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The God Who Slakes Our Thirst Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 22, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Kings 17:29-41 John 4:1-42
“But he had to go through Samaria” John tells us at the beginning of this story. The necessity had nothing to do with geography or time constraints. This is John’s way of telling us the detour was God’s doing. Jesus is about to have the longest conversation he has with anyone in Scripture, a conversation with a woman, a Samaritan woman, a morally suspect woman. In the story we are about to hear, God will be revealed. Before her encounter with Jesus, the Samaritan woman most likely was not known for her theological acumen. In fact the Samaritans as a whole, though they may have gained a reputation for compassion on the road to Jericho, could not be said to be very clear about the One whom they thus served in stopping by the way. Nevertheless, there are those who contend the conversation reported in John's gospel between Jesus and this thirsty woman was highly theological, that their exchange has nothing to do with her colorful sex life or her limited understanding of metaphor. Rather, they would say, it has to do with her people's propensity for whoring after other gods; it has to do with the Samaritans’ affinity with what worked for them, theologically. “Go, call your husband, and come here,” Jesus commands. “I have no husband,” the woman replies. “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’” says Jesus, “for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.” The point was not with whom she slept, but to whom she prayed. The Samaritans, you remember, were syncretists. They took their cues, theologically, from the culture around them rather than from the sovereignty of the One who had, in the wilderness, been revealed to them. Hence there was Succoth-benoth, probably known through the Mesopotamian settlers and roughly translated to be the “daughter of the star of justice and right”; there was Nergal, the god of Kutu, deity of the underworld; there was Ashima, most likely worshipped as a goddess, the secondary wife of Yahu; and finally Adrammelech and Anammelech, connected to the four great nature gods who capriciously played with human lives: all of them gods to whom the Samaritans prayed. Then added to these five, according to the seventeenth chapter of II Kings, “…they also feared the Lord….” “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’” said Jesus, “for you have had five husbands (Succoth-benoth, Nergal, Ashima, Adrammelech, and Anammelech), and he whom you now have (the God of Israel) is not your husband; this you truly say.” From Mesopotamian cults to astrological configurations to eternally returning cycles of nature, such was the stuff from which the Samaritan gods were fashioned: impersonal gods, detached deities at whose merciless whim the Samaritans bowed down. Even when the King of Assyria asked for a theologian to come and straighten them out, it did no good: “Every nation still made gods of its own, and put them in the shrines of the high places which the Samaritans had made….So they feared the Lord but also served their own gods….To this day their children and their children's children continue to do as their ancestors did,” records the second book of Kings, ominously I might add. They did, that is, until centuries and centuries later when one of their company--and a woman at that--stood before Him in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, even Jesus Christ. The woman’s discomfort, at first, was purely cultural. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” But then Jesus, as he was want to do, took the conversation to a holy other level, asking of her what she could not, of herself, give. The well from which she drew water, the well of her ancestors, could keep a body going day by day. But a saving grace, a redemptive power, a life-giving hope: none of these gods could sustain her in this way. Still if she could find some way to finesse this awkward encounter with Jesus, make this conversation fit into her previous understanding of the gods, she likely could live the rest of her life simply skimming the surface of life’s purpose and meaning…praying to Adrammelech or Anammelech that the well not go dry…turning to a new god when and if she hit rock bottom. What we know in the first place is that having to do with the God who slakes our thirst means doing business with our unquenchable thirst for a truth which lasts, admitting our weariness in whoring after the gods who are powerless to save, confessing our own emptiness and need. “By telling the woman who she is,” writes colleague and friend Barbara Brown Taylor, “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 are—the good and the bad of it, the hope of it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is—who crosses all the boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises—speaking to you like someone you have known all of your life, bubbling up in your life like a well” that will never go dry. Jesus reveals to us our deepest need even as he meets that need by thrusting us, just as we are, on the grace of the Living God. So