Prime Rib
THE FIVE TIME LOSER – AND JESUS by: Malcolm Smith
Who was she? We don’t know to this very day; a woman who toted her water pot on her shoulder across the burning sand toward the well just outside the village of Sychar. She was a very lonely woman…one might almost say a leper in spirit, unclean in the eyes of all the villagers.
Women came to draw water in the cool times of the day, just after dawn and before sunset; this woman is not with the others at watering time. She treks in the heat of the day, when she could be almost certain to find the well side empty of people. Her wretched history made decent folk avoid her, while the not-so-decent made her the butt of off-color jokes.
She was not really a person in anyone’s mind. The religious used her as a mirror to show off their righteousness, as someone they could preen their feathers over and say, “I don’t know how she can act as she does-you wouldn’t find me doing things like that, thank God.” The men used her as an object for their pleasure…no one really knew her or cared who SHE was. And that is how she has remained through the centuries, “the woman at the well,” the anonymous “woman of Samaria.”
She would have been surprised to see Jesus sitting on the well and the young teenager John, loitering a ways off. She could tell by their appearence and dress that they were Jews, and their dusty clothes betrayed a long journey in the heat. But Jews were Jews, and Samaritan were Samaritans. They never spoke except to hurl obscenities and curses to eachother; teenagers on the border towns added rocks to their oaths. There was a question in her mind as to what they were doing in the middle of unfriendly territory.
When he saw her coming, the teenager quickly turned and stared over the desert. “Typical Jew,” she muttered under her breath.
The shock came when Jesus spoke to her. Jews did not communicate with Samaritan folk, and she knew that religious Jews would not speak to a woman in public for fear of sinning. This one impressed her as being very different. he was not exactly religious, but exuded gentleness and goodness-one a woman could feel safe around. She assumed He would avoid even looking at her, which was fine with her. She was taken off guard when He said very simply, “Give me a drink.”
Because Jesus spoke openly with the wrong kind of people, the low-life of society such as this woman appeared to be, religion was scandalized by Him and sneered at Him. they derided Him as “the friend of tax collectors and the sinners!”
He knew who she was, the woman who had been through agonizing divorce five times over and was now living with a stranger in an uneasy relationship. She was a walking soap opera-five times her dreams had turned into nightmares, and this one was going nowhere. If she had a self-image, it was that of a loser. But Jesus looked at her without scorn or embarassment, and asked for a drink. He talked to her as if she were normal, a human being to whom one said, “Please” and “Thank You”…a person.
What religion can never get into its head is the fact that God is unconditional love. One does not have to perform to be worthy of His love, only accept it. God’s love to us has nothing to do with our performances, oor good works or our bad ones, or our badness by default. This woman, like all of us, was the object of God’s love because she was alive-we are all candidates for infinite love simply by being born. All our performances drive us away from God, creating an image of God as He is not, an idol we cringe before, reminding us of a slave driver who demands the impossible performance. In Jesus, we have the full revelation of who God really is.
The woman at the well couldn’t help herself. She was so shocked that He spoke to her, she blurted out, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink, since I am a Samaratan woman?”
Jesus doesn’t answer her question but, matter-of-factly speaks of answering a thirst to deep for anything physical for years.
…If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” John 4:10
We must not think that Jesus is simply picking up the woman’s words regarding drink. He certainly used the opportunity, but what He is speaking of has been the subject of the prophets for many centuries. One of the most used descriptions of man’s sin and subsequent cry for God in the Old Testament is that of thirst.
Jeremiah had sopken God’s words to the people.
For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.
Jeremiah 2:13
Isaiah has said the same.
The afflicted and needy are seeking water, but there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst…. Isaiah 41:17
The psalmist had expressed their longings with the same picture.
As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” Ps. 42:1,2
…I shall seek Thee earnestly; my sould thirsts for Thee, my flesh yearns for Thee, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Ps. 63:1
I stretch out my hands to Thee; my soul longs for Thee, as a parched land.
Ps. 43:6
And God’s response to the cry of the thirsty was always the same.
Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.
Is. 55:1
For I will pour out water on a thirsty land and streams on the dry ground.
Is. 44:3
But I can hear the objection. This woman was hardly thirsting after God; and many would agree that they are not exactly in a state of thirst when it comes to Him.
There is an emptiness that can only be filled by God Himself…a longing that has been filled in the heart of men in his creation, but became a terrible thirst that had to be quenched when he declared himself to be independent of God. since then each one of us had spent life on a treasure hunt, searching futilely for the person, vocation or obsession that is big enough, rich enough to fill the emptiness. The search always ends in dispair, and each generation takes it up again…dedicated to the belief that there is perfect fulfillment and statifaction outside of God.
