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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
We each may have different municipal utilities or private wells, but we all have and probably take for granted our immediate access to water. Such things as boil orders or power outages may affect our immediate access to water in some way for a limited time, but generally we have access to the water that we need in order to support our bodies and lives. Necessary water is a focus of today’s Gospel Reading for the Third Sunday in Lent, and Jesus and a woman from Samaria’s discussion about living water—water flowing from its source—leads to their discussion about true worshipers. So, this morning as we consider primarily today’s Gospel Reading, we direct our thoughts to the theme “Living Water and True Worshipers”.
As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, wearied from His journey, Jesus told a woman from Samaria to give Him a drink of water from Jacob’s well, and, soon after, the woman from Samaria told Jesus to give her living water, so that she would not be thirsty or have to come to the well to draw water. At first seemingly oddly, Jesus then told the woman to go, call her husband, and come “there”, not so much “there” to the well as “there” to Jesus, the source of living water. The woman’s answer to Jesus and His then revealing His knowledge of her sinful life, led the woman to perceive that Jesus was a prophet and so to ask Him about where to worship, implicitly, where God was present in order for her to receive the forgiveness of her sins. And, ultimately Jesus told her that true worshipers will worship God the Father by the power of God the Holy Spirit in the person of the God the Son Who is the Truth (John 14:6).
As I studied today’s Gospel Reading in preparing to preach this morning, I was reminded that, in the Old Testament, wells often were locations for meetings that led to marriage (Weinrich, ad loc John 14:16-30, p.488). For example, Abraham’s servant met Rebekah at a well, and Rebekah married Abraham’s son Isaac (Genesis 24:1-67); Isaac’s son Jacob met Rachel at a well, and Rachel eventually married Isaac (Genesis 29:1-30); and, generations later, Moses met Zipporah at a well, and Zipporah married Moses (Exodus 2:15-22). Some commentators go so far as to think that the woman from Samaria “viewed Jesus as a potential sexual or marital partner” (Weinrich, ad loch John 4:16-30, p.489, quoting Keener [n.p.]). Regardless, Jesus revealed some of what He knew about the woman’s sinful past, and so, apparently, she perceived Him to be a prophet and asked Him about where she could receive forgiveness for her sins (Weinrich, ad loch John 4:16-30, p.489, quoting Hoskyns, Fourth Gospel, 1:266)
We might have a different reaction if we encountered someone who, as the woman from Samaria put it, told us all that we ever did, but wanting to receive forgiveness is certainly the right reaction. We do not have to have had five spouses in the past or to have someone else’s spouse right now in order to have sinned or sin against the Sixth Commandment in deed, word, or thought. We do rightly condemn as sinful society’s inescapable homosexuality and gender confusion, but we must also condemn as sinful such things as all forms of pornography, our satisfying our sexual desires by ourselves, wearing other than modest clothes; crude talk, derogatory comments about other people’s appearances; and any and all lustful thoughts. In some ways, we all sin against the Sixth Commandment, just as we all sin against the other nine Commandments, for we all are sinful by nature. Like the woman from Samaria, on our own we would not know the gift of God or Who is offering living water, and we are hostile to them. Like the Samaritans and Jews, we would worship what we do not know. We deserve both temporal death and eternal punishment, apart from God the Father and God the Son’s, by the power of the Holy Spirit, seeking us out as true worshipers.
God the Father and God the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, do seek us out as true worshipers, true worshipers who worship God the Father by the power of God the Holy Spirit in the person of the God the Son, Who is the Truth. God the Son took into His own Person our human nature. In today’s Gospel Reading, for example, we see Jesus wearied from His journey in the noonday heat, and yet we know that Jesus is greater than the Samaritans’ and Jews’ father Jacob who gave them the well and drank from it himself, for Jesus is the Christ, God in human flesh. On another day at noon (for example, Matthew 27:45), in the “hour” of Jesus’s glorification on the cross, God’s love for the world was shown in His giving His Son (John 3:16), and Jesus’s Spirit was handed over (John 19:31), and water flowed from Jesus’s side (John 19:34-37), as water flowed from the rock, which in some sense was the present Christ, to the thirsty people of Israel, in today’s Old Testament Reading (Exodus 17:1-7; confer 1 Corinthians 10:4). As the Divinely-inspired St. Paul put it in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 5:1-8), God showed His love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The death that we deserved, He died for us, who were ungodly, in our place. As with the woman from Samaria, He appeals to us to believe, and justified, or forgiven, by faith, we have peace with God, and we rejoice in the sure and certain hope of the glory of God.
People often wrongly think that Jesus’s in the Gospel Reading speaking about worshiping God in Spirit and in Truth did away with worshiping God in a particular place and in an outward manner, as if Jesus was one of the radical reformers of the sixteenth century. Rather, enabled by God to be true worshipers, we seek and receive the forgiveness of sins where God is present in His Word and in that Word combined with things like water, touch, and bread, and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood. Arguably in Holy Baptism we receive the living water that Jesus gives, and through that living water we receive the Holy Spirit and also the life of the Spirit that becomes our inner reality—our inner reality of faith in Christ and His obedience to the Father’s will—to the goal of our eternal life (confer Weinrich, ad loc John 4:1-15, p.474, and ad loc John 4:16-30, p.500). The Divinely-inspired St. Paul in writing to the Corinthians similarly refers to our being baptized in one Spirit and our being made to drink of one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13). And, in the chapters of St. John’s Gospel account both before and after today’s Gospel Reading, water is associated with wine (John 2:1-11), the birth from above by the Spirit (John 3:1-15), and the blood that flowed from Jesus’s side (John 19:34-37), just as St. John writes elsewhere of the Spirit, the water, and the blood’s all testifying and agreeing in their testimony (1 John 5:6-8).
In today’s Gospel Reading, the woman from Samaria heard Jesus for herself and then “testified” to the people of her town. Some of those people in turn came to believe by the Holy Spirit’s working through her words, and then others of those people came to believe by the Holy Spirit’s working through Jesus’s own words, and they confessed that Jesus is the Savior of the world. God can similarly work through our words to those whom God places in our lives, as we invite them to “come” and “see” (confer John 1:39, 46). Truly, the living water that gives life flows from Jesus not only to the Jews and the Samaritans, like the woman from Samaria and her town in the Gospel Reading, but the living water that gives life also flows from Jesus to all Gentiles, including us and those around us (John 7:37-39; Zechariah 14:6-21; Ezekiel 47:1-12; Revelation 21:6; 22:1-2). So given life, as we heard in the Epistle Reading, we can rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, Who has been given to us. That sure and certain hope includes our knowing that those who die before the Lord comes in glory will be resurrected in their bodies and that believers will live eternally, glorified in God’s presence, reunited with believing family and friends.
Our immediate access to water through different municipal utilities or private wells may sometimes leave us with cloudy or brown water, but not so with “Living Water and True Worshipers”. The pure living water comes from its holy source and makes us true worshipers holy, holy now and holy forever.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +