Message based on John 4.5-42

There is nothing more powerful to transform the world that extravagant love.

It is more powerful than politics, than armies, than philosophies, even more powerful than religion. Extravagant love confronts conformism, confronts apathy, confronts irony and sarcasm, even unbelief. Extravagant love is often looked down… unappreciated… underestimated.

Yet, it remains the most powerful way to imagine a different future, and to find the strength to fight for one. Extravagant, unexpected, unasked for… love that reminds us of what life is made of, what life is meant to be, what life will one day be.

It wasn’t religion that met her… she had found religion before and was left confused by it.  It wasn’t social change that met her… society had chew her up, spit her off, rejected her to the core.

It wasn’t human love that met her… people had used her, people had left her, people had judged her and condemned her… people had made promises and failed to fulfilled them…

It wasn’t self-power or inner strength that suddenly met her… she knew how low she had gone… she knew how bad she had failed. She knew the promises she broke, the many times she did the opposite of what she had promised herself…

No, and it wasn’t you or me. You and me, carrying our own prejudice, carrying our own mistakes, carrying our own sense of shame and pain and hurt… you and me, we may have good intentions, good thoughts, good plans… but we are not saviours. We could offer some comfort, we could offer some friendship, we could even carry the jars but we could never carry her burdens… She needed more. And what she needed she found in the form of extravagant love that day at noon…

You see, there is nothing typical, planned, orthodox about this encounter. Unless you go the Christian cheesy way and say “typical of Jesus, planned by heaven, orthodox in scripture…” But I believe the best of you!

She is coming at this time because she wants to be left alone. He is there by himself because he needs a break. She is a woman from a minority group, from a mixed religion, socially untouchable. He is a Jew, a Rabbi. He could have stayed quiet. We would never know about it. She could have ran away. We wouldn’t know any better. But he spoke, and she answered. He offered an unexpected possibility and she took the chance.

He offered no judgement, she opened her heart. She asked questions about here and now, and he offered answers about eternity. She was looking for a temporary relief, water for her thirst; she was looking for a permanent solution to her social pain- never having to return to the well where other people could find her… Aren’t we all?

A little relief from our so mundane problems… from the stress, from the rushing, from the physical pain, for our loneliness, for the many misunderstandings… And looking for a place where we could find no judgement, no condemnation, no gossip… that sounds a little bit like heaven, isn’t it?

Temporary relief, and eternal solutions… nothing to offer, but a heart wide open. And she was seen. Truly seen. Eternally seen. Unconditionally seen.

Not as a rejected woman, not as a minority, not as a religious outcast, not as a social failure. As a person. A person looking for answers, carrying her doubts and questions, standing under the weight of the social and religious burdens and the crashing pressure of her own failures- a person. Looking for peace. Looking for a new chance. Looking for life.

And she found life in the form of a Nazarene. Cover in dust and tired of the road. He spoke to her. He understood her. He saw her. And she found eternal life. Life that cannot be explained. Life that couldn’t be contained. So she ran. She ran passed the gates. She ran passed the gatekeepers, those of the physical doors and those of the unspoken doors of life. And she spoke. She spoke loud and clear to everyone that wanted to hear! She couldn’t be silenced anymore.

And because she spoke many others came to see Jesus, and they believed. The first evangelist wasn’t a disciple, a close follower, a former religious scholar, but a simple woman that dared to open her heart. And because of that she got the answer to the greatest mystery in History. She was the one what heard from his lips “I am he”.

Not written in the sky. Not written in starts or fire or clouds. Not spoken at the end of a great sermon or at the temple or surrounded by thousands in the hills. Not at the palaces surrounded by the powerful.

No. From dry lips, and with a big smile, at midday near a well in a dusty town in Samaria. As a wink to heaven and history and us rejected people everywhere… I am he. Extravagant love…