Samaritan Woman

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here. It's good to be here, and it's good to have you here. We are just so thrilled to be able to be able to worship together, and welcome to those who are online with us this morning. We have started a new series called Identity just a couple of weeks ago, as we kind of walk through the Gospel of John. And we are finding how many, well, first of all, that the Gospel of John is unique in the fact that there are more one-on-one intimate conversations with Jesus than in any other Gospels, these dialogues that go on, that we could kind of have a sneak peek as the fly on the wall in these. And most of the dialogues that happen in the Gospel of John do wrap around the idea of identity, who Jesus is, but also who the individuals are. Are they their background, their race, their gender, their work, their past history, their culture? Who am I? Is the big question that's being asked along with, who is this Jesus? And it's the interaction between the two that makes the difference for these individuals. Today, we're going to be kind of going to the absolute other extreme from last week. Last week, we were in John chapter 3, and it was the story of Nicodemus, who was at the top, the apex of the ladder, or the pyramid. Now we're going to the bottom, to chapter 4. And I think John deliberately puts these two chapters next to each other. And today we're going to be looking at a Samaritan woman who remains unnamed, and she's about as low as you can go in that society of that day. But unlike Nicodemus, who never quite gets it from what we can tell, she identifies who Jesus is as the Messiah, as the Christ, when he identifies with her. He left Judea and departed again for Galilee, and he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, give me a drink. For his disciples had gone into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. The woman said to him, sir, you have nothing to draw water with. The well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock. Jesus said to her, everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The woman said, sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water. Jesus said to her, go call your husband and come here. The woman answered, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, you are right in saying I have no husband. You've had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true. 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. An amazing dialogue, amazing. The woman, like I mentioned, is at the bottom of the social pyramid of her day. She is unnamed, she's a female, those are two strikes against her already we find from this text. She is a Samaritan, which is this heretical, as the Jews consider it, mishmash group of mixed race lineage, and who had become enemies to the Jews when they came back to the promised land after the Babylonian captivity. It was some Samaritans who tried to defy the Jews and cause trouble for them, and since that day, they hated them. They despised them, they'd have nothing to do with them. And she herself, within her own community, was at the bottom because of her past associations with five different men and now the person she was l...