Jesus and the woman of Samaria (Part II)

JOHN 4

By Odon Bulamba (20th June 2003)

While Jesus was waiting for his disciples a woman came with a jar and this woman was a Samaritan. This woman was surprised to see someone by the well but she didn’t want to say a word, she just wanted to get water and go back home. But there was a man there and this man had the courage to talk.

Imagine yourself, you go in front of the door of someone and the owner of the house comes, what will you say, you might say, ‘oh sorry’ and you might move out of the way so this person can come in but for Jesus, this was not the case, he didn’t leave the place he was but started talking. The time was around midday and as you know at midday the sun is really strong and for Jesus this was the right time to talk. As Christians we must also have a notion of time. What time can I do that? Will it be God’s time or not? If you don’t have the notion of time in your Christian life it will be hard for you to move. It’s very easy to have the notion of time in our every day life especially when you are looking for material interests but when it’s about spiritual life, the notion of time is often forgotten.

Jesus was at the well at 12pm and He said to the woman, ‘give me some water to drink’. There was no hello or what is your name, Jesus didn’t want to know all of this, he just said, ‘Woman give me some water to drink,’ that’s it. Imagine someone you meet on your way and that person asks you, ‘give me that’ using the imperative form, what will you say in the depth of your heart, maybe you will say, ‘oh this person is rude, this person doesn’t have a good education, he doesn’t say hello, I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me, what bravery’.

This woman didn’t answer, ‘I will give you or not’, her answer was, ‘you are a Jew’. How will you explain that? Jesus asks for water to drink and He is answered, ‘but you are a Jew’. Is the fact to be a Jew enough to quench the thirst? Does it mean that if you are a Jew you will be satisfied and never need water? Or to be a Jew, does it mean you don’t have the right to ask for water?

So let’s study something here, when you see someone, can you know if my brother is French, German or English or something else? When my brother sees me, does he know which country in Africa I am from? No, that is not easy. This woman answered precisely and if you read her answer, you can see she was 100% sure that Jesus was a Jew, but Jesus was not a Jew as you know. He was not as this woman thought that He was but this woman wanted to confirm that Jesus was from this nationality.

We also ask the wrong questions to the wrong person at times. Sometimes we ask the devil our rights. You will ask your body for example, give me time to pray but your body will say, but you forget that it is the time to eat now and you know you have to go somewhere to visit someone and you know that visitors are coming soon when you will say, give me my rights satan, satan will answer you in another way to show to you that you are guilty, to show you that you are not able to ask God what you are asking.

The first thing that satan plays with is the identity of a person, do you know you are a Christian but you don’t need to pray three times a day, you are a Methodist. A Methodist only follows Wesley’s sayings and He only prayed once a week so leave this for the Pentecostal. Once I was with a man here and I talked with him about the Gateway Church and I said in this church people praise and sing and he said this is a Pentecostal spirit, people who respect themselves can’t do what they do, that is why you see in the choir there are only young people there. It is like there are bad people there and that is why you have to be careful, look at their hair the way, they are wearing it and the way the dress themselves, they don’t even look like Christians and so for him the outlook was enough. But for us Methodists, each man has a tie and we respect each other in the church and that was the identity that he gave me. So for him Pentecostals don’t have the right to worship God the way they do so don’t speak about anything positive about the Pentecostals in front of the Methodists.

So because of that, this woman said, ‘you are a Jew so you don’t have the right to ask from me something to drink’. Jesus didn’t ask for water to wash Himself, He didn’t ask water to wash his clothes or his feet but he asked for water to drink because He was thirsty. And as for you, are you thirsty in your life and when you are thirsty what do you do? When you are thirsty and you drink juice are you satisfied, or beer are you satisfied? Some people might say yes and some might say no, but as for me, when I am thirsty, even if I drink two litres of fanta my body will still ask for water.