in the first place, the One who has come to reveal the God who slakes our thirst reveals our emptiness and our true need. But what we know in the second place is that having to do with the God who slakes our thirst must involve quitting all other gods. Jesus must relieve this woman of her other gods before she can know him as the Christ, the revelation of the Living God, the God who slakes our thirst. Hence this question from out of the blue concerning her husbands--her ba’als--concerning those to whom she has turned to uphold her life thus far. “They are no ba’als,” says Jesus. “Sir,” says the woman, “I see that you are a prophet,” referring not to the fact that he knew her sordid personal history but as if to say, “You seem to have become my critic.” We may not be syncretists, but we surely are a people and we certainly live in a time that would critique the Christ by way of the culture’s idols long before we would judge the general culture by way of the God we know in Christ. Ask yourself what the lens is through which you read the Sunday Inquirer…what the filter is through which you hear a Sunday sermon: patriotism, pacifism, feminism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism? We listen for a Savior who confirms our previously held ideals (Jesus as revolutionary, as patriot, as feminist, as pacifist, as social conservative, as thoroughgoing liberal)…but we would rather this critic, who questions our perspectives, who challenges the little gods we hold most dear, we would rather he accommodate himself to us. Yet if it is the Living God with whom we have to do in Jesus, then this story reveals to us a God whose claim is outrageously clear, whose identity is scandalously particular, and whose grace and mercy are more powerful than we can bear to believe. For in him, the abstractions no longer avail; in him, the distance is ended; in him all general ideas about a god are shown to the door; in him the God for whom we have searched in all the wrong places has sought us out at our variously dry wells and claimed us, by grace, to be God's own. To this woman’s vague affirmation of faith in a savior on the way to her in the sweet by and by, there stands God’s Word in the flesh saying, “I who speak to you am that One.” “…what could possibly be meant,” asked the Scottish preacher and theologian John Baillie, “by saying that any reality of an impersonal kind could exercise over me such [a claim] as that?…I have never been able to see how any being that is not a person could possess a moral and spiritual claim over me.” That is why, as Brunner says, “it is so much more comfortable to have a pantheistic philosophy than to believe in [the] Lord God….” So much easier to keep our theological options open than to believe on the One in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What this little story is about, my friends, is knowing and being known by a God who sees us as we are and loves us more than we could ever imagine. It is about a thirst and a longing for God that we have tried to meet by whoring after every other spiritual technique or cultural fad whose help coincided with our attention span. But more to the point is the help they cannot give when we find ourselves treading the valley of the shadow. I dare you to hang on to some Cosmic Principle when your wife is dying…or to be comforted by some Universal Intelligence in the depths of your own despair…or to be claimed for a purposeful life by an Ideal constructed in your head. We were made, you and I, to live in personal relationship, day by day, to the One who made us and redeems us and sustains us. In the end, says preacher and professor Fred Craddock, the woman “is a witness and not even a thorough witness. ‘A man told me everything I ever did’ is not exactly a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. She is not even a convinced witness. ‘Can this be the Christ?’ is literally ‘This cannot be the Christ, can it?’ Even so, her witness is enough. It is invitational (come and see) and not judgmental; it is within the range permitted by her own experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty; it is for everyone who will hear.” How in the world do I know the God who is God? The only possible clue I have is the One who stood before the Samaritan woman at the well and offered her living water. It is a mystery how or why I believe. I can only tell you that in him I somehow have had to do with the God who is for you…because of him I will bet my life on the fact that this same God is with you, even now…in him I will go to my grave in the sure and certain hope that, no matter what, God will not let you go. Therefore like the woman at the well and like John Baillie who, himself had "no choice," he said, "but to set my feet upon the pilgrim's way," the only thing I know to do is to take off Sunday after Sunday for the top of the hill, the mountain on which we worship the Living God, shouting to this gathered crowd, "Come see him for yourself" in order that you may one day say in response, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world." May he become for you, in the hour of your deepest need and greatest thirst, a spring of water, gushing up to eternal life! Thanks be to God. Amen. |