10/21/2024
The Evangelist at the Well
John 4:1-30 and 39-42
Do you recall a Mercedes-Benz commercial from a few years ago that showed one of their cars colliding with a concrete wall during a safety test? Following the crash, someone asked the Mercedes engineer why their company does not enforce the patent on the car’s energy absorbing body design. Apparently, the Mercedes design has been copied by almost every car maker in the world in spite of the fact that Mercedes-Benz has an exclusive patent. The engineer replied, “Because in life, some things are just too important not to share.”
The Good News of Jesus Christ is one of those things that is too important not to share. The work of sharing this Good News is called evangelism. While this term sometimes scares us, even turns some of us off, the simple truth is that the Christian faith has been advanced through the ages by people who were willing to take upon themselves the responsibility of being evangelists, of telling others about the Good News of Christ. With that in mind, I want to remind you of an evangelist from years gone by.
It may surprise you that the evangelist at the well is the first person, outside of the original twelve disciples, that the New Testament records sharing the Good News of Christ. This is a unexpected development, first of all, simply because she is a woman. Serious students of the Bible know that women have always been at the forefront of the Christian faith: remember Mary, the mother of Jesus; the prophetess Anna; the women at the tomb, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James; remember also Mary and Martha; Lydia; Priscilla; the four daughters of Philip, who were also evangelist; Phoebe and Junias, coworkers of the Apostle Paul. Somehow, in spite of the impressive early résumé, women have been largely excluded from the “official” work of the Church. Thankfully, that is no longer the case in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church; nonetheless, let me share with you an undeniable fact: Most churches today, including our own, would collapse if the women of the church withdrew their efforts.
The unnamed evangelist at the well would be as shocked as anybody about her place in Church history. When she first meet Jesus, she was stunned that He even talked to her. The event recorded in our text for today primarily took place at a well outside of the woman’s village; Jacob’s Well it was called. She had gone there to draw water. She thought she would be the only one there at that hour of the day, but there was this Man, a Jew, and He spoke to her, a Samaritan woman. She was taken aback for such things rarely happened in that day. Jewish men did not talk to women public, except for family members, and they would never speak publically to a mixed-race Samaritan women. According to the customs of the day, the evangelist at the well had two strikes against her before her conversation with Jesus began: she was a woman and a despised Samaritan.
Are you ready for strike three? The evangelist at the well had a reputation for—well, let’s just say for not being a “respectable” woman. Now things are starting to get sticky. This woman had been married five times and was currently living with a man to whom she was not married. In ancient Israel this was considered to be adultery and there were laws that prescribed that an adulteress could be stoned to death, so you can imagine how surprised this woman was that Jesus had any public dealings with her at all. Not only was she a woman, she was a despised Samaritan woman; but not only a Samaritan despised woman, but a despised Samaritan woman with a bad reputation. With three strikes like that, surely would not have anything to do with her.
Jesus can be such an embarrassment, can He not? He even embarrassed His own disciples. They were continually having to explain His unconventional behavior, but to have anything to do with this particular women was going too far. The evangelist at the well was a village outcast. She could not even associate with other women; that is why she was at the well in the middle of the day instead of the cool of the morning or late evening with the other village women. How could Jesus have anything to do with her?
So far, I have been talking about the evangelist at the well’s reputation and not necessarily about the facts. How many of us have heard sermons on this woman’s terrible sinfulness where she was called a loose women or even worse? I mean the scorecard reads: five husbands and at least one shack-up. It is important to note that under Jewish custom of the day, a woman could not divorce her husband for any reason, not even adultery, but a man could divorce his wife for any reason, including burning his supper. All the husband had to do was go to the city gate or the center of the village with his wife, take off his sandal before the elders, and say: “I divorce you! I divorce you! I divorce you!”
Let me propose this scenario: The evangelist at the well had not simply been divorced five times; instead, she had been thrown away five times and the man who she was living with did not care enough about her to marry her. In spite of her past, whether you see her as a horrible woman or a victim, Jesus saw possibilities in her. He not only spoke to her, He used a term while addressing her that would be shocking to most Jewish people; Jesus called her “woman” [John 4:21]. That may not be shocking in English, but when he wrote this gospel, the Apostle John used the Greek word gune. This is not a term used for scolding or with contempt, like an Archie Bunker type of man would say, “Woman!” Rather, is it a word used lovingly as a term endearment; it can be translated “wife”, but generally means “special lady”. Here is what is really shocking: it is the same word Jesus used for His mother as He was dying on the cross [John 19:26]. Imagine that, Jesus called a woman, who was regarded in her own village as hardly better than a pr******te, a special lady!
Perhaps, even more surprisingly, Jesus treated her like a special lady. He listened to her and respected her opinions; yet, He did not compromise His own convictions; that is, He remained true to God’s position on marriage. Still, because Jesus treated her with dignity and transparent honesty, the women went away knowing that her lifestyle must change, that she must repent and follow Jesus. Here is another interesting note: The evangelist at the well is the first person mentioned in the New Testament to who Jesus revealed His true identity: “Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you, am He (the Messiah).’” [John 4:26, AMP]
The impact of Jesus’ acceptance of this woman was enormous. Never before had she been treated with such respect. Most, if not all, of the men she had known had used and abused her; they certainly did not treat her as a special lady. She had gone from one relationship to another. No man had given her what she really thirsted for; still, she kept up her desperate search and then she encountered Jesus face-to-face. By the end of her conversation with Jesus, the evangelist at the well had drank from the water that Jesus offered and discovered what she really needed all those years. Her needs were most probably similar to ours. She needed to know that her life mattered. She needed to know that in spite of her failures, in spite of her weaknesses, in spite of her sin, she was a person of worth, a special lady. The evangelist at the well did not know who she really was or what she truly needed until she met Jesus and when she did, her life was forever changed. She had brought her jar to the well to draw water, but in her encounter with Jesus, she discovered something far more significant; she was given the water of life, the “living water” Jesus called it [John 4:10].
Most probably, the evangelist at the well would have liked to have stayed in Jesus’ presence, but the disciples arrived and brought an end to the conservation. She immediately went back into her village, leaving her water jar behind, and then something truly striking occurred. This woman, this despised Samaritan woman, this despised Samaritan woman with a bad reputation who had fouled up her life in so many ways, turned into a bold evangelist. “‘Come see a man who knew all about the things I did, who knows me inside and out. Do you think this could be the Messiah?’ [she asked.] And they went out to see for themselves.” [John 4:29-30, MSG] Perhaps, just perhaps, one or another of her former husbands was among the crowd. Either way, many people from that village believed in Jesus because of the evangelist at the well’s witness. Eventually, some of the villagers proclaimed to the woman: “. . . ‘We’re no longer taking this on your say-so. We’ve heard it for ourselves and know it for sure. He’s the Savior of the world!’” [John 4:42, MSG] Because of her witness, many others has personal encounters with Jesus; may that also be true for each of us.
So there you have it, the story of a very unlikely evangelist. When the evangelist at the well found out who she was and what Jesus could do in her life, she told others, and maybe the most surprising part of this story is that they listened. It is hard to argue with a changed life. Since God used someone like this special lady to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ, perhaps He wants to use people like you and me to do the same. Have you found that you need Christ? Have you discovered that because of your relationship with Him, you are a special lady or a special man, a special girl or a special boy? If so, is it not about time you told somebody? As our Scripture for today clearly shows, the natural response of coming to Jesus is to go and tell; after all, there are some things in life that are just too important not to share.
