John 4:31-42

02/01/09
John 4:31-42
Hudson UMC

Jesus was not the kind of guy who went along with the flow. He often said things that confused people, upset them, or got Him into trouble. In fact, His claim to be the very Son of God in flesh, equal to the Father, got Him killed. He is often misunderstood, especially in John’s Gospel. There are times when Jesus will say something that His hearers do not understand, then tries to help them understand His way of speaking, only to eventually cave and say it plainly, usually in harsher terms. Here, right after the Samaritan woman leaves Him, the disciples offer Him food, saying, “Rabbi, eat something.” He responds by saying that He has food that they don’t know about. The disciples do not get it, but Jesus does not elaborate much. However, if we are persistent in understanding the words of God, we will gain tremendously.

I have titled this sermon, “True Food.” Jesus does not ever use the phrase, but I think that it helps us to understand what He is getting at. Jesus often takes words and phrases that were common at the time only to radically reinterpret them to illustrate the realities of God. He claims, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” Now, this is not likely what most of us would consider to be food. We might call that obedience, but not food. What Jesus is saying is that, at the end of the day, the real food, the thing that will sustain us, is not what we put into our mouths, but our obedience to God. We can have plenty to eat, with a balanced diet and all the right vitamins and minerals, but if we do not live in obedience to God, we will not be able to endure the reality of life. We might have physical energy, but our spirit will be famished and malnourished.

Now, I want to interject at this point that, when Jesus says that obedience to the Father is our food, our sustenance, our fuel for our lives, He is not saying that our acceptance in the eyes of God is dependent on how well we have obeyed the will of the Father throughout our lives, or, as we are more prone to think, in recent history, like the last week or the last forty-eight hours, and praise be to God that He isn’t. If God decided whether He would accept us based on how well we have kept His commandments, who among us would be able to call themselves a Christian? Psalm 130 reads, “If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” And yet, what Jesus is telling His disciples is that, though we are accepted by faith alone, we can have all the faith in the world, all the unsubstantiated trust we can imagine, but we will not, we can not be sustained for the long run if that faith and trust does not manifest itself in doing, in our obedience to the will of the Father. If our days are not marked with our asking ourselves how we might be obedient to God that day, it is if we are barely surviving on the spiritual equivalent of watered down gruel rather than the hearty Bread of Life.

So, an entire sermon could be preached about how every single Christian is called to live lives that are obedient to the Father, just as Jesus lived a life that was obedient to the Father; after all, we are called to live like Jesus, aren’t we? However, I want to draw your attention to what Jesus does here. He does not simply talk about obedience in general terms, but ties it in directly with mission. His words are, “Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest?’ But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.” If you remember back to when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus, the Pharisee, you will recall that Jesus spoke about salvation in terms of participating in eternal life. Those who believe, He claimed, were participating already in that eternal life; those who did not believe were not. Here, He uses the same kinds of terms to describe those who are out in the fields harvesting. It seems as though Jesus is saying that everyone who really believes will be active in mission.

Though it has not been a theme in much of Mainline Christianity recently, the New Testament portrays faith and mission as inextricably connected. There were no Christians who were not, in one way or another, involved in mission. It was the natural thing to do. However, though we often relegate mission work to a given committee and identify being a “missional church” with paying our apportionments and giving money to others to do mission, the fact that we are all individually called to mission has not changed. I do not mean for a minute that we are all called to go off to Asia and be street preachers; quite the contrary. I believe that most of us are called to stay right here in Hudson and the rest of the Greater Waterloo area and be in mission. There is no doubt in my mind that there are far more people in this area that do not participate in a body of Christians than those who do. There is work to be done, the fields are ripe for harvesting, here in Iowa just like they were in first century Palestine.

And yet, we must not forget the reason we are involved in mission. It is not because we are trying to fill the pews so our singing will sound better or because it will put more money into our offering plates. It is certainly not so we can recruit people to sit on committees and preserve our structure. It is not so we can feel good about ourselves, or to act like we are better than our brothers and sisters who are not as mission minded as we are. The fact of the matter is that we hear the words “mission” and “evangelism” and we run away, because of the negative connotations that they have assumed. We envision Bible-thumping street preachers and angry people in the pulpit. In fact, many of you are probably rather uncomfortable that I’m talking about mission so much, even claiming that we all are called to the work of mission in a personal way. We are terrified of fear-based mission and rightly so, because it is so very destructive and contrary to the central message of the Gospel. However, since most of us cannot envision any other kind of mission, we choose rather to not do mission at all.

Jesus, though, calls us to be missionaries, but not fear-mongering missionaries. He calls us to participate in the harvest as a means of participating in eternal life. The reason that Jesus says the reaper goes out into the field is “so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.” It is not, as the image of harvesters laboring in the fields would imply, that we do it so that we can get a reward, either money or food. It is not only because God loves the rest of the world, but because we love the rest of the world, and because we have experienced a God who loves and transforms. We could even say that, so far are we from laboring in the fields to get a reward from God, we are laboring in the fields because we have already received the gift of God and are doing so out of gratitude rather than obligation. By the sheer gift of grace, our God walks with us and talks with us, but not simply for our own benefit, but also because He desperately wants to walk and talk with those outside the church and He has called us to participate in making that happen. Indeed, Jesus tells His disciples that they are going to reap where they have not sown. They are to go out into the world, not because they are so great, but because God is already at work in the world, planting seeds, making them grow. They are called, not to do the work of God, but to follow after God and gather what He has produced. This is a very different image of mission and evangelism than we often hear.