When you are thirsty your body needs water but if you are given (for example) fanta, you will start analysing this fanta, the chemicals are there and the amount of sugar, sucrose and so forth and you will think of your health and say, ‘this fanta will destroy my health one day.’ Because I have a tongue let me drink a little bit and if I drink only a little bit today it won’t destroy my health. But water, even if you drink 5L your health won’t be injured. Of course you can drink fanta today and tomorrow, and people will start offering and you will find out in 10 years you will need 10L of fanta but during that time the sucrose and the chemicals will work in your blood like a drug.
Sometimes a drug can stay in the head for 20 years.

When we have a spiritual thirst we must drink water, we must not drink the spiritual coke. This means we must not live an artificial life, pretending we are Christians when we are not, to accept the human solution instead of committing yourself to God’s hand to find God’s solutions.

A man wanted to be helped by God and his wife made him suffer a lot and this wife didn’t want to do a service that this man required and this man was in his house like the woman and the woman was like the husband. As you might know, in some cultures the man has a special place in the bed to sleep and the woman has a special place also and they say the man is always at the front and the woman is always at the back but this woman changed the order in the bedroom. The husband had to wake up very early in the morning to make tea and bring it back to the wife and this woman would say, ‘praise the Lord because I have found a husband of good quality.’ It wasn’t bad that the man would help but it got to the stage where the woman would order the husband to do what ever she wanted, ‘oh go and see the pan on the stove, oh Michael can’t you see what Nathanael is doing there, so get up and do that.’

It started to change their Christian lives. With their eyes people would think that this man would humiliate himself and love this wife very much but they weren’t living the Christian life but were living an artificial life, a life that would look Christian but was not any more and was controlled by the devil because they broke the law.

So when the woman said to Jesus, ‘you are a Jew’, He said, ‘if you knew the man who talks to you, and if you knew what God can give, if you give me water to drink I would give you also water to drink and you would not be thirsty anymore.’ If Jesus also had this water, why didn’t He drink His water Himself not to be thirsty anymore but He said to the woman, ‘and I will give you water and you will not be thirsty anymore’, when He Himself is thirsty. Can you imagine that? You are hungry and you ask for food and you say to the person, if you give me food, I will give you something to eat and you will not be hungry anymore in your life.

Jesus wanted to teach this woman something, He said you have something of little value but if you accept to give this thing to some one else you will find more than what you have. This woman was proud, this well has been given by our ancestor Jacob but Jesus said, ‘you talk about a well but as for me, I am the source of water. I produce water’.

Sometimes the well can be dry if the source cannot give water to this well and there are little things that Jesus asks for in our lives, He says give me these small things and in exchange I will give you the great things. ‘Oh God help me, I need money’, (for example) and God says, ‘you have 20c in your pocket, give this 20c’. How can I give this 20c just like that? How can I give 20c to this pastor, he is a thief and I don’t even know what he did with the money last month and there will be reasons. Jesus can say, ‘don’t give me 20c just give me two cents’, as this woman came with the jar, Jesus didn’t ask for the whole jar to drink, Jesus asked for a small quantity to drink, maybe it was a litre, maybe two litres at maximum if Jesus could drink a lot and the water would stay in the jar.

How many times as for us Christians when God asks for a little part of what we have, we resist to give. When God asks you for two minutes to pray you can’t find this time to pray when you can watch the rugby match for two hours. Here in NZ when the All Blacks win, you will see all the people excited, ‘today we have to watch the match’ and people will stand and watch it. There is an advertisement on tv where someone who wants to watch the rugby match but doesn’t have sky on his tv (cable) and he really wanted to find a tv and he could see people watching the match so he came in.

Before arriving there he suffered, and when he walked in, by mistake he tripped over the cord and the cord came out of the switch and the tv came down and the people who were there watching the match changed their attitude because he destroyed their program and everything that they wanted so this man had to run. At the end you can see that you need to enrol with sky to see also what others can see.

It happens sometimes when you touch human beings lives, people are against you because you destroyed their program and touched their interest. You cannot say when people are in the stadium there is no match anymore let’s pray. People will leave one after another and you might stay alone.