It’s Not About the Bucket

My sermon title today is about the woman at the well.

But the note is, it's not about the bucket.

So the biggest ideas here that Jesus is bringing us is Jesus meets our deepest thirst with the only life he can give us.

Jesus seeks the overlooked.

Jesus knows the whole story.

Jesus tells the truth without withdrawing grace.

And Jesus redirects worship towards the Father.

Jesus turns a recipient of grace into a witness.

So the story here happens in John 4, happens with Jesus on his way from Judea to Galilee.

So John places the encounter in Saqqar in Samaria near Jacob's well near Mount Gerizim.

The route from Judea to Galilee could pass directly through Samaria.

The story makes the religion itself part of the message.

Jesus goes where hostility and religious division lived for generations.

So if you can see on the map here, Judea is way at the bottom and Galilee is way at the top and Samaria is right in the middle.

So I learned some information here that I didn't necessarily know when I was studying and preparing the sermon.

I knew that the Jews did not like the Samaritans and there was great hostility between them, but I didn't understand the whole way that it affected them.

So it was basically a three-day journey if you were to pass through Samaria on your way to Galilee.

However, they disliked the Samaritans so much that usually they would choose to make a six-day journey through the desert rather than to go through Samaria.

You know, how much do you have to dislike or hate someone to go three extra days on a journey in the desert? You know, we'll sit through a movie uncomfortable so we don't have to walk 50 extra yards to the bathroom and we can just catch it on the way out.

So the whole Jew Samaritan thing runs throughout the whole Bible.

So I want to take a minute here and explain a little bit about it.

At the end of 1 and 2 Kings, the Empire of Babylon conquers the people of Israel, and it takes them into the Babylonian exile at the end of 1 and 2 Kings.

What happened there were two groups of Jews.

Some of them obeyed the Old Testament where Jesus had prohibited his people from intermarrying other nations.

And just as a side note, these prohibitions were not of interracial marriage, they were prohibitions of interfaith marriage because in that time to marry somebody of another nation typically meant they were of another religion.