11 True Worship: The Woman at the Well, Part 2 (John 4)

Welcome back to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today is the 11th talk in our series on the Gospel of John and the second of two podcasts on John chapter 4. I'm so glad you joined us today. Last week we began looking at John chapter 4, which includes the conversation Jesus had with the woman at the well and the healing of the nobleman's son. Since this is a big picture study, rather than walking through the chapter, I have been going through it in sections, pulling out the three major themes that I see. This podcast will make more sense if you listen to the previous podcast first, and if you're not familiar with the stories in chapter four, you might want to pause and read through the chapter before listening further. I see three themes in the stories in this chapter. We looked at the first theme in the last podcast and we'll cover the second two themes today. To focus on each theme, I will be skipping through verses as I read, which is another reason you might want to read through the passage on your own first. But if you listen to last week's podcast and this podcast, we will be covering all the verses. Let me briefly remind you what we talked about in the last podcast. Jesus is traveling through Samaria on his way back to Galilee from Jerusalem. The Jews and the Samaritans did not get along. There were religious issues between them and racial issues between them and a history of bad blood. Jesus stops at Jacob's well around noon. He waits there while his disciples go into the village to buy food. While he's waiting, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water from the well. Jesus starts a conversation with her and asks her for a drink of water from the well. This is quite a striking thing to do. There are at least three good reasons why a Jewish rabbi might not want to speak to a woman in this situation. First, she is a Samaritan, second, she is a woman, and third, as Jesus knows, she is an immoral woman. Any one of those reasons are enough to persuade any self respecting rabbi to keep his distance, and she's got all three strikes. She remarks on this fact. She's amazed that Jesus speaks to her and asks her for a drink. Jews were not allowed to share eating utensils with Samaritans, particularly cups and glasses, because Samaritans were considered unclean, and she is amazed that he would take a drink from any cup she handed to him. The first theme we talked about last week involves testimony and belief, and it should be a familiar theme if you've been listening to this series. This is a story about how a village of Samaritans come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and they follow the pattern we've been seeing. There's a miracle, there is testimony concerning the miracle, and then there is belief that Jesus is the Messiah because of that miracle and testimony. As we talked about last week, the extra twist in this story is that the believers are the Samaritans whom the Jews hated and considered unclean. John contrasts the relatively quick and easy belief found among the Samaritans with the more reluctant belief of the Jewish noble at the end of the chapter. The nobleman comes to Jesus seeking earthly help for earthly troubles. He only comes to believe Jesus is the Messiah after Jesus gives him a sign. Now let's look at the second theme in the story. We're going to pick up the story in verse nineteen. Jesus has already spoken to the woman about how he can provide living water, and whoever drinks this living water will not be thirsty again, and Jesus has made clear to her that he has supernatural knowledge about her life, particularly the fact that she has had five husbands. And she responds and will pick up in four nineteen through twenty six. The woman said to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming, when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know, we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know that the Messiah is coming, he who is called Christ. When he comes he will tell us all things. Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He. Jesus has just pointed out the fact that he knows all about her extra husbands, and she brings up these religious differences between the Jews and the Samaritans, and there are very clear differences between them. Now why would she do that? Well I always thought that she was trying to change the subject. Maybe Jesus was getting a little too personal with his conversation about her lifestyle, so she's trying a diversion tactic. A theological debate might distract him from this uncomfortable topic of her many husbands. That's possible, but the more I studied this, I don't think that's giving her enough credit. As I started digging into what the Samaritans believe, I realized the question she asks is quite reasonable given the situation. Jesus has just done something astounding. He knows these personal things about her that he has no reason to know. Only God could have told him such detail. So she realizes he's a prophet, but from her perspective there's a problem. He's a Jew, and she's a Samaritan. Why should she listen to a Jewish prophet? He's the wrong religion, from her perspective. Prophets should come from the Samaritans. And I think that's the issue she's raising. She's saying, look, you're a Jew. We have some pretty big significant religious differences. You say that we have to worship in Jerusalem. What do you have to say about that? Why should I as a Samaritan listen to you, a Jewish prophet? I'm inclined to think her question is serious and that she's pointing out to him that he worships in the wrong place, so why should she listen to him? He may know about her personal life, but from her perspective, his theology is off. Jesus takes her question seriously and he makes two points, and I think it's important to see both of them. His first