The Third Sunday in Lent, Year A, 2011

John4:5-42

The Rev. Ronald N. Johnson

On a journey through Samaria, near a village called Sychar, near the field, which the patriarch Jacob gave to his son Joseph, Jesus stopped to drink at a well that Jacob himself had dug.  From this account in John’s Gospel comes a remarkable story about the God’s love and grace, made present in Jesus Christ.  A woman, whom many would have criticized for her lifestyle, met Jesus.  During the encounter, which was little more than a brief exchange about sharing a drink of water, the woman’s life was forever changed. 

This story could have been much different.  Our Lord might have chastised her, or he might simply have gotten a drink of water, thanked the woman and gone his way.  The story is different from many of the gospel stories about encounters with Jesus.  Almost always, people seeking Jesus came with requests for favors.  In this story, first of all, the Samaritan woman did not seek Jesus; the meeting was accidental.  The second point is that the woman asked for no favor. In fact, her initial response showed a bit of sarcasm and even disrespect.   Amazingly, to her at least, she received unexpected and unmerited grace, simply because Jesus saw her, felt compassion and love for her, and blessed her by his presence.

There is a teaching point, here.  This story tells us something about God’s love and its specific expression as grace – God’s blessings or favor.  We can not earn God’s love.  We have no claim on his favor.  The idea of earning points in some way with God through our merit is a foreign to the Christian understanding of God.  God gives his love to us freely, in spite of us being unworthy.  In fact, God gives his love, expressed as grace, or love acted out, to us not because we deserve it, but rather because we need it in order to be whole.  This is not an easy thing to understand, because for us to love this way takes something approaching a superhuman effort.  Nonetheless, this is the way it is with God’s love.  In the words of the old evangelical hymn of grace, “Just as I am”, Jesus loves us “just as we are, without a plea.”  That, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is what the Cross is all about.

In Lent, we should remind ourselves daily that we are sinners and strive to live a more perfect life, to find a better way, to be more diligent in prayer, to take time for religious study, perhaps taking on a Lenten discipline, just to remind ourselves that we are seeking a closer relationship with God.  Doing this is a good thing, but this piety carries with it a hidden danger.  The danger is that we could begin to think that if we are pious enough we could win God’s rewards; we might begin to think that surely God will shower us with his grace, if we just work hard enough at being good.  When our thinking turns this way we are getting into a religious mindset called “works righteousness,” and we should reject this concept out of hand.  To think that we can influence God and buy his grace only cheapens our understanding of grace.  In our thinking, we make God a lesser god by making conditional that which he gives us without condition. 

Like the Samaritan woman, must understand that God’s love is both unexpected and unconditional.  When we do understand this, something happens within us.  We begin to let our defenses down, drop our guard and set our anxieties aside.  The Samaritan woman thought that Jesus was going to judge and condemn her, both for being a woman of some promiscuity and for being a Samaritan.  Jews, you understand, just didn’t like Samaritans.  When she realized that Jesus knew all the details of her whole life, knew all of her failures and all of her shortcomings – and loved her in spite of it, that love itself liberated her and made her whole.

God, in Jesus Christ, loves us exactly as he loved the woman of Samaria. He knows everything about us.  He knows our sins and our failures whether we confess them to him or not.  If we let him, he will take the guilt away and lift us up into righteousness. What is required is that we not block him out.  We must be open to our Lord and open to his Holy Spirit.  We must say, in deeply felt prayer, Jesus, come into my heart, through your Spirit purify me, find a place within me and stay with me, so that in you, I may be whole. Amen.