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In John 4 we find the amazing story of Jesus encountering a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well and I mentioned last Sunday that this chapter will be the lens for all of my Lenten sermons up until Holy Week. On Ash Wednesday we saw Nicodemus, one of the elite Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, come to Jesus at night, probably because he was embarrassed to be seen with Jesus. But there was no problem for Jesus to talk with him. It was a problem for Jesus to talk to the woman at the well. Jewish men who cared about their reputations did not talk to any woman in public. It was considered not only impolite but immoral.

Furthermore, no self-respecting Jew would talk to any Samaritan, male or female. The Samaritans and Jews were largely descended from the same ancestors but over several centuries bitter racial, religious, and economic prejudices developed between them. So despite living next to each other, Jews and Samaritans had no dealings with one another, if such could be avoided.

Besides all that, noon was the wrong hour for a woman to be at the well.[1] Village women went to the well in the morning and evening to draw water for daily needs. This woman went out at noon when no one else was likely to be there. The implication is that she was ostracized by others because her moral life was in shambles, another reason for Jesus to avoid her. But he didn’t and their encounter is one of the most amazing of all. Let’s read it in John 4.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common 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 no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

This conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well is the longest recorded conversation in the New Testament and the story had a radical impact on the first followers of Jesus.

Jesus was revolutionary in relationship to the Samaritans. Racial prejudice is a sad part of even our own history but it was never more bitter than the hatred Jews had for Samaritans. That Jesus freely talked with and stayed with Samaritans and that he used a Samaritan as the hero in his famous story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), is still radical today. It was unbelievable 2000 years ago.

The same is true of Jesus’ openness to women. Gender roles and differences are not a settled issue even in the secular society, as Harvard’s president, Dr. Lawrence Summers, can attest.[2] But the church still struggles with it too and has for centuries.

There is a book known as the Gospel of Thomas. It supposedly records sayings of Jesus about a variety of subjects. Sometimes it has wording almost exactly like the four New Testament gospels. It also has some striking differences which reflect how the early church struggled with much of what Jesus taught and did. The Gospel of Thomas was written over a hundred years after the New Testament and at one point says this: “Simon Peter said to [the disciples], ‘Make Mary [Magdalene] leave us, for females don’t deserve life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of Heaven.’”[3] (Gospel of Thomas, 114) It isn’t clear exactly what that meant. But it is clear that many early Christians fundamentally rejected femaleness as being in the image of God. Some still do.

But the true Jesus of the true Gospels accepted all persons regardless of race, sex, or moral condition and in that acceptance there is a challenge for our own encounters with Christ. I’m calling today’s encounter necessary and you might ask why is it necessary? Two reasons.

The first reason we must of necessity encounter Jesus is because he is Lord. Jesus said to the woman at the well, “If you knew … who it is that is [speaking] to you … “ That’s the gospel writer’s way of telling the story to point to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. It is the clear witness of the Christian tradition that Jesus isn’t ordinary. He reveals God uniquely and we necessarily encounter him if we want to know God.

We need to encounter Jesus because no matter how faithful we are, we become complacent about him. Without even being conscious of it, we put him into a box of some kind and order our lives around that box. But if Jesus is Lord, he will not stay in our boxes, and we must not think he will. This is so clear when you read the gospels and see the contrasts between Jesus and his disciples. One writer puts it this way. “The disciples want a crown, Jesus chooses a cross; they want triumph, he chooses humiliation; they want prestige, he chooses denigration/degradation; they want power, he chooses weakness.”[4]

This problem didn’t go away with the first disciples. All of us put Jesus in a box. All of us remake Jesus in our own image. Encountering him is necessary so he can break out of the boxes we want to trap him in. This means there is always more to learn about Jesus. We don’t master him, he masters us. Have you been a Christian 80 years, faithful in worship, diligent in prayer, learned in the Bible? You have much, much more to learn and some things you should probably unlearn. Have you somehow found yourself in this room today not even knowing who Jesus is or why you should care? You have much, much more to learn and some things you should probably unlearn. And wherever you are in-between knowing much and knowing nothing, you have much, much more to learn and some things you should probably unlearn. There is always more to Jesus because he won’t stay in our boxes.

I’ve started reading again C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. I’ve read this series of seven books three or four times before but not for at least a decade. So it’s time to delight again in these wondrous stories about the magical land of Narnia. Ostensibly written for children, The Chronicles are among Lewis’ most profound writings and if you’ve never read them, it’s not too late, no matter your age. (If you don’t have a set, let me know, and I’ll lend you one of mine.) I mention this because what I’m reading usually bubbles out in what I’m preaching. So undoubtedly you’ll be hearing Chronicles stories for awhile. Including this one.

The fourth book of the Chronicles is called The Silver Chair. A young girl named Jill finds herself in the magical land of Narnia which is ruled by Aslan, the Great Lion, “son of the Emperor from beyond the sea.” (You Narnia fans know that Aslan is the Christ-figure in Narnia.) Jill meets Aslan as he sits like one of the lions of Trafalgar Square beside a stream of cold water. Jill is desperately thirsty, but the Lion is so close to the stream that she is afraid to drink for what might happen.

They were the first words she had heard since [her friend] Scrubb had spoken to her on the edge of the cliff. For a second she stared here and there, wondering who had spoken. Then the voice said again, “If you are thirsty, come and drink,” and of course she remembered what Scrubb had said about animals talking in that other world, and realized that it was the Lion speaking. Anyway, she had seen its lips move this time, and the voice was not like a man’s. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice. It did not make her any less frightened than she had been before, but it made her frightened in rather a different way.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

This is Lewis’ profound way of describing the Lordship of Christ in ways both kids and grownups can understand. Jesus will not be contained in the safe and simple images we have of him. But if we don’t want to die of thirst, we need to encounter him.

