“When
Nicodemus Met the Woman at the Well”
John
3:1-10 and John 4:1-42
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
27, 2011
Lent
3
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This is not entirely the sermon I
thought I was going to preach today. I
had planned, cleverly I thought, to pair the story of Nicodemus in chapter 3 of
John’s gospel with the story of the woman at the well in chapter 4 to see what
we could learn from that coupling. The
meeting between Nicodemus and the woman at the well did not take place in real
life, I was going to say, but in the literary imagination of
Let me hit the highlights of that
would-be sermon. I was going
to say that John crafted his gospel with these stories in back to back chapters
to show the breadth and openness of the kingdom of God (in which we have our
ultimate citizenship before any other) and that there is a spaciousness about it
that belies the gatekeeping function that too many Christians and churches too
eagerly embrace.
That Jesus engages Nicodemus in one
story and the woman at the well in the other shows that in the
I was going to point out that the
Nicodemus story takes place in a city, a center of culture and learning and
sophistication. The story of the
woman at the well is set in some rural outpost.
John was pointing out that geography has no determinative function in who
can enter into and be a part of the
Further, Nicodemus is named in his
story and described as being an esteemed leader of the Jews.
The woman at the well is unnamed and of no social account and yet Jesus
received them both. Thus, John means
to say that reputation and standing in the community do not count for anything
in the
In both stories, a reputation is put at
risk. Nicodemus risks his reputation
among the other Pharisees by being seen with Jesus whereas Jesus risks his
religious authority by being seen with a Samaritan and talking to her in public.
John is underscoring the new reality that the kingdom of God is not
marked by constraining and confining conventions but by a willingness to cross
over and to contravene them in order to extend God’s radical welcome even to
those we consider “unwashed” and “unclean.” Or, to use Walter
Brueggemann’s image that we have seen in our early hour presentations this
month, to make a “neighborhood.”
In both stories, “Spirit” is the
key. Our Lord the Spirit links the
contrasts and differences in the two stories in John and shows them simply to be
different elements of the one encompassing story of the
That is something of the sermon I was
going to preach but as the news of Elizabeth Taylor’s death came across the
wire this week, I noticed some parallels. True,
the woman at the well had only five husbands to Liz’s eight, but in some ways,
the differences in millennia and cultures notwithstanding, they shared
similarities. The woman at the well,
like Elizabeth Taylor along the way, was held up to public scorn and ridicule.
Liz’s came on national television as her many marriages and later her
weight became fodder for the late night comics.
The Samaritan woman was ostracized for her many marriages and lifestyle
and left to make her trips to the well alone in the heat of the day instead of
with the group of village women who went together in the cool of every morning.
But both of these women had lives before their public hazings.
They had dreams and hopes that surely did not include all of the messy
twists and turns their lives took. To
their credit, neither of them, not Liz, not the woman of
She had every reason to be hard-shelled
and withdrawn for the harsh way in which she had been shunned by the other
villagers and probably treated by her husbands.
But there also was a wisp of vulnerability about the woman and maybe that
is why Jesus paid her attention, going against religious rules and custom for
Jews did not associate with Samaritans (hence, the power of the parable that
suggests there could be a good Samaritan),
to say to her, “Give me a drink.”
When the woman asked him why he was breaking taboos to do that, he
answered that if she knew who it was who was asking for a drink, she
would have asked him for a drink of living
water. Like Nicodemus when Jesus
told him he needed to be born anew and he protested that he could not go back a
second time into his mother’s womb, the woman also responded obtusely in a way
that showed she still was at a literal level.
“Sir, you have no bucket, and the
well is deep. Where do you get that
living water?” When Jesus
answered the woman, “Everyone who drinks
of the water I will give never will be thirsty.
And the water that I give will become in you a spring of water gushing up
to eternal life,” she said, “Sir,
give me this water.” Give her
credit for that. But she went on to
say, “Give it to me so that I may never
be thirsty again or have to keep coming here for water.”
Did she still not understand what Jesus was saying or did she
comprehend and now she herself was speaking metaphorically?
However you understand her response,
she no doubt was taken aback by what happened next.
Jesus told her to go get her husband and to come back.
Not wanting to detail her sexual and matrimonial history, she told Jesus
she had no husband. To which he
said, “You are right in saying that because you have had five husbands, and
the man you are with now is not your husband.”
Jesus went right to the point of her pain.
(Did anyone ever do that for Liz?) He
went right to the reason for her estrangement from the rest of the community
(perhaps the other women wondered if she would target their husbands next?) and
it did not put him off. In fact, she
became one of the few people in scripture to whom he identified himself outright
as the Christ of God.
The Samaritan woman experienced in
Jesus the restorative love of God because he knew her for who she was and did
not condemn her but gave her an opportunity to be born again, to be born from
above. When I was in college,
a classmate named Megan once said to me that though she had had sex with at
least thirty different boys during high school that now, in Christ, she is a
virgin. As a young Christian, I was
not very gracious in my response, incredulous that she would make such a claim.
I threw the book at her. After
all, there are standards, aren’t there? And
you cannot undo what you have done. But,
according to
Who or what defines your life?
Is it your sin or your Savior? Is
it your sin that clings so closely, to use that memorable line from the book of
Hebrews? Or is it your Savior, the
one who knows everything you ever have done and yet offers to you living
water? Notice in the story that
Jesus did not whitewash or gloss over the dubious events and qualities of
woman’s past or present life and, in effect, say, “It doesn’t matter.”
If he had done that and simply offered her the living water, it would not
have been so restorative because then she could say to herself, “If only he
knew who I really was and what I have done, he would not have offered me such
grace.” But in saying to her, “I
know what you have done” and still offering her to drink of God’s living
water, Jesus gave her the room to come face to face with her life and then
to repent and believe the gospel, to change her mind about herself and the life
she thought she was condemned to live, for, in Christ, the kingdom of God is at
hand.
She must have done just that because
John says of her, “Many Samaritans
believed in the Christ because of the woman’s testimony.”
Her witness was at least enough for the Samaritans to give this
Jewish Jesus a hearing after which John reports that they said to the woman, “It
is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for
ourselves, and we know that this truly is the Savior of the world.”
It is just like God to take a life that looks least promising through
which and whom to do the most amazing things.
When your life feels in any way like a
stagnant pond of stale water on a hot and humid day or you feel stuck in the mud
of it, the Christ of God who knows your life comes to offer you living water.
Drink of it, all of you.
Amen.
Copyright 2011 by First Presbyterian Church