WELL BUCKETS AND WATERPOTS

#091                                                     WELL BUCKETS AND WATERPOTS                                                                            

Scripture  John 4:5-34, 39 NIV                                                                                                 Orig. 8/23/1964; 11/1979

                                                                                                                                                                             Rewr. 4/20/1988

Passage: 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a]) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” 19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” 26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” 28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him. 31 Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” 33 Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” 34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 

Many Samaritans Believe

39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.”

Purpose: To show how Jesus shared expectation, and guilt, and faith, and victory, with a woman who perceived of herself as caught in the trap of sin.

Keywords:           Christ as Saviour               Biography of the Samaritan Woman        Conviction           Faith      Guilt      Hope                                Revival

Timeline/Series:               Biography of the Samaritan  Woman

Introduction

                In some form or the other, well-buckets and waterpots have figured into human social activities.  As necessary as the water itself, are the gatherings of community.  So, on a day not all that different from other days, “a woman of Samaria” went to draw water for herself, perhaps for others.

                Our interest in well-buckets and waterpots now is only as a memento of early American treasures from the past.  Her interest was basic.  It had to do with life, and living.  And thus she  has come to the well.

                The last thing on her mind that day as she walked the dusty road beyond Sychar was that this was going to be a day like no other.  She would encounter One who would turn  her life around.  In sudden swirls, a spiritual, moral  dimension will invade her life.  In the twinkling of an eye, she becomes a practitioner of the Kingdom of God.

                Dr. James Stewart, in his book, The Wind of the Spirit(1), reminds us of the care that we must take in assessing a person’s spiritual attainment.  He writes, ”God assesses . . . relationship to the Kingdom of Christ, not by the point [one] has reached on the highway of holiness, but by the way he is facing; not by the  distance of his pilgrimage, but by the direction of his life; not by the question, ‘Has he achieved an ethically complete and rounded character,’ but by the question, ‘Has he his face to Christ or his back?’”

                She is not much, this Samaritan woman, but there is a great lesson that we can learn from her, because she stands with her face, not her back, to the Christ.  We must turn our own faces to these well-buckets and waterpots to learn what they would teach us.

I.             Jesus Found Her in the Anguish of Hope.  V15 “Sir, give me this water that I thirst not, neither come  hither to drink.”

                You see, hope can sometimes be misapplied in that we want it to affect life where we are, rather than life in its substance.  If we have no bread, it is food, not faith, that claims our interest.  If we have bread, it may be for something more, cake, pastry, for which we yearn.

                This woman stands at a moment of great crisis and decision though not yet knowing it.  She is not just a woman dissatisfied with life.  She is a woman lost in the wilderness of living.  If that were not enough, suddenly, her sin is exposed.  Exposed before moral, spiritual perfection.  But of equal importance, exposed to herself.  She sees that she, herself, is not under the searchlight of law, rather, under the enigma of grace.

                She had  momentarily concluded that this man at the well could help her to escape from herself, from this trap she has rigged, from another man who has dragged her down, perhaps from reality itself.  I sat one afternoon and talked for two hours with a woman  like this.  She needed, wanted Christ.  It seemed that she was ready.  That evening her male companion came by, with a bottle.  They went to the shack he called home.  A fire that night spelled finish to whatever hope she had.

                This well symbolizes the bad and the good in this complex life.  It is both  her burden, and the source of life.  She is here drawing water to quench the thirst of the one, at home, who is the source of her woe.  She has come expecting no one else present.  The social center of life for other women is avoided because of unpleasantries.  Seeing other women coming toward the well, she knows she  is partly what they whisper about.

                She is closing in, however, on the discovery of new life waiting at the well.

II.            He Led Her Through the Acknowledgement of Guilt.  V16 “Jesus said to her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither. [V17] The woman answered and said, I have no husband.”

                There are times when life’s realities are too much.  Joshua 7:7 (Israel at Ai) “Would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan.”   (How can we pretend this evil away?)  Habakkuk’s sad lamentation (Habakkuk 1:2) “O Lord, how long shall I cry, and Thou wilt not hear! . . . cry . . . and Thou wilt not save!”  In Columbia this week, a friend told me about the prominent citizen, Bible teacher who took his own life.

                Guilt, however, is not something to be avoided.  Medical professionals diminish it.  But Jesus seems to have deliberately brought her this way.  How much  worse to have a soul so steeped in sin that guilt could not penetrate?  Romans 3:19 “We know that whatsoever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law: that every mouth . . . be stopped, and all the world . . . guilty before God.”

                Without guilt, law is impractical.  Without law, society is impossible.  But culture, brought under the burden of law by guilt, finds its solace in community, and in Christ.

                When the rescue of a soul is at stake, guilt is a relatively minor price to pay.  Matthew 1:21, “Thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.”  John 4:42 “We have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.”  For her sake, guilt is the goal.  But others are involved also who will find their own struggle through her.

III.           He is Her Companion through Her Altercation with Truth.  V19 “The woman saith unto him . . . Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place . . . to worship.”  Her only real experience with truth was that of tradition.  Twin mounts of Ebal, Gerizim are near.  Jerusalem was 40 miles away.  But a temple had been built on Gerizim.  Some even contended that Isaac had been brought by Abraham to this mount.

                Believing as she did, she disdained the beliefs of others.  Even of Jesus.  Truth is an enigma to  her.  No doubt she is sincere.  Sincerely wrong.  She thinks others are in the same dilemma. 

                Jesus reminds her that tradition will not set her heart at rest.  Worship without prejudice was vital. She deals with Messianic uncertainty.  Jesus tells her who he is—Messiah.  Jesus made such a revelation of himself to a social outcast of the Jews and also of the Samaritans.

IV.          Thus, She Begins to Discover the Affirmation of Faith.  V28 “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did:  is not this the Christ?” 

                Someone to believe in has given her something to believe in.  How natural faith is for a child.  Sunday School teacher talking to class about creation.  Child: “God created the world with His left hand.”  “How do you know that?”  “Because Jesus was sitting on His right hand.”

                But for an adult, a more practical view of sin clouds such faith.

                Someone to believe, and something to believe in, now enables her to believe in herself.  Faith is her enabler. Others will  now come to believe in her also, to see the world through her.  For too many, quest for success is first.  That quest can trap us away from God’s grace, and all others who might come to grace through us, to see the world through us.

Conclusion

                Two little lads stood on the edge of Itasca.  “Look,” said one, “it’s leaking!”  “That ain’t no leak,” said the other.  “That’s the Mississippi!”

(1) Stewart, J. (1988). The Wind of the Spirit. Baker Publishing Group.