Year A
John 4:5-42
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
No One is Denied Access
We live in a world that continually tries to deny us access. To get behind locked doors, we need keys and perhaps more than one. We need photo ID’s to get past security guards. We need PIN numbers to get money out of our own bank account or to charge groceries on our bankcards. We need passwords to access computer files. Some buildings now are so sophisticated that you have to use your handprint to enter into secured rooms. No matter where we go today, whether it’s online or off, we have to have the right information to gain access. If we don’t know the secret password, or don’t have the proper identification as a cleared, non-risk person we will be denied access.
Paul in his letter to the Romans today writes that through Jesus Christ we have been given the password, the key that unlocks the door. “We have obtained access to the grace of God” “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” This gift of love is not a secret and it’s not something we have to keep hidden and only by our refusal to accept it are we denied access to God’s grace. God will not deny us. Jesus Christ will not deny us. He will not even deny an outcast, a Samaritan woman.
After visiting with Nicodemus, Jesus headed into the Judean countryside with his small group of disciples. As people began flocking to him, rumors about his popularity and ministry began to cause a controversy that threatened to divide his followers from those of his cousin, John the Baptist. Rather than lend fuel to the fires of gossip and jealousy, Jesus left Judea and started north for Galilee. Jesus could have taken the normal route that went around Samaria with its despised, outcast minority. There was a long standing deep seated hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. Instead, he walked directly to Sychar, Samaria’s capital because as the text tells us today, “it was necessary that Jesus go through Samaria.” He was to meet a woman there and lead her to faith that would not only save her but an entire village of people.
It was high noon and Jesus was weary from his journey. The disciples had left him alone by Jacobs well to go into town to find food. As Jesus sat by the well, waiting, he saw a woman approaching. As we know by the story, this woman had made a mess of her life, as far back as she could remember, there had always been an emptiness, a nameless, unsatisfied longing, a thirst that would not be quenched. Thinking her thirst a thing of the senses, she sought relief in sensuality, eating, and drinking. She had lost herself and had become cynical and angry at God and man. She saw that “access denied” sign flashing right before her eyes.
Is her story so different than many of ours? We all go through those times when we feel like there is an “access denied” sign flashing right before our eyes. We may wonder if our lives really count or if this is all there is. Of all the things the woman might have expected when she saw Jesus sitting at the well, the last would have been that he would start a conversation with her, for it was forbidden by law for a Jewish Rabbi to address any woman in public. And to even find a Jew there in Samaria was unheard-of. Yet, there he was asking this woman for a drink and with that simple request, Jesus touched on the greatest need in this woman’s life. She was the one who was thirsty and needed a drink.
Jesus knew the woman had searched for meaning in her life and came up empty. So as he drinks of the cool well water, he tells this woman that “everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again.” In other words, all who look for satisfaction from the wells of the world—pleasure, popularity, position, possessions, politics, power, prestige, money, family, friends, career, children, clubs, sports, success, reputation, education, health—will soon be thirsty again. If we look for deep, lasting satisfaction from any of the wells the world offers, we are wasting our time.
I have quoted this prayer from the great theologian, Augustine to you before, he prayed, “Lord you have made me for yourself. Therefore my heart is restless till it finds it rest in you.” At the very core of our human identity is a hole and once we recognize the hole there within us…we discover there is a thirst to fill it. This thirst is actually a longing for God and one that only God can satisfy. We read in psalm 63, “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you: my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Yet, although our hunger and thirst is for God, we are always trying to satisfy them with other things because we cannot satisfy our thirst on our own.
It is the living water that draws us to seek the quenching of our hearts. We will never find our true selves until Jesus fills that hole with the help of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says to the woman, “If anyone it thirsty, let them come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink and they shall be satisfied.” Jesus the endless source of the Holy Spirit flowing out of him like living water calls the thirsty to him. It is when we hear his voice and turn toward it that our thirst begins to be quenched. And when the Samaritan woman realized she had not been denied access to this living water, she drank and led others to drink and be refreshed by the living water of God’s love.
David Rensberger a professor of New Testament at the Theological Center in Atlanta and author of books on the gospel and letter of John wrote: “Our thirst for God will never be satisfied by taking an eye-dropper 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 it 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.”
The Samaritan woman, poured the living water over her head, and invited hundreds to come and do the same. Their eyes were opened and they believed “now we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” What an awesome God we serve and love, one who forgives and loves us enough to send us a savior who is just as human. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, he cried out, “I thirst.” Surely he was physically thirst, but we can also believe that Christ was thirsty for all of us who thirst for life, eternal life, forgiven, cleansed, made whole, and free to live life as God intends.
The living water of God is limitless. There is no need for our souls to be dry especially during these days. So let us come to the well during this Lenten season, where no one is denied access, where we can meet Jesus our savior and drink of this living water that refreshes and fills our body, soul, and spirit with new life…eternal life.