So, as we can see, and as is a theme throughout the Gospels, the disciples don’t get it. They just want Jesus to eat something so they can get on their way to Galilee. They want to be mission minded, that’s why they are going to Galilee, right? They could not understand that there is a need for mission everywhere, not just somewhere else. The Samaritan woman understood, though, didn’t she? As soon as she understood the good news that Jesus was offering her, she took off to tell other people about it. She had been so transformed by the power of Christ that she could not help but share it. Surely she did not consider herself to be a “good enough” Christian to be a professional missionary. Surely she did not consider her self to be a missionary at all by today’s definition, but, having been brought into the kingdom and made a partaker of eternal life, she immediately went to work in the fields.

Through her work, we read that “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’” She didn’t go to school to learn how to tell people about Jesus, she did not have any credentials, she was not “qualified” at all, but she did what she could. She told people about how Jesus had exposed her sin, had confronted her with tough love that hurt for a moment but opened the floodgates for peace and joy to flow in. Her testimony brought many people to see Jesus. They came because this woman, who did not have the best reputation in the world, had been radically and completely transformed by Christ. Anyone who could do that was someone worth seeing.

We might not feel that this image applies to us. Though there may be some exceptions, I would bet that most of the people in this room have not had to be rescued from such depths of human sinfulness. We do not have many former prostitutes or drug dealers among us, but has God not transformed our brokenness? Though we are still broken in some ways, has not God transformed us in many other ways? Are we not so different than we once were that we can say that we have been born again? Even though we still struggle, are we not, as a whole, conformed to the image of Jesus Christ and becoming more conformed to that image day by day? If this is the case, then we are just as capable as the woman at the well to tell others about what Jesus has done for us. We, too, were enemies of God that Jesus died to transform and save. We, too, have experienced the grace that the world needs. We, too, have skeletons in our closet from when we were not so well behaved as we are now that can be a powerful witness for the grace of God if we can be bold enough to show them to the world. The best witness to the truth that God saves sinners is not pretending that we have never needed grace, but to show the world how much we need grace and how God has not held back that grace from us. That is what will encourage and inspire others.

This was the testimony of the woman, and people came. She was indeed a reaper in the field, just like Jesus called His disciples to be and just like we are called to be. And yet, though her efforts brought many Samaritans to Jesus, she has no room to become arrogant. After all, she was not the one who transformed the people. It was Jesus. The people said, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” The harvester went out into the fields to gather the wheat. However, that was not the end of the process. The reaper brought in the wheat, but only Jesus could make it into bread.

We often talk about the need for personal experience in Christian faith. One does not become a Christian by attending church. Hearing a sermon on the nature of salvation is not the same thing as actually participating in the eternal life of God, and knowing what the New Birth is not the same thing as having one. In the same way, not one of us can feast on the true food of obedience to the will of God, particularly through mission by hearing a sermon about mission or attending a presentation on a particular mission trip, but only by participating in the missionary work of God. In this respect, we do not look at the disciples in this passage as our example, but the woman at the well. She was so changed by the Gospel that she could not help but share it with others. The faith of the disciples was shown to be lacking because they did not want to share it.

Jesus, in chapter six, will call Himself the Bread of Life. Throughout the New Testament, we are described as the Body of Christ. These symbols might seem disconnected, but I want to propose a connection in light of the image of the field in this passage. Bread is made from a multitude of different grains of wheat. And yet, those grains, even when gathered together, are not bread. They have to be pressed, and pushed, and manhandled, finally bound together with water, before the many grains can become one loaf of bread.

We are the same way. We, as the church in Hudson as well as the church worldwide are many different people. And yet, even when we come together, we are not yet the body of Christ who is the Bread of Life. We have to endure life together, being pressed and pushed, and manhandled, facing life’s ups and downs and experiencing God’s grace through it all, finally bound together with the Living Water that is also Christ, that we indeed become the true body of Christ. We, who are the body of Christ, are about to partake in Holy Communion, which is meant to be for us the body of Christ. We will be eating of bread that is, in so many ways, Bread of Life that is meant to sustain us as we participate in the Bread of Life. As wheat is gathered from all over to make a single loaf, and as grapes are gathered from all over to fill this cup, so are we gathered from all over to partake and be joined to the Triune God who has loved us to the uttermost. As we partake of the bread and the cup, let us remember that, though we are the wheat that has already been taken into the bread, the fields are ripe for harvesting, there are others who need to be brought into the bread with us. Let us always remember that the same God who has shown us love, mercy and kindness desires to show that same love, mercy and kindness to our neighbors and has asked us to be the vehicle that He uses to do so. God has already sown the seeds and has called us to reap. “The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.” Let us pray.

AMEN