welcome to the commons cast we're glad to have you here we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week head to commons dot church for more information we continue our lenten series lent is why i am wearing purple again this week if you haven't seen a clerical stall before this simply helps to remind us of the season that we're in and what we're preparing our hearts for which of course is easter but we still have quite a journey ahead of us six more signs of things to come
now last week we explored what john calls the first sign jesus turning water into wine at a wedding and this is one of my favorite stories of jesus jesus making good wine and a lot of it to keep a party going late into the night i mean that is just good stuff i made a joke about apothec red and how bad it was last week and a lot of people gave me dirty looks i deserved that but i stand by my opinion so take it up with jesus that said as much as i love this story
it is one that we do need to be careful with it is very easy for christians to misread a celebration of jewish custom and ritual as a critique of judaism if you don't already understand the culture and the beauty of these rituals what they meant and what they were for then the fact that jesus takes these stone jars for ceremonial washing and repurposes them as vessels of celebration that can very easily seem like a repudiation of those religious practices that jesus grew up with and
continued to celebrate throughout all of his life that there's no sense in this story that jesus ever stopped ceremonially washing his hands before a meal or that he ever expected his disciples to stop either so instead of imagining this story as these stuffy rules that we used to follow but now we get to party a better way to contextualize jesus intent here is on the lines of him speaking to his people saying we've had these rituals that have sustained us for centuries
that have reminded us of god's presence near us and with us and the first sign of things to come is a celebration of the fact that it was all true god was near god is near and everything we have longed and hope for it is all coming to pass now you may not be jewish i'm not jewish and so these rituals that jesus celebrates they aren't mine but i still find this incredibly encouraging i mean how do you remind yourself of god's presence how rituals and systems and habits do you celebrate that keep
you close to god do you journal do you pray do you get up every sunday and come to church even when it's daylight savings time do you volunteer at the mustard seed to pray for peace jesus is saying that whatever our reminders and rituals are when they become realized they point us to the world that will be and so my encouragement is in whatever small moments you experience joy in the presence of the divine whatever religious commitments you have that transcend your religion
and connect you directly to the heartbeat behind them reminding you of god's goodness always that is the sign jesus is pointing toward our rituals are not wasted our attempts at goodness are not futile the small contributions that all of us make every day to align ourselves with god's imagination for the world on earth as it is in heaven jesus once said all of this is a sign of things to come today we move on to sign two but we're actually going to talk about two
connected stories that move us together toward john's second slime first of all let's pray together god who continues to offer us signs of things to come who speaks with grace and compassion even in the midst of our hurts and fears even in the midst of the violence we direct toward each other may we have ears to hear and eyes to see your presence that surrounds us always may those glimpses of truth those glances of beauty inspire dancing and celebration our parties long into the evening
and may that joy become the fuel to re-engage the needed work of justice and restoration around us may your signs inspire us to the hard work ahead and trusting that none of it is in vain and for those of us who are hurt today perhaps let down by someone we trusted perhaps wondering if what we thought was goodness was just an illusion we asked that your spirit of comfort be near and close that truth would bubble to the surface and that healing be allowed to take place in each of us
and that this might in time become a sign of your promise creation renewed and restored in us may joy return wherever it is lacking and may your kingdom come as it already is in heaven in the strong name of the risen christ we pray amen okay today we got two stories a woman at a well and an official with a sick son and we're going to talk about how i think those stories are actually connected in john's imagination but here's our agenda for today weddings and divorces royal officials
and no signs for you but we're going to look at john 4 today so let's start by setting the stage after the wedding at canada jesus has gone down to jerusalem for the passover so cana where the wedding that we talked about last week happened is in the northern region called galilee jerusalem is way down in the south in a region called judea and jesus makes that journey for passover chapter four he's starting the long journey back home we're talking about 150 kilometers here
so this is a multi-day journey by foot however between galilee and the north and judea and the south there was a region called samaria that jesus would have had to travel through now samaritans were a related ethnic group that drew their lineage from the assyrian occupation of this area centuries earlier so they had both azirium and jewish ancestors and they had religious practices that were drawn from both of those stories and cultures but while traveling through this area
jesus meets a samaritan woman at a well one day and you may have heard that story we have talked about it here before it's a pretty famous one but jesus comes up and asks her for a drink she's surprised that he's interacting with her so freely there were gender expectations at the time but there were also clearly some tensions between these ethnic groups regardless they strike up a conversation and two important things happen first jesus slowly shifts the conversation
from a drink of water to the living water that he offers and second he surprises her with this profound knowledge of her life and story now when you read the interaction in john 4 it feels kind of strange the woman says look man it's kind of weird that you're out here asking me for water in the middle of the day and jesus responds actually if you knew who i was you would ask me for living water to which she replies what are you talking about now in english it can kind
of sound like she's just not keeping up with things right but the metaphor that jesus uses here is actually very subtle that living water sounds obviously spiritual to us in english right but in the first century living water was also a way of saying running water like a stream there's a very ancient document called the decay it's one of the first church manuals that we have sort of a book about how to do church but at one point it talks about baptism how do you do a baptism
and the writer says look if you can always use living water for a baptism if you don't have that still water is fine but try to make sure it's as cold as possible this basically comes down to hygiene right dumping old warm standing water on top of someone came with some significant health risks living water flowing water or at least cold water was going to mitigate the presence of bacteria they didn't understand bacteria but they knew what made you sick the point being
living water just meant fresh running water like a stream so when jesus asks for well water and says actually i've already got some fresh water the woman is like well why are you here asking me for a drink and so it's now that jesus starts to make clear that he's getting at something deeper he says whoever drinks the water i offer will never thirst again you see this water that i give becomes in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life and so the woman replies okay i see
where this is going tell me more now we get to the famous part of the story right jesus says go and get your husband and the woman says i don't have a husband and jesus says that's right you've had five husbands and the man you are with now is not your husband no many scholars like lynn kohick have pointed this out and we've talked about it before the assumptions we make about this woman are flat out wrong this is not a story about some serial adulteress this is not a judgment against this
woman that jesus is making at all in fact jesus is empathizing with her story here now the simple fact is that a woman in the first century could not divorce a husband she could only be divorced by a husband in other words this is a woman who has been continually abandoned and discarded by the men in her life and she has continued to pick herself back up and move forward regardless and the way that she responds to jesus comments indicates that she understood his intent and compassion
she saw his words as welcome not criticism and so she says i can see that you're a prophet and they begin to talk about their various religious traditions the woman ends up coming to a place of trust in jesus and she invites him to spend some time with her and her community now side note here this is not all at all out of character for jesus when jesus talks about divorce in the sermon on the mount he takes a very similar approach he says it has been said anyone who
divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce but i tell you anyone that divorces his wife except for sexual immorality makes her the victim of adultery now the context here again only men could divorce a woman but if they did they were supposed to at least provide a certificate of divorce essentially a legal divorce that allowed a woman to remarry that's part of the law of moses problem was they often didn't do that largely because there were basically no
ramifications for men getting divorced at all women on the other hand who couldn't hold property or own things the way that men could they were often dependent on finding a new partner to look after themselves but if they weren't legally divorced that would automatically make them adulterous in the eyes of many so jesus says look divorce is hard and divorce is full of hurt divorce is a concession to the brokenness of our relationships but it happens let's not add injustice on top of that
let's look out for those who are disadvantaged by the status quo and so consistently throughout the gospels jesus takes the side of anyone who is on the downside of the power differential advocating for a more fair approach to the systemic imbalances in all of our relationships the gospel is not just hey let's be nice to each other jesus is advocating that we begin to fundamentally restructure the systems that allow for abuse in the first place and so here on his way back to cana
the rural region that he comes from in the north returning from a big religious festival in the south he interacts with a samaritan woman in the middle a human person who has a very different experience of gender in the associated cultural norms a human person who comes from a related but different ethnic and religious background from himself he empathizes with the imbalances he commends her for her religious practice and devotion and he says a day is coming when where we worship
and how we worship won't matter a day when all of our limitations and misconceptions will be swallowed up by grace and on that day we will all of us worship in spirit and truth okay hold on to that interaction i think it's going to be important as we follow the rest of the story in chapter four now picking up in verse 43 we read after the two days he left galilee now that's the two days he was invited by this woman to stay in her community with her teaching them in samaria
