Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Woman at the Well; Water and Redemption"
Date: February 24, 2008
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson: John 4:4-30, 39-42

Sermon request: "What is redemption in the Christian context?"

I thought it best to begin by defining redemption. According to Webster’s, it is, of course, “the act, process, or an instance of redeeming.” Among the several definitions of “redeem” are these:

to free from what distresses or harms

to extricate from or help to overcome something detrimental

to release from blame or debt

to free from the consequences of sin

As I attempt to answer the sermon requests I received last fall, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well seems to me tailor-made for this topic. It is such a compelling story that I generally select it every three years when it comes up in the cycle of Lenten Gospel lessons. Jesus talks longer to this woman at the well than he does to anyone else in all the Gospels—longer than he talks to any of his disciples, longer than he talks to any of his accusers, longer than he talks to any of his own family.

It is so rich with preaching possibilities. We could ponder why Jesus would talk to a woman. Jewish men neither talked to women in public, nor to foreign women. Why did she come in the heat of the day, when all the other women came for water at daybreak? Why did she confuse the living water Jesus offered with the running water she’d like to have coming right into her own home? This unnamed Samaritan woman is the first person Jesus reveals himself to in the Gospel of John. She is the first outsider to guess who he is and tell others. She is the first evangelist, John tells us, and her testimony brings many to faith.

So why is she in need of redemption, she who accounts for the longest conversation in the Bible? A first clue might be in the timing of the story. Good women, respectable women came to get water at the well when it was cooler in the morning. They had to draw the water, then schlep the large clay jars home. Yet this woman came in the blazing heat of the noonday sun. Did she oversleep? Did she run out of water already?

No, I suspect it was because she was not well regarded by the other women of Samaria who had gathered their water early and doubtless gossiped together. What do we do when we are uncomfortable with someone? We avoid them. We go to other places than where we expect they will be. We go at other times to avoid running in to them.

It didn’t take Jesus too long into the conversation to find out just why she came at another time than the respectable women to draw water from Jacob’s well. It seems this woman had had five husbands, and the man she was currently living with was not her husband. This might be acceptable in Hollywood, but not in Biblical times, even if these were Samaritans and not Jews.

Because Jesus was able to discern this about her, she deemed first that he must be a prophet. It’s interesting and ironic that the revelation has developed thus far out of Jesus’ simple request to her at the beginning: “Give me a drink.” This opens the conversation that follows because the woman, like all of humanity, is looking for something to quench a deep spiritual thirst to be with God. Notice that Jesus gives her the access code: “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.” (John 4:10)

Recognizing God in the ordinary rhythms of life, finding access to God, access to the living, life-giving water of the Spirit, isn’t something we can test or demand of God. It’s something we ask for, opening our hearts to the possibilities and promises of God in the present, regardless of the circumstances. We have all the proof we need that God loves us and cares for us. As if all the miraculous works of God weren’t enough, we have to remember that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Rather than continue to prove we’re human over and over again through our self-centered and sinful ways, God calls us instead to skip the test and simply make a request to be more like the Christ who gave himself for us in love.

The woman perceived who was talking with her—someone that the other women of the community shunned, ignored, avoided—when she professes she knows the Messiah is coming. Just as eye-opening as was the risen Jesus’ later revelation to Mary Magdalene in the garden when he called her by name, he says to this woman, forever known as the “Samaritan woman”, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

So wondrous is her reaction that she runs back to town. The story is interrupted here by the Secret Service and the rest of Jesus’ handlers coming back onto the scene and asking “Why are you speaking with her?” They look around, realizing damage control must be done. They couldn’t have Jesus talking to a woman, especially that woman.

Meanwhile, the woman is running into town, proclaiming, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” Which, by the end of the story, the townspeople have come to believe for themselves.

How do I see this woman being redeemed? What is redemption in the Christian context? Jesus freed her from her past. She came face-to-face with who she is and what she had done. He freed her from the consequences of her past sins. He regarded her as a person of value, someone worthy for the Christ to talk to. He choose her, of all the good, righteous, Temple-attending, early-morning-water drawers to be the first one in John’s Gospel to whom he reveals his true identity.

By telling the woman who she is, Jesus shows her who he is. By confirming her true identity, he reveals his own, and that is how it still happens. The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are—the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is—who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises—speaking to you like someone who has known you all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back—redeemed, or in the words of my favorite hymn, “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven”—to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you. “Come,” you exclaim, redeemed and radiant, “and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”