Some have gone through five marriages, or more, looking for the perfect mate. They look for someone who can give love of such quality and obession it will impart to them their lost sense of worth and meaning; it will make the receiver know that they are loveable, that they matter in life. In all the marriages, they are looking for God, longing and thirsting after Him who alone can fill the vacuum with infinite love. Others ignoratnly seek Him as they try to anesthetize the inner pain of emptiness with food, drugs and alcohol, or with mindless shopping. The workaholic seeks Him in his god-substitute of the perfect job well done and the impossible project wrapped up and complete in his briefcase.
We have forsaken the God who alone is the water of life, and have dug our stupid wells that are cracked and dry, believing that one day water will gush from them.
With simple gentleness, Jesus draws the woman out of the darkness to admit that she is a loser. If she will have the life-giving water for her inner self, she must see that she has been wrong all her life. It is amazing how we return to the same empty cistern over and over again. We cling to patterns that have been conclusively proven as wrong. Five attempts to make life work ended in despair and she was on the sixth, as if determined to prove that there was human out there somewhere who could bring fullness to her empty heart.
It is fascinating that Jesus does not talk to the woman about sin, but about her thirst for real life. The emptiness in her heart is the result of sin, of course, but the thrist is where the pain is…and it is there that Jesus zeroed in. Jesus always meets us at the point of our hurt, even though it is our refusal to be dependent upon Him, in faith, that causes it. He presents Himself as the One who is the Source of the only water to satisfy the thirst of the inner self.
She realizes He is removing the mask and exposing the pain of the five bleeding wounds she has called life. She is an expert in denial. “Lets not talk about that, its not as bad as you think, I am a spiritual woman really; lets talk about God, if that’s what you are into.” She had learned in the bars that the way to handle a man was to get him talking about himself, because none of them were interested in her as a person.
The Jews were always pointing out to the Samritans that they had a religion that was in error. From the temple they had built outside of Jerusalem, to their priesthood and its rituals, all was out of line with the revelation of God to Moses. Salvation and truth was to be found in the temple in Jerusalem and the Law of Moses. The religious of the day endlessly argued back and forth, and this woman assumed that fighting over fine points of dusty theological scrolls was the meat of worship. As fas as she was concerned, God and His professionals had nothing to do with the bleeding inner self of an anonymous woman in a village in Samaria…a woman deeply hurting, the pain stark in her eyes. When she realizes Jesus is in some way a representative of God, she assumes He must be interested in talking of church splits!
Jesus picks up at once on her question, and leads her to the heart of true worship. He said:
…an hour is coming when neither in this mountian nor in Jerusalem, shall you worship the Father…but an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
Jn. 4:21,23
It is incredible that Jesus should give some of the greatest revelations concerning worshiping God to this unknown irreligious woman. In the previous chapter He spoke to Nicodemus, a prominate religious leader, of the necesseity of being born again; one would have thoguht He should have spoken to the woman of a new birth and discussed worship with the theologian!
The woman’s real problem, as with all of us, was a matter of idolatry. Even as the thirst which expresses itself in so many directions was really a distorted cry for God, so the gods we set up and serve, trusting them to meet our need, are substitutes for God, by Whom and for Whom we were made. We will never know spiritual, mental or emotional and social health until we worship and serve Him alone.
Romans 1:25 sums up the twist that occured in man at the fall:
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and serves the creature rather than the creator….
We placed a created thing, another human creature, in the place reserved exclusively for God.
In her case it was clear. She had placed human relationships in the place reserved for God; five tragic little gods had fallen and the sixth was hardly in place. For the years or months they had been together, each man had been her rock, her fortress and security, her sunshine and laughter. When he smiled, she smiled, and his frown was the abyss of despair. She lived to please him and his slightest whim was her command. She was enslaved to his happiness. “Isn’t this what love is all about, making someone happy?,” she would ask with a sigh. And she looked to him to make her happy.
If he had a self-destructive habit, she covered, lied and convinced herslef and eveyone else that, after all, it wasn’t that bad. He would get better, especially if she would really give herself to loving him, understanding his problems and sheltering him from anything that would upset him.
But one day, the fountain hewn out of the valley of idols was discovered to be broken from the beginning. What she has thought was water was the poisonous substitute that was dealing death with every mouthful.
She was back on the street in the single’s scene again, looking for a new god to satisfy the craving to be loved, obessivly wanted, given worth and significance by the care of another human. Only this time, she would pick a winner and life would be wonderful.
We have all done this to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the god of choice. The god may be money and possessions, and may have stayed in place for a good many years.