point deals with their theological differences, and he acknowledges there are theological and religious differences between them, and he is very clear to say the Jews have it right and you Samaritans have it wrong. For example, the Samaritans rejected the temple at Jerusalem, and they set up their own temple in Samaria. Jesus believed the Jerusalem temple is the temple God established. The Samaritans only accepted the first five books of the Old Testament. They rejected prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, but Jesus clearly believed that the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah were from God, and that they testified to the Messiah, they were messengers from God that needed to be heard, and she is wrong to ignore those parts of the scriptures. The Samaritans didn't accept the idea that the royal line belonged to David. They represented a split that goes all the way back to the split between the southern and northern kingdoms after Solomon, which is roughly a millennia back in their history. But the fact is the Messiah, Jesus, who is standing right there in front of her, is from the line of David. So Jesus says in effect, you Samaritans worship the Father, but you don't understand him properly because you've cut yourself off from the means that he has made himself known. We Jews do know him. We understand the God we're worshiping because salvation is from the Jews. God has revealed himself through the Jewish scriptures and the Jewish prophets. God revealed the coming Messiah through the Jews, God set up the true temple in Jerusalem, and the Jewish prophets have spoken from God. Now not that all Jews necessarily understood or believed all that they had been told, but compared to the Samaritans, the Jews had a better chance of getting their theology right. That's the first issue. Jesus says the Jews have some things right that the Samaritans have wrong. But there's a second point he makes. He confronts her with a more fundamental issue. In the end, the true worship of God is not about which temple you worship in. The Jews are in the right temple, which is in Jerusalem, and the Samaritans are in the wrong temple, but in the end that is not going to matter. Now I think Jesus is making a very important and fundamental point here, and it's one that we in the modern church tend to lose sight of sometimes. If you stop and think about it, there's always been something problematic about the religious rituals of the Old Testament. Even though God gave these rituals, the Mosaic covenant, the laws, there's a little bit of tension in their practices. For example, you can go to the temple and you can make your sacrifice, and that is being obedient, that was what was commanded, but the sacrifice doesn't solve the problem of sin and guilt and God's wrath. You have to go back the next year and make another sacrifice, and you have to keep on making sacrifices. These rituals were a kind of picture, a lesson the Jews were supposed to learn. Also they were to worship at this particular temple in Jerusalem, but the fact is God doesn't dwell only in that temple in that particular location. The temple was just a kind of picture. We know God is everywhere. Yes, worshiping God at the temple is being obedient, it's what God said to do, but it's only a picture of a bigger reality. The Psalms and the prophets made it clear that doing the rituals was not the most important part. The heart or the attitude, the fundamental beliefs of the person doing the ritual, that's what really matters. The rituals were a way to express their inner commitment to and belief in God. The rituals themselves contained no magic. They were meant to express a reality about the person's spiritual state. But of course we know experience proves when you have an external ritual to do, it's easy for the ritual to become the point and the heart of the person involved to become irrelevant. It's easy to start going through the motions of the ritual without caring about the God behind them at all. And that's the tension. Since God is concerned with the heart, why not just skip the rituals and get right to the heart of it? Why not just work on being the sort of person that God wants me to be and forget about all these rituals that picture that kind of person? Well, I understand Jesus to be saying that time has come. It is time to recognize the temporary provisional nature of things like these rituals performed at a particular temple in a particular place on a particular day, and instead to emphasize the inner reality. Before, if you asked someone, did you worship God? a person would answer, yes, I went to the temple and I offered my dove or whatever it was. Now if you ask, did you worship God? A person could answer, yes, in my spirit, in my inner heart, I bowed my knee to God and his truth. And Jesus, I think, is saying, that's really what it's all about. The time is coming and is now to put the emphasis where it belongs, which is how do you stand before God? We are not to symbolically act out a ritual of believing in God without belief, we are to actually believe in him. And this makes sense. God is not confined to a particular temple. God is spirit, and it makes sense that we would worship him wherever we are. The only worshipers God is really truly interested in is those who worship him from the inside where it counts. Notice four twenty three again, but the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. Now this phrase worship in spirit and truth could be understood several ways. You'll find a lot of discussion about exactly what it means. I'm leaning in one direction. I'll tell you what that is, but I might change my mind. At this point, I think to worship in spirit and in truth is to worship God in my spirit in response to truth. It's my acceptance of and bowing to the truth of God. And I really like that idea because there is so much emphasis in the