The Humility of God

The Humility of God

Last Sunday Jesus met with a religious professional – Nicodemus, a Pharisee. The Pharisees were one of a number of religious parties in Israel including Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and others, all who held competing views of what it means to love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself. Yet, they all establish boundaries between themselves and others. [John chapter 3]

The text goes on to tell us Jesus comes to love the world, the kosmos, all of creation and everything therein. That he does not come to condemn or judge the world, but to reconcile, repair, rescue and reunite the kosmos and everyone and everything therein. The world is filled with separation and boundaries. He reminds Nic that we are all made of the same stuff – water and spirit, water and breath – the breath, the ruach of God that animates the first human in creation – the spirit breath that is life and light and love for all.

Jesus comes to remind us that his Way, his Path, is to move us beyond the boundaries we create that judge us, condemn us to solitary lives separated from the love of God and from one another. As Paul would sum it up, if we are in Christ there is no Pharisee, no Sadducee, no Essene, no Zealot, no male or female, no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no liberal or conservative, no black or white….No. All is made one in Christ who comes to us in great humility and with reconciling love to repair and rescue a broken world, a broken cosmos.

This Sunday we read that Jesus is near a Samaritan town. [John chapter 4] He is tired from traveling, from teaching, from healing, from loving a broken, angry, and divided world. He sits down near the well that our ancestor Jacob dug for his sons and daughters, his flocks and his herds, to drink from. His disciples are off in the city shopping, buying food, emptying the shelves of bread and water and whatever else they think they need. The storyteller John says it is about noon – the hottest time of the day. A woman comes to draw water. She is a Samaritan. Jesus asks her for a drink of water.

She is astonished. How is it, she asks, that you, a Jew, as me, a woman, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water? (The storyteller reminds us Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans…a sign of just how broken the world, the kosmos, really is…yet, here boundaries are being crossed.) As he had with Nicodemus, a Pharisee, he talks with her about water and spirit. We are meant to see that this is the same conversation. No matter that she is a woman and men do not speak with non-family women in public in the middle of the day. No matter that she is a foreigner. No matter that their respective tribes strive to have nothing to do with one another.

And we learn that he knows things about her. She has had five husbands and the man she is living with is not her husband. She has suffered multiple broken and failed relationships. She comes to draw water at noon in the heat of the day so as to avoid the other women who come early in the morning in the cool of the day. So as to avoid how they avoid her, glance at her with pity, snicker about her all the while refusing to talk with her. This woman is the most broken person Jesus meets in all the four gospels. And yet, he not only speaks to her, he asks her for a drink of water, for he is tired and he is thirsty and the men he travels with are too busy buying things to help him let alone the likes of her.

She is astonished. She is astonished that anyone would speak to her at all. And that is when it happens. Are we able to see that his simple request for a drink is transformative? There is something you can do for me, he says. It no longer matters who you are or what others think of you. You are a daughter of Jacob and thereby a daughter of the Most High God. You are made of water and spirit. All at once his simple request gives her purpose, and dignity, and personhood. We notice she assumes a new confidence in speaking with this strange man sitting by Jacob’s well who speaks of Living Water that springs up within her. Suddenly she becomes a theologian engaging him about water and then stating the problem that separates their respective people – we worship on this mountain and you say we worship in Jerusalem. That no longer matters, he says. Jesus says to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these 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 Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

Just then the disciples return from their shopping spree and begin babbling about lunch! She drops her bucket, runs back to the city and tells people she has had an experience of the Living God, the Christ. The Christ spoke to her despite knowing all about her broken life. Do we see that this broken woman of Samaria becomes the first evangelist, the first to proclaim the good news of God in Christ? Before Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Before Paul writes letters, she is the first to proclaim the good news! And her testimony propels others to leave the town to go see for themselves. All because Jesus asks her for a drink of water. He dares to cross every social and religious barrier and boundary to treat her as an equal. He gives her the same dignity as he would Nicodemus and anyone, really, who will come to him in the same humility in which he comes to them. To us. To all people. To the entire world, the kosmos. We are all made of the same stuff, water and spirit. He wants to be with us.

The Christ comes to unite, to repair, to rescue us from ourselves and the ways in which we separate ourselves from one another and from the love of God. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?