Fourth Sunday of Advent – Love
Jesus Comes to the Woman at the Well – John 4:1-26

I grew up with a Christmas carol called “Love Came Down At Christmas.”

Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love divine; Love was born at Christmas, Star and angels gave the sign.

There are a lot of songs that combine the words “love” and “Christmas” on the radio right now, especially if you ever hear K-Lite FM, who seem to have set themselves the goal of being “all Christmas, all the time” for this month.

I went online to their site this week and looked at the “Recently Played” page. There they had listed all the songs that they’d played in the last 24 hours, all 281 of them. Many of those were multiple playings of the same song, usually by different artists. For instance, in the 24 hours that I looked at, you would have heard “The Christmas Song” (otherwise known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) sung 11 times; twice each by Celine Dion, Devine Brown, Natalie Cole, and Gloria Estefan, and once by Michael Buble, Nat King Cole, and The Carpenters.

The interesting thing to me was that, out of those 281 songs, only 19 (6.5%) had anything to do with Christ, (and a quarter of those are sung by Rita Macneil or Bruce Cockburn!)

Now, this isn’t a rant about how our society is no longer Christian. Societies change over time and I think there’s some good in people no longer assuming they’re Christian because they were born in a so-called “Christian country.” That’s not my point. My point is that, as Christians, we are surrounded by messages that clash with what scripture tells us about any number of things, and Christmas is no exception. It’s easy to have our ideas of Christmas shaped by the other messages that we hear day in and day out; the ones that have to do mainly with weather in the Northern hemisphere at this time of year, and family gatherings, and a very fuzzy idea of “love.”

Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love divine; Love was born at Christmas, Star and angels gave the sign.

This Advent we’ve been meditating on what it means to say that Jesus has come into the world. We’ve looked at his coming to various people; Simeon and Anna, the disciples in the boat, Lazarus in the tomb. This week, as we talk about love that came down at Christmas, we’re looking at what happens one hot day when Jesus comes to a Samaritan woman by a well.

“The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John… ³ When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.”

So, Jesus is travelling again. Have you noticed how much of what we know about Jesus’ life is about him travelling (walking mainly - other than the odd boat trip and one donkey ride at the end) all over an area that was about 150km long by 75km wide? From the moment he began his public ministry Jesus never stayed anywhere very long.

And so, in this passage, he’s travelling again. This time he’s on his way north, from Jerusalem, back to Galilee, where he grew up and where he had his base of operations in Capernaum.

Jesus’ coming breaks down barriers

Jesus is on his way through Samaria, en route to Galilee. It’s a hot day, and around noon he and his disciples stop by an ancient well. The disciples go into town to buy something for lunch while Jesus waits by the well. Along comes a woman and, since Jesus doesn’t have anything to let down into the well to pull up the water, he asks her to get him a drink of water.

That all seems perfectly normal to us, except that according to the rules, Jesus shouldn’t even have been talking to her, never mind asking her for a drink. There were just too many barriers between them.

Cultural barriers

For starters, she was a Samaritan. To say that Jews and Samaritans didn’t like each other would be putting it mildly. They despised each other. Their enmity went back almost 1000 years to when the nation of Israel spilt into two; Judah and Israel. Samaria was what was left of the ancient northern kingdom of Israel. Many Jewish rabbis taught that Samaritans were unclean and that you shouldn’t even talk to them, never mind drink water from their cups.

[I grew up in Scotland at a time when the enmity between Protestants and Catholics was still very strong, even after 500 years. My Mum’s family was Protestant and my Dad was from a Catholic family, and so we were the black sheep of both families. In some cities in those days, Protestants didn’t walk through Catholic neighbourhoods, and vice versa. That’s the kind of enmity that existed between Jews and Samaritans.]

But… Samaria was the shortest route between Jerusalem and the Jewish communities in Galilee. So you would grit your teeth, aim to spend as little time in “enemy” territory as possible, and try to avoid talking to anyone.

No wonder she was surprised that Jesus talked to her.

Gender barriers

But she’s not just a Samaritan. She’s a Samaritan woman. From the writings that we have from around Jesus’ time it’s clear that the culture didn’t have a particularly positive view of women. Women were perceived as responsible for most sin, and especially for the sexual kind. For example, Josephus, a contemporary historian, says that the Law holds women to be inferior in all matters. Sirach, says, “better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good” (Sir 42:14 NRSV). A Jewish man prayed three benedictions each day, including one in which he thanked God that he was not made a woman. You get the picture.

So, strike one; she’s a Samaritan. Strike two: she’s a woman.

Social barriers

And, on top of all that, it’s a little strange that she’s at the well at this time of day. Women would go out to get water either in the morning or in the evening. It was cooler then, and the morning and evening visits to the well were communal times to get caught up with each others’ lives.

This woman was at the well, by herself, in the middle of the day. That probably means she was an outcast. And that would be understandable given what we find out about her lifestyle a little later. Samaritans were no less religious than Jews and this woman had been married five times and was currently living with a man she wasn’t married to. Like the song says she had been “looking for love in all the wrong places,” and the respectable women of the village wanted nothing to do with her.

So many barriers, but when Jesus comes he breaks down barriers. Love came down at Christmas and broke down the barriers that keep people excluded.

