DOUG EICHER
NOTEBOOK
All Things New2/15/2020 I’ve been reading through the Gospel of John recently, and there’s an odd little exchange in chapter 4 that caught my attention. It’s one that I’ve read and heard countless times, but there were a couple of things I noticed that seemed worth exploring. It’s a transcript of a conversation that Jesus had with a Samaritan woman as he passed through her town on his way back to Galilee. Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 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.) 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.” Notice what Jesus is doing here. He meets this woman, going about her routine, doing what she’s done hundreds of times, and he immediately shifts the conversation. He says something so provocative and strange that she can’t help but notice. However, her initial reaction is not particularly positive. At first, she’s incredulous. “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 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?” The woman is confused about what claim Jesus is trying to make. She tries to frame it in terms of her worldview; in terms with which she is familiar. But Jesus doesn’t seem to notice; he simply proceeds to say something even more strange. Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 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.” The woman is not impressed. You can almost hear the sarcasm in her voice as she replies. 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.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 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.” This point in the conversation is a pivotal one. The woman’s attitude about who Jesus is has completely changed. She realizes that there’s something more to him than what she initially perceived, and she’s not happy about it. The conversation has shifted from an intriguing exchange with a socially inept Jewish man to something entirely too personal. “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” The woman responds by posing a theological question to Jesus, desperately trying to steer the conversation away from herself. But Jesus isn’t having any of it. He responds by taking her question and again making it personal. “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” Jesus cuts to the heart of what the woman was trying to avoid. He tells her that what God is really seeking is not those who practice religion correctly; it is those who worship “in the Spirit and in truth”, as he puts it. He explains to her that God is not seeking those who adhere to some form of pious discipline, he is seeking those who have experienced radical transformation in the deepest parts of who they are. He makes it clear that what God is concerned with is not the aesthetically pleasing exterior she presents to him; it is the darkest and broken parts of who she is. He doesn’t want platitudes; he wants her. I heard someone say the other day, “It’s hard to tell the truth when I’m at church.” If you’re a follower of Jesus (and maybe especially if you’re not), you’ll know exactly what that means. It seems so ironic that the one place where we should be able to be open up about our brokenness is the place where we feel the need to cling to it most tightly, but we do, and usually with good reason. Through our presentations of plastic piety and self-aggrandizing platitudes, we have fostered a culture in which we only feel welcome on our best days. We have decided that following Jesus is all about doing less “bad” things and doing more “good” things. We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re really not all that bad, and so we treat following Jesus as a glorified self-help program; a way to “tweak” what we perceive to be our minimal character flaws. But there’s a problem with this, and it’s evident in the way Jesus responds to this Samaritan woman. God doesn’t want our upgraded performance; in fact, he finds it nauseating. He wants us. He wants all of us. He’s not looking for the person we are at church, or at work, or even at home. He wants the darkest parts of us; the filthy, vile, broken parts that make up our deepest selves and contribute to the screwed-up way humans have been relating to each other ever since we decided to take morality into our own hands. You see, there will never be transformation without confrontation. Before the Gospel can be good news, it must first level us. Tearing off a few pieces of siding or blowing in a few windows won’t do; Jesus will not be satisfied until every last piece of our excuses and our pathetic attempts at self-righteousness lies in ruins at our feet. He has a way of getting up in our business; of exposing exactly how vile we are, but he does this because he knows that this is exactly why we’re broken in the first place. All of this pain, injustice, and evil is our fault. We have caused this. We are the reason the world is the way it is, and the gut-wrenching thing about the Gospel is that it forces us to confront this head-on. It shreds the rags we’ve convinced ourselves are designer jeans and leaves us completely naked and utterly ashamed in the presence of the one whose good world we have ruined. Then, and only then, can we see just why the Gospel is good news. God is a on a mission to renew his world. The story of the Bible ends in much the same way as it began, with God and his people living together in a restored version of this world in which shame and injustice are nothing more than distant memories of another time. The beautiful thing about the Gospel is not that God is making humans better; it is that he is making an entirely new humanity. It is a new type of human, of which the resurrected Jesus we see in the Gospel accounts is the first, but most certainly not the last. Paul describes it as being a “new creation” born out of the broken shards of what we used to consider to be normal. As a part of this new humanity, we are called to be bringers of new creation; channels through which this new life can trickle into a broken world. As a collective group of believers, we are called to foster a culture in which love and grace are perpetuated to others in the same way pride and injustice are perpetuated in the one around it. We are called to live out this new creation; to bring “heaven” to this world, living in eager anticipation of the day when the transformation that has begun in our hearts will spill over to flood the whole world.
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