but after the two days in samaria he left for galilee now jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honor in his own country yet when he arrived in galilee the galileans welcomed him for they had seen all that he had done in jerusalem at the passover festival now this is sort of an interesting comment right john points out that an honor a prophet has no honor in his own country and then jesus comes home to his own country and is greeted with i mean a lot of honor
probably what's happening here is the author is being ironic and that's because two chapters later in john 6 15 we read that jesus knowing they intended to come and make him king by force withdrew again to a mountain by himself and then a few verses later we see from this time on many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him all of that happens in the galilee in other words he comes home and the people are excited but then they listen to him and they
become a little less enthusiastic and john is sort of setting the stage for what's going to come as the story unfolds other way this is what we read next once more he visited cana in galilee where he had turned the water into wine again we're laying groundwork here we're connecting back to where we were last week and there was a certain royal official whose son laisik at capernaum when this man heard that jesus had arrived in galilee from judea he went to him and begged him to come and heal his
son who was close to death unless you people see signs and wonders jesus told him you will never believe but the royal official said sir come down before my child dies go jesus replied your son will live the man took jesus at his word and departed while he was still on the way his servants met him with the news that his boy was living when he inquired as to the time when his son got better they said yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him and the father realized that this was
the exact time at which jesus had said to him your son will live so he and his whole household believed this was the second sign jesus performed after coming from judea to galilee now another interesting story right and again fascinating that john thinks this all of this is the second sign of things to come but let's talk about a few things here and how this whole chapter works together to illustrate what i think is john's point first of all a certain royal official i
don't know if you noticed this but this woman at the well in john 4 and this royal official in john 4 neither of them get names that's not to say that all of the characters in john are anonymous they're not right nicodemus in john 3 nathaniel and john 2 are both named and they illustrate a personal connection to jesus we even talked about nathaniel's possible connection to the wedding at cana last week but we also talked about how john has an agenda in writing his gospel
this is a second generation christian text it's reflecting back on the story of jesus and highlighting the meaning and the significance of his life so often when we read these types of anonymous encounters in john it could simply be that by the time john is written the names and identities have been lost and forgotten to time but it's more likely that the reason certain stories are anonymous is because the writer wants those stories to be reflective of something larger
the scholar gary bird says that these anonymous characters are mirrors in which to view jesus from another angle in other words when a character is anonymous john wants us to see ourselves in that character and we see ourselves in them and through that we see jesus in a slightly different way okay and what about this certain royal official who is he well literally in greek what we read here is a certain royal now that doesn't mean this guy is the king or even a member of the royal household
but what it does signify likely is that he worked directly for herod antipas now herod was the tetrarch of galilee fancy title but it just means that he ruled over one-fourth of an area and in this case it was the northern jewish region galilee in the smaller region to the east called perea now herod had been installed there by the roman empire to keep the roman peace that largely meant negotiating with the jewish peoples and if necessary violently putting down any uprisings
he is the son of herod the great who ordered a bunch of babies murdered around the time of jesus birth and he is the same man who would later murder jesus cousin john the baptist so not a good dude but that means that the certain royal that comes to jesus for all intents and purposes works within and directly for the very system that kept jesus people subjugated that harmed his family directly and that would eventually execute jesus himself in other words there is a really interesting contrast
john is building in this chapter between a samaritan woman abandoned by her partners and a royal official who wields the power of the state and the hinge here for me is this sort of gruff line we get from jesus unless you people see signs and wonders you will never believe see that comes at a really interesting moment in the encounter we read that this official went to jesus and begged him to come and heal his son who was close to death and jesus says ah without a sign you'll never believe
except if you look more closely at the language here there's some i think questionable choices that the niv has made the word they have translated begged here is the word erota and veg is okay it can be used that way particularly if the context indicates it but more commonly this word simply meant to ask for something that's how it's translated in the esv he asked jesus to come and heal his son where the niv is getting begged from is that the word is in what we call the
imperfect indicative form and that doesn't really correspond to the past tensed begged it indicates something like an ongoing action he kept asking jesus to come so begged is an option i get it but from the context i would argue here there's another possibility and you can see that in the way that the nasb has translated this when it says he began asking or he kept asking jesus which makes more sense to me when jesus replies unless you see a sign and wonder