Bible on this idea that we are called to respond to truth. One of the fundamental problems we human beings have is we lie to ourselves. We discount and ignore the truths that we don't want to deal with, like the fact that we're sinners and God could justly condemn us. But we are called to respond to truth and then submit to it, and that's worship, that bowing of our knee, humbling ourselves before God and saying, You are right, I am wrong, save me. That's what God is looking for. Now I think it's important that Jesus acknowledged that the Samaritans were wrong. He doesn't say it doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't matter how you worship. That's not what he's saying. I'm sure many Samaritans by rejecting the temple in Jerusalem were actually expressing a rebellion against truth and a hostility to God. It's very easy for all of us to take comfort in performing empty rituals that don't reflect any inward reality. There were probably other Samaritans who were sincerely worshiping God even though they got it wrong. What Jesus is saying is this disagreement about which is the true temple, this is about to become irrelevant. What's really important is are you a person who responds to truth? Are you a person who bows your knee to God and says, Yes, you are God? I think Jesus is making it clear that true religion involves who we are and what we believe inside. It's not what motions we go through on the outside. True religion involves embracing the truth and worshiping God because of it. In a real sense, the religious differences between the Jews and the Samaritans are going to be swallowed up by this more important distinction. But we still want to be people who seek the truth and believe the truth. Now we could spend a whole lot of time talking about that, and in a detailed study we probably would spend a lot more time thinking that through. For now I just want to point out that there are two points Jesus makes. Truth still matters. Some theology is right and some theology is wrong, and it's important that we respond to the truth when we're taught it. But we want to give an appropriate weight to what Jesus is saying here. In my humble, good for nothing opinion, many of the traditions that have grown up in Christianity and the way we think about what God wants from us now show that we haven't really taken these words to heart. We embrace this idea that God has stopped caring whether we worship him in this temple or that temple, but then we easily convince ourselves that he cares really deeply whether we're dunked or sprinkled. Or we convince ourselves that he is quite particular about the details of how we take communion and how often we take it, and which songs we sing and what liturgy we say, and we can become quite rigid about having a particular set of religious practices. It seems to me as we debate these topics, and they're good topics to debate, we need to give weight to what Jesus is getting at here. Fundamentally, religious distinctions have to be subsumed under the issue of who is doing them, the issue of the inner person. Now I am not saying that it doesn't matter what we do or how we worship God. Just to be ridiculous, I can't decide that my religious practice will be sacrificing children on an altar in my backyard. Clearly, God would find that abhorrent, and I am not free to do something like that. It is true that my religious practices say something about who I am inside and how seriously I take God, and in that sense, religious practices matter a great deal. But I think we need to take Jesus' point here seriously, and the primary issue is do I really believe and trust God? If I truly believe Him and trust Him, then the way I live my life should start reflecting His values and the truth He's revealed to me. Now as I said, we could spend a whole lot of time on that, we barely scratched the surface, but let's turn to the third theme in this section, which starts in verse thirty one. The woman has gone back to town to tell everyone what she has just heard from this guy, Jesus, and the disciples have arrived. They had left to get food, but now they're back, and Jesus and his disciples are waiting for the townspeople to arrive. And we have this little interlude which starts in three hundred thirty one and goes to thirty eight. Meanwhile, the disciples were urging him, Rabbi eat, but he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about. So the disciples said to one another, has anyone brought him something to eat? Jesus said to him, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say there are yet four months then comes the harvest? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored and you have entered into their labor. Okay, what's going on here? I think this is another theme that's going to run through the Gospel of John. It is related to this theme of testimony and belief. You and I believe today because of the testimony of the apostles, the original twelve disciples who were with Jesus, who were taught by him and then ultimately represented him to the world. I think what's going on here is Jesus is preparing the twelve to become his representatives. He knows he's eventually going to leave and his apostles are going to take over and represent him to the rest of the world. When John is writing, this has been true for decades. Jesus has been gone and the church is relying on the testimony of the apostles. Jesus takes this little teachable moment to say something to these disciples whom he will later send out to be his apostles. He wants them to look at the world the way he looks at the world. And we're going to see more of this theme. It's going to culminate in the upper room discourse. We get just a little glimpse of it here. While we're waiting for the woman and the townspeople to come back, Jesus is preparing them to join him in this ministry and ultimately to replace him. What does Jesus mean