He includes the excluded

If you had asked any of the people who came to hear Jesus speak, they would have told you that this woman was excluded. She was excluded from God’s will, from God’s presence, from God’s love. They all knew what kind of people God was interested in; morally upright, religious, Jewish men were at the top of the list. Shady, Samaritan women didn’t even make the list.

But here is Jesus, sitting by the well, talking with this woman… Because part of the message of Christmas is that Jesus doesn’t come just for the good people, the nice people, the well behaved and clean people. He came for them, but he also came for the outcast and the outsider as well.

[This Christmas millions of people will one version or another of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” It’s become a Christmas tradition. In the Spectator this week I noticed a comment that connected “A Christmas Carol” with “Christmas cheer” and I wondered if Dickens was turning in his grave. When Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” and the other Christmas stories like “The Chimes,” in the 1840’s he didn’t write them to be heart-warming stories of Christmas cheer. He intended them to be disturbing. Like the Old Testament prophets, he wanted to paint a picture of social evil and hold it up so that people would recognise themselves in it and change their behaviour.]

And one of the recurring themes in Dickens’ Christmas stories is about how Christmas is a time to include the excluded, the outsider, the poor.

I grew up in Scotland. I moved to the Netherlands when I was 21, but it wasn’t until I moved to Canada at the age of 26 that I heard the phrase “Christmas is about family.”

Well, maybe we’ve made it about family, but I think that’s a cultural thing. You see, Christmas isn’t about family, if family means that we turn in on ourselves and turn our backs on the world. And, for me, that’s the picture that that phrase conjours up; family members gathered together around the dinner table, facing each other, with their backs to the world. That image of Christmas is a large part of why this is a such difficult time of year for people who, for one reason or another, don’t have a good, well-adjusted family, or perhaps any family at all. If Christmas is about family then there are all kinds of people who are excluded from Christmas. But if Christmas is about love, then everybody is included.

Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love divine; Love was born at Christmas…

But it wasn’t romantic love, or family affection. The kind of love that came down at Christmas is agape love. The kind of self-giving, self-sacrificial love that eventually took Jesus to the cross, but on the way there saw him reaching out to drunks, tax-collectors, prostitutes, and shady Samaritan women, as well as Pharisees and community leaders like Nicodemus.

I don’t say this as a rebuke. I think that, as a church, Wentworth gets Christmas better than most. I saw evidence of that this week when Angela came by the church to pick up the gifts to deliver for the Angel Tree project. She, and a number of other women, have been working with Prison Fellowship to buy Christmas gifts for the children of, mainly men, who are incarcerated; reaching out at Christmas to families who carry that burden of shame.

Then, on Christmas Eve, we’ll have a full turkey dinner here for the neighbourhood, and whoever comes is welcome. So, as a congregation, you get it. Despite what the culture might say, you demonstrate by your actions that you understand that Christmas is not primarily about celebrating with your own circle of insiders. It’s about reaching out with love to outsiders. Because, to paraphrase Paul, …God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, [outsiders, outcasts, excluded] Christ [came and] died for us.

Jesus’ coming offers us life

And it’s out of his love for us that God, in Christ, offers us life.

At a physical level, water is life. You can survive without food for a month. Without water you’re dead in 3 or 4 days. Jesus and this woman were sitting at a well. Without that well there would be no crops, no flocks, no village, no life. Jesus recognises that and moves the conversation up a notch, from physical life to eternal life. ¹³ “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.”

What’s this water that Jesus is talking about? Later on, in chapter 7, we read this, ³⁷ On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. ³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” ³⁹ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.

So, Jesus is sitting by a well, talking to a very unrespectable person, and offering her the gift of life in the Spirit. He’s offering her the opportunity to experience God’s life flowing through her.

There are no barriers to that offer. It isn’t an offer that only applies to some and not to others. It’s an offer that he makes to everyone, and that offer still stands. Jesus came to earth to offer life, eternal life, to anyone who would believe in him. And Jesus comes to each one of us this Christmas and offers us this living water. He offers us life, the life of God flowing through us.

Jesus’ coming reveals God to us

If we accept his offer of life we discover something that has been a theme all through this advent season; that when Jesus comes, he reveals God to us.

When he came to the disciples in the storm he revealed himself as the God who is in control of the wind and the waves. And we saw that we don’t have to be afraid of what the world throws at us, because Jesus is more powerful than any of that.

When he came to Lazarus in the tomb we he revealed himself as the God who cares, who comes alongside us and feels our pain and weeps with us in it. And we saw that he is mightier even than death itself.

And when he comes to the woman at the well he reveals himself as Messiah. That’s a Hebrew word that means “anointed one.” In Greek the same word is “Christ” and it’s where Christmas gets its name.

So he tells the woman by the well, …true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. ²⁴ God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in 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 who speak to you am he.”

This is what Christmas is about; God revealing himself to us in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. He was born as a baby in Bethlehem, lived as a man and died on a cross for our sins, to show us how much God loves us. And he rose again from the dead to lead the way for us into eternal life.

In the meantime, he gives the gift of his Spirit so that streams of living water will flow out from our lives and touch the lives of those around us, bringing something of God’s presence wherever we go. This is what Christmas is about. This is why Jesus came.