The second reason we must of necessity encounter Jesus is our need for living water and only Jesus can give that to us. The text suggests that initially the woman wanted living water so she wouldn’t have to work so hard drawing regular water or go back to the well so often. After somewhat barbed banter with Jesus, he identifies what she really needs, indeed what everyone really needs: living water. She responds, as so often happens in John’s Gospel, on the literal level, pointing out the obvious. Jesus has no bucket and the well is deep.[6] Jesus counters at the deep level: living water gushes up in a spring of eternal life. Like Jill, she responds with a small step away from the obvious and towards the deep: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty” — but still doesn’t quite get it — “or have to keep coming here to draw water.” The woman still thinks her greatest need is to not have to work so hard. Jesus wants her to understand that her real need is for God. Jesus wants to give her and us what he uniquely can give and what we desperately need: the living water of eternal life.[7]

The image of living water expresses what humans so deeply need and so often deny. There is in the human person a thirst for God. Humans know this but so often ignore it. Long ago the psalmist declared:

Only when we admit our thirst do our lives become open to what encountering Christ really means. Only when we admit our need for love can we discover how much God loves us. As one writer says, “Our thirst for God will never be satisfied by taking an eyedropper full of divine love and dribbling it onto our tongues. We want to lift the whole bucket and pour it over our heads. We want to swing out on a rope over the river, and let go, and splash naked into that deep, delightful pool. We want to be washed all over in the water of the love of God, and in the end to have absolutely nothing left to cover us but the holiness and the rightness of God’s will. That is our utmost and ultimate desire; that is our thirst for God.”[8] We need to acknowledge that to encounter Christ.

I don’t know why I remember this. It goes back almost 40 years to a week at summer camp. During cabin devotions one night I remember we were talking about heaven. Our counselor asked us if we honestly wanted to go to heaven. The point was not about dying. The question was did we honestly desire the wonderful joy that heaven would be.

Most of us, including myself, answered that we should not want that too much. Our answers reflected the basic tone of simple and sometimes simplistic piety we learned in our church. To want something too much was selfish. We should not want things too much. We were taught that self-denial was the most important thing. Wanting things, even heavenly things, was suspect because it could easily be a form of selfishness.

I was surprised to hear my counselor challenge that. He thought it was quite all right, in fact, quite necessary, to honestly want the fullness of joy and God’s blessing. There is built into us a longing, a hunger, and a thirsting for the fullness of life. To honestly want that is not selfish. To want that is to want what God has made us for. We are made for eternal life and we need to want that. So we necessarily encounter Christ.

The problem is not that we want. The problem is that we settle for too little. We settle for things that do not and cannot really satisfy us. We settle for well water when we need living water. In this sense, it is not Christian to be less selfish. We should be more selfish. We should honestly want more of what only God can give, more of God’s eternity in us.

In another of his writings, this is how C. S. Lewis described it. “These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the king’s stables.”[9]

In other words, don’t settle for ponies. There is built into us the desire and longing for winged, shining, and world-shaking steeds. Or in terms of today’s text, don’t settle for things that will make you thirst again. Jesus Christ offers living water. Like the woman at the well will eventually show us, we must have the good sense to honestly want and long for and thirst for the fullness of God.

[1] J. N. Sanders, A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. John (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1968) 141.

[2] A storm of controversy has swirled around Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’ hypothesizing in January that innate sex differences might account for the dearth of women in high-level positions in science. A significant number of faculty appear to be calling for his dismissal.

[3] Robert J. Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) 322,

[4] R. David Kaylor, Jesus the Prophet: His Vision of the Kingdom on Earth (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994) 204. On page 208, Kaylor goes on to develop the radical contrast of Jesus’ teaching and acts with the expectations of the first disciples and the subsequent church. This has profound implications for how we live today as disciples, implications that will have to be considered in other sermons. “He proclaimed God’s kingdom as hope for the poor, as liberation for the oppressed, as good news for Israel’s future. He unleashed a charismatic movement of helping, healing, and renewing community. He spoke with the directness of Spirit-filled authority to challenge Israel toward peaceful, nonviolent, nonegoistic dealings with each other. He called for new trust and confidence in God’s goodness and power as antidote to the anxiety that drove some to aggression and others to despair. He challenged the holders of institutional religious power with bold manifestations of God’s immediate presence. His vision of a just society of equals threatened those whose economic advantage was backed by the coercive power of Roman troops. He celebrated fellowship meals anticipating the time when the renewed covenant community would find fulfillment in the kingdom of God.”

[5] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier Books, 1970) 16-17.

[6] Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 1, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 424. “[The well] is a fine installation, with a cylindrical shaft seven feet in diameter and 106 fee deep driven into the rock and fresh subsoil water at the bottom … ringed by a wall on top. There are two holes through which a bucket can be lowered (v. 11) and the water lies near the bottom of the shaft.”

[7] Sanders, 141. “The gift which Jesus offers is living water. This means ostensibly water from a river or spring, not stagnant water from a cistern (cf. Jer. 2.13). But it also has a deeper meaning. In the Fourth Gospel water symbolizes the old covenant, as the medium of John’s baptism (1.26), in the water-pots at Cana (2.7), and in Jacob’s Spring (4.7, 13); but it is also the means whereby the spirit is given in Christian baptism (cf. 3.5), and so, when given by Jesus, is itself a symbol of the spirit (as becomes apparent in 7.38f.). The contrast between the two covenants, and the two kinds of water which symbolize them, helps to explain why John has introduced this episode at this point in his Gospel. Its position is determined by the themes which it expounds.”

[8] David Rensberger, “Thirsty for God,” Weavings 15.4 (2000): 22.

[9] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan, 1947) 169.