when he says his food is doing his father's will? Well, let's think this through. When we get hungry, We long for food to satisfy our hunger. Food is very important to us. We need food to sustain us. We look forward to eating. We make time for it in our lives. We feel satisfied and content after a good meal. The disciples come back and say it's lunchtime, don't you want to eat? And the answer is, Of course I'm going to eat, but I have a different hunger that is even stronger, and it is satisfied in a different way. The desire that drives me is for me to do God's will. God has sent me to do something. He's given me a task to do, and I have this great desire that it be done. So my food, the thing that I long for, the thing that motivates me, the thing that keeps me going, the desire I most want to satisfy is to do that which God sent me to do. That satisfies me in the same way eating a good meal satisfies my physical hunger. Ultimately, doing God's will is what I want. It's what I came here to do, it's my desire. Now remember the disciples were surprised that Jesus was talking to a Samaritan woman at all. In part I think he's speaking to that kind of surprise. There's a little bit of flavor of why are you surprised that I spoke to a Samaritan woman? Preaching to the lost is what I came to do. Speaking to people like her is my calling, and ultimately, my disciples, it's going to be your calling. And he's telling them it gives him great satisfaction to do this, and he wants the same for them. Then he switches to this imagery of harvesting, and I believe he's referring to a saying they have, which is basically you gotta wait four months for the harvest. He's talking about the reality of life and the need for patience. You plant your seeds and you have to wait four months before you can reap the harvest. You don't get to go out the next morning and harvest your barley or your corn or whatever it is. If you're hungry for barley or corn or wheat, you have to plan ahead. You have to sow your seeds, then you have to wait patiently for the harvest. And after you harvest, you have to grind it in the flour, and then you have to make it into bread, and then finally you can eat it. But when you're sowing the seeds of the gospel, sometimes you can sow and reap immediately. You can sow your seeds of the gospel and enjoy the fruit right away. And he's talking about the situation in the Samaritan town. This woman has believed him. She's telling others about him. Many people from this village are about to come listen to him and beg him to stay and be taught by him. They are like a field ready to be harvested. He knows they're ready to hear his words, like a field that is ripe and ready to be picked. They just need someone to tell them the truth about how to find eternal life. Now Jesus qualifies the picture a bit. He says the field is ripe now because others sowed first. You twelve sometimes are going to get to experience the instantaneous gratification of the harvest because someone before you did the hard work of sowing. Those who sowed, they didn't get that gratification. You get the gratification because you're the one who came at the time when the harvest was ready. Now why would he say something like this? He doesn't explain it. He just makes this comment and then lets it go. But what makes the most sense to me is the sowers he's talking about are all of those who have contributed to the Samaritans' understanding in this town, their understanding of God and their expectation that there is a Messiah who's coming. That would include Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, all of the people whose stories are told in the first five books of the Bible that the Samaritans read. It would include their parents and grandparents and great grandparents. It's true they ignored the later Jewish prophets, but they listened to Moses. They know the story of Abraham and Joseph and Jacob, they know about the law. They know Moses said there was a prophet coming one day, and they had this hope, this expectation that the world needs a savior and the Christ is coming. When Jesus says, I who speak to you am He, the woman was prepared. She knows who he's talking about. She understands the claim that he's making and what it means that he is the Messiah. The people in the town seem to understand it too. Jesus stays with them two days and they listen and believe. They were in a position to understand and embrace the gospel because they had listened to others who came before the day Jesus arrived. Now it's true that ultimately this is all a work of God and that He prepares our hearts to hear and understand, but the point Jesus is making right now is the disciples don't have to work very hard at explaining what this is all about because the Samaritans were ready to hear what they had to say. God had prepared them to hear and believe when Jesus and his disciples came to town, and he prepared them through the hard work of others. So what's Jesus saying to his disciples here? I'd paraphrase it something like this. You know how hunger drives you to long for food? I have a deeper hunger, a hunger to do what God wants me to do, which is calling people to eternal life. And I invite you, my disciples, to share my hunger that God's will be done. Look around you. These people are ready to hear about the salvation that I am bringing them. The work of many years has gone into preparing them for the message that you can bring them as my disciples. Others prepared the ground. You have the privilege of seeing the results in the lives of these people. That's your call as my messengers. Now let me end all this by talking about a couple of things that strike me as significant. First, Jesus is preparing the apostles for their task. In the end, you and I are part of this grand and glorious harvest because they brought it in through their writings in the Bible. There's this long beautiful plan of God's preparation and teaching that brings us to the point of being ready to believe and embrace the gospel. And God is weaving all of history to bring about salvation for people like you and me. Second, this whole harvesting picture he paints suggests that those who had come before prepared the Samaritans to accept Jesus. They had been taught enough that they understood the problem of sin, they understood that God was sending a Savior to the world, their prior teaching, their cultural experience gave them a foundation upon which Jesus and the apostles could harvest. Well that raises a question for me is could we say the same today? Are the fields white for harvest today? Is this a general truth or is he talking about something specific that was true at that particular time? And I think, if I'm understanding what he's saying, that he was talking about that particular time, the historical work that prepared the Samaritans to understand him. If that's the case, then it seems to me that today the fields are not ripe for harvest. It seems to me that modern culture has led us to a place where people are less prepared than ever to hear the gospel. This immoral, we might call her primitive Samaritan woman was in a much better position to hear Jesus than we are in our culture, because our culture has taken the issue of sin and guilt off the table and put other things in its place. Of course, God can and does break through any hard heart he wants to and he saves lots of us. Our lack of cultural preparation is not an obstacle to God. I don't mean that. I'm just looking at around at the world and saying what kind of situation are we in? As we proclaim the gospel to our neighbors, it seems to me that we should picture ourselves as the people who are breaking up the hard ground so that later on someone can come along and sow the seeds of the gospel and someone else reap the results even later. I think, at least in my little corner of the world, that we are called upon to break ground, and we should think about it that way. We're trying to create an environment where something can get planted, and it may take a while before anything grows out of it. Now why do I say that? Well it seems to me that for many people today the gospel answers a question that they aren't asking. We have so trivialized sin and guilt that no one thinks they need a savior anymore. And our anything goes tolerate every mentality culture, the concept that I might actually be wrong, I might actually be a sinner is foreign to most people. We have so emphasized the message that God loves you, that no one seems to understand that God may love you and you're still facing his wrath. Part of our job today is to encourage them to start asking the right questions. They need to understand the nature of the problem of sin so that the gospel actually resonates as good news when they hear it. If I'm right about this, then the modern, sophisticated, materially prosperous western is much worse off than the Samaritans of this town because they were ready to hear about Jesus, and by and large, we're not. Finally, when Jesus says his food is doing his father's will, we might want to stop and ask ourselves, what am I hungry for? We were told from the beginning that mankind does not live by bread alone, but everything that proceeds from the mouth of God. Well you and I are not apostles, we're not called to represent Jesus in the same way they were called to represent Jesus, but we are disciples of Christ. As disciples of Jesus, we should hunger for the will of God to happen. Part of growing and maturing as a believer, I think, is learning to want what God wants. It's easy for us to want what we want. I already know how to do that. I've known how to do that from a very early age. I know how to want what seems good to me, but we're trying to learn to want what God wants because we recognize that what God wants is the real deal. What God wants is the thing to want because nothing else will ultimately satisfy us. Everything else in this physical universe is going to die and decay and turn to dust, but God is the real thing. He is the one who can bring us eternal life and create a world that is not spoiled by sin and death. Now each of us has our unique role to play in the kingdom of God. I can't say what specifically you're called to do in this life, but I do know the story of salvation and redemption, the story of how God sent His Son into the world to rescue us from our guilt and bring us into righteousness and life. And I know that understanding and embracing that story, that gospel, knowing that it's true, is the most important thing we can ever do in this life. The gospel ought to matter to us. It's very easy to get distracted by the cares of this world and forget how important it is to come to terms with the gospel. So it's a challenge. What Jesus says here is not just a challenge to his disciples, but a challenge to us. What are we hungry for? What are we all about in this life? What do we really want God to do for us? Are we looking to him for earthly blessings to solve earthly problems tomorrow? Or do we want him to forgive us and grant us eternal life in his kingdom? You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. The blog version of this episode is on the link below this podcast. You can also find it by going directly to wednesdayintheword.com slash John 11. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please support the show by following it wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you can, leave me a positive rating or review. It really does help others find the show. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by my friend and favorite musician Reggie Coates. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes or other series from Wednesday in the Word, just go to wednesdayintheword.com. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.