you will never believe in the man who is used to getting his way used to making demands used to seeing people respond to him immediately when he asked for something says sir come now before my child dies that's an imperative in the greek which means it's a command to jesus come now and there's a really interesting dynamic here this man this official he clearly knows that he needs jesus help he calls him sir it's actually kurios or lord in the text he defers to jesus in one sense
but then in the next he's demanding or at the very least strongly expecting that jesus is going to accommodate him in the next and man if that doesn't ring true for me i mean how many times have i prayed or how many times have i given money or how many times have i volunteered my time and then acted as if or at the very least felt like i deserved something on the back end in fact sometimes there's something even more insidious in that isn't there sometimes it's even more satisfying to
think you're not getting what you deserve it feels like you've been hard done by or under appreciated we kind of feed off of that that's a tricky line right because sometimes we are underappreciated sometimes we are underpaid and sometimes we have been undervalued or dismissed and we do need to learn how to stand up for ourselves and ask for something but maybe that's part of the story here our starting point where we come from today we might even call that our privilege
but the disparate experiences of say an ignored woman and a respected official that can often obscure the line between the goodness of god that comes to find us and the expectation of being served that often comes from existing for far too long at the top of an unbalanced scale now is there anything wrong with what this man is asking for of course not he has a son in pain a child that he loves of course he would advocate for healing but remember this story this chapter is
more than just about a son in need this is about the world to come and so we get this really interesting contradiction here where jesus says you won't believe without a sign so no no sign for you you'll have to leave trusting and he does and then john tells us that all of this is a sign of things to come if you were to sit me down and demand that i tell you exactly what i think john's meaning here is i mean yes of course i would say that it's about the healing of our bodies
and the ways in which the world to come will free us from the terror of sickness and the tyranny of decay but if i had to give you my gut feeling my perspective on what i think he's getting at i'd have to say it's more than just the healing of our bodies i think it's also about the healing the reordering of our expectations how perhaps those of us who are used to getting our way and acquiring what we need and having our requests taken seriously how we can learn to trust in what we can't see
even as those of us who've been pushed to the edges and ignored start to notice god showing up in all kinds of unexpected places and out of bounds conversations signs of god all around them except here's the real beauty of all that that is a gift to everyone in this chapter because samaritan women who notice the messiah talking with them as equals they return home as leaders in their communities ready to expand the story for everyone and royal officials that gain the ability to trust in the
goodness of god beyond just what they can demand with their stature they become the kind of people that slowly decouple their imagination of god from the expectations of their culture and when that truly begins to happen then even those royal officials can become signs of god's blessing to those who've been struggling to see the divine all along and maybe this is the sign of things to come a world in which the hungry are filled with good things and the rich are sent away empty
and both of them are better for it the promise of a god that loves each of us enough to meet us wherever we are with the healing that we need specifically may the sign of things to come give us hope for the healing of our bodies today absolutely but perhaps also the healing of our expectations and assumptions about god and the trust that as we grow in awareness of the goodness that surrounds us always learning to celebrate what comes near to us instead of just a demanding of more
that we might actually see the unending graciousness of god and the ways that we can become a blessing beyond ourselves to those who need it let's pray god that comes near to all of us with signs of things to come for those of us who like a samaritan woman have not seen your presence for a very long time and if putin pushed aside ignored abandoned might we today see your presence a sign of your goodness around us and near us then for those of us who like royal
officials are full of blessing in our lives surrounded by your goodness all the time and yet still wanting more might your spirit come near to remind us that a sign is not going to make things better it is only our awareness of gift that heals us god might we recognize that probably most of us are present in both of these characters without the push and pull of your spirit that welcomes us with signs of things to come and encourages us to see what is already around
is the goodness and the graciousness of the god that loves us perfectly that yes you want to heal our bodies our minds our emotions but also our expectations of you and our sense of purpose in the world might you come near to each of us just as we need in this moment in this day right now and may that become the fuel the clarity the energy to become a sign of things to come to everyone we encounter this week may we speak peace and blessing and truth with our words and our actions
and the ways that we love in the strong name of there is in christ we pray amen