The text this morning is from the Gospel according to John, the fourth chapter:
So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
This is not the first pandemic that the Church has survived and, unless Christ returns first, and we pray He does, it will not be the last. We will come through this time with the same Gospel of hope that we first received. We will preach to those on their deathbeds. We will call out in the streets. We will aid our neighbors. We will do this all in the name of Christ. The Church will stand until the end, and we will stand by doing the same thing we have done for two millennia: preach Christ and Him crucified. The Church has never lost a member but only has grown as we are transferred from this life to await the life to come. Fear not death, fear not suffering, the Lord is with you and has promised you that He shall transform your mortal body to be like His glorious one. The Church has survived plague after plague through her history, and we shall, in the name of Christ, persevere until the End.
If you have been out in the world since all this hit, you would see that people panic. You would see the toilet paper and water bottles flying off the shelves. You would see cleaning supplies and cold medicine disappear like candy. You would hear the laments over the loss of sports seasons. You would know the pain as people try to figure out work schedules because their children are out of school for four weeks at a time and the parents cannot afford any time off. You would feel the collective sigh of relief as Disney releases Frozen 2 three months early on their streaming platform. While these things may be necessary for this life, a pandemic like this reveals our true natures. Hoarding, anger, fear, all of this stems out of our sinful nature. And what our true natures give way to is the display of our false gods. We have made comfort and security, sports and entertainment, food and water and shelter our gods. They are horrible taskmasters. When our false gods take over, they must be fed, they must have what they need. And if you do not feed them, your gods will turn against you leading you to despair.
The Samaritan woman is no different. The Samaritans were a mixed-breed people, Jews intermingled with the Gentiles, and their religion was a mixed-breed, too, leading to a mixture of the true Israelite religion with pagan worship. This woman not only did not take God at His Word, and believe Him, that He was to be worshipped at the Temple in Jerusalem, but she also worshipped at the god of sexual promiscuity and adultery. She loved having these men, five husbands and now sleeping with another. She would bear the indignity of other people’s mocking stares as she went through her town, and, where she could, she would avoid them because she loved her false god so much. That is why she was at the well in the middle of the day, when it was the hottest and when she would suffer the most trying to get the water from the well. She was disgraced, and she avoided the morning and evening when all the other women would be there.
For her to find a Jewish man waiting for her would be a surprise. Jews didn’t travel through Samaria, and men did not usually do the work of gathering water. But there this man, Jesus, sat, waiting, it seems, for her. She was coming to get her water, all in service to her sex god, but Jesus came for her. Jesus came to disabuse her of her false notions of a false gods, that she might be saved.
Water has a high appearance rate throughout the Scriptures, and it has a high correlation to marriage. Where you see water, pure water, it is compared to a most blessed union where a husband loves and tends to his wife, and where she honors him. But this pure water coming from Jacob’s well would be drunk by an adulteress. The water that she draws is pure, but what comes out of her body makes her unclean. Jesus is here to bring her to what marriage is, an image of the union of Christ and the Church. He is here to break her away from her false god and join her together in a holy union with the one true God.
And so He does. He asks her for water, but she is surprised that He could even talk to her, much less ask her for a favor. He tells her that He is the source of true, pure, living water, forcing her to seek the truth: who is this man? He shows Himself to be a prophet to her, knowing what sins she loves. This forces her to try to change the subject. Little does she know that Jesus has this in mind, that Jesus would change her focus from the sin she loves to the God who loves her. Jesus has not come to do away with the demands of the Law, even that the Jews were to worship in the Temple, but Jesus begins to show her that He is the true Temple, that the day is coming when all those who belong to God will worship Him in Spirit and in truth, that her days of blasphemy and idolatry are coming to an end. He shows Himself, and tells her, that He is the Messiah, the Christ.
This woman ran from this encounter, not out of fear, but out of amazement, to tell others that she had found the Christ. And others would come to believe because of her call to faith through Jesus. Presumably, she left behind her life of sin, she had forsaken her false gods, that she might follow after this man, even as He walked toward Jerusalem, to the cross.
As we consider this text, and as we consider it in this time, when the plague is among us, when it is crossing over the whole earth, we should consider how we are also called away from our false gods. Yes, it’s true, we are inconvenienced at every turn, but perhaps we have gotten used to receiving the good gifts of God, thinking that they come from our hard work or our hand. Perhaps this time is calling us away from our lackadaisical lives of comfort and into lives of suffering. We do need certain things to survive, but surviving has never been the goal of the Church. We are all called to something higher, which is to receive that which Christ always promises to give: the forgiveness of sins, the strengthening of faith, everlasting life. There is no higher goal that striving for these things, and they are offered freely only in one place: the Church.
It is right to fear this plague among us, but not for our own sakes, but the sake of our neighbors. Christian, you will not fear your own death, but you work to serve your neighbor. This is why the early Christians risked life and limb in the fiery city dumps, rescuing poor infants, often little girls, who had been thrown away by their families. This is why Christians go to the poorest neighborhoods, giving alms, helping to feed them, helping to clothe them. This is why Christians set up the first hospitals, helping those who were sick, and not fearing if they got sick as a result, because they were serving their neighbor. We do not fear our own death, but we work to serve those around us, one, that we might take care of the person God has put into our lives, but, two, and most importantly, that we might preach to them the love of Christ and that they might be counted among the faithful.
We turn from our false gods of comfort and security, sports and entertainment, food and water and shelter, and we turn to the one true God, the God who took on your flesh to serve you through His life and death. We forsake those things which call us into the fiery torments of hell, and we turn to the One who promises us everlasting life. Even though we die, yet shall we live, for we believe in Christ and in the One who sent Him.
If you need water, get water, but do not hoard it. If you need toilet paper, buy it, but leave some for others. If your neighbor needs your Lysol, give it and do not expect it back. If you lament the loss of sports, put your time and energy into studying God’s Word, or go out and find someone to help and serve. If you are fearful, return here each time we gather to hear the same message: your Jesus has overcome this world and its sickness and its death, and He shall bring you through, for your sins, your sickness, your death, have been taken into Him on the cross. He has taken it all away, and He, in His own resurrection, shows you your end, He shows you what you, too, will be. He shows you that He shall not leave you nor forsake you, but shall bring you out of your grave and give to you a life that will never end.
We will come through this plague, my friends. We may not all make it out alive, but we will all live. The day is coming when we, too, shall be raised from the dead, and we will live with our Jesus forever. The day is coming when we will be joined with this Samaritan woman and all who believed in Jesus that day. The day is coming when our false gods will disappear forever, and all we shall see is the one true God who walks with us, who lives among us, who never shall depart from us, our Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah. He has found you, just as He found this woman, and He will not leave you nor forsake you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment