We thought together this morning about Rahab as a Canaanite convert to the Jewish faith, to the one and only living God, and this evening we meditate on a similar situation from the New Testament. If you turn with me to John 4, we're going to think together about the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, particularly from verse 9. So I'm going to read John 4, 1 through 10. First to get the context, and then we will meditate on a few things that surprised the Samaritan woman about Jesus. John 4, starting in verse 1. Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, although Jesus himself did not baptize but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. It was about noon. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, give me a drink. For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, Ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria. For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. So this woman is surprised. There's lots of things we could say from John 4, 1-10, but we're going to focus on verse 9 tonight. So she's surprised. She asked a how question. How in the world are you asking me for a drink? So what is she surprised about? Well, I think she's surprised about at least five things. And the longer we go into chapter four, the more things she gets to be surprised about about Jesus. But we're going to focus on five things tonight. First, Jesus is surprisingly kind. Jesus is surprisingly kind to her. Yes, she's being the one who is asked the favor. He wants her to give him water. but he's the one who initiates the conversation in the first place. And he's doing that from a social position of superiority. He's the full-bred Jew. She's the interracial Samaritan. He's the one initiating contact with a stranger, a social inferior on her turf, not his. And that's what surprises her. I mean, she may as well even be asking, what are you even doing here? Most Jews didn't even go to Samaria. How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me, being a Samaritan woman? And Jesus does this after being rejected by his own ethnic and religious countrymen. He's there when the Pharisees had heard that he was making more disciples and baptizing more people than John. So he has to get out of there because they're getting angry with him. And add to that his own physical fatigue from walking all morning. And this is not just surprising, it's baffling. He's just been socially and spiritually rejected, or at least suspected of foul play by his own people at the beginning of the chapter. So what treatment can he possibly expect from a Samaritan who likely hates his guts just for being Jewish? He's not in his own city or state. He's been walking all morning, so he's probably physically exhausted. I mean, you know what it's like to be in a strange town. You're not exactly wanting to initiate conversation with everybody. You might need directions, but you're not exactly thinking, I want to meet somebody else's need. And still, here he is, stopping in Samaria on his way to Galilee, starting up a conversation with an apparently random Samaritan woman. How is it? Now, Jews may have no dealings with Samaritans, but Jesus did. Jesus is subversive in that way. He undermines social and cultural conventions. He doesn't feel the need to conform to conventions of ethnicity or privilege or barriers. He wanted to have a conversation with this woman, and he wants to have dealings with us, too. He wants to talk with you. He wants to relate to you. He wants you to know Him and trust Him so that you can know God. He's not too tired for you. He's not too busy for you. And even though He is infinitely superior to you, He's not above meeting you right where you are, and He's not even above calling you brother or sister. And Christian, this is how we can introduce Jesus to the sinners and religious outsiders around us. He's kind. So think about how other people would think about Jesus if all they have to go on is how you act or how you introduce Jesus to them. Will they think that Jesus is kind by how you introduce them to him? Second, Jesus is surprisingly incorruptible. You can't defile him. You can't make them dirty. Jesus the Jew is not afraid to drink after the Samaritan woman. Most Jews wouldn't even enter a Gentile house, much less drink after a non-Jew because they were afraid that that would make them ceremonially unclean. And Jesus did not bring his own Nalgene water bottle or his Yeti insulated mug in his backpack. Jesus is asking this Samaritan woman to draw water from a well with her own clay jar. Without Jesus having the ancient equivalent of a solo cup for her to pour it into, he's going to have to drink from her jar. Remember, Samaritans didn't even worship at the temple. They worship the wrong way in the wrong place. And yet Jesus is not afraid that she's going to mess him up somehow. You can't defile him. So sinner, Jesus is not afraid of your mess. He doesn't need to avoid you in your uncleanness. Your identity in your sin does make you unclean, but your uncleanness cannot make Jesus unclean. Jesus approaches us in our unclean sin in order to make us clean by his cleansing grace and power. This woman had not yet repented of having all those men in her life. You'll remember how the story goes on. Jesus has a real word of knowledge for her. She tells him, I'm not married. He goes, yeah, I know. I know you're not married. You had five other men, and the guy you're living with now isn't your husband either. She was still living with her boyfriend. And that guy was her fifth. Meanwhile, she thinks she can stump Jesus about where to worship. She's changing the subject from her sin to a theological disagreement. She's the classic nominal religionist. She's living with her boyfriend and going to a bad church. Jesus approaches her before she leaves her boyfriend, before she leaves her church, before she has the chance to make herself feel worthy. Jesus initiates with her before she even has the chance to clean herself up. And that's how it is with us. He initiated with you before you had the chance to clean yourself up and get ready for him. He just shows up in your life. And that should prove to you, you don't make him unclean. He makes you clean. So Jesus is surprisingly kind. He's surprisingly incorruptible. Third, Jesus is surprisingly important. Jesus is surprisingly important. In fact, Jesus is so important that His identity matters more than our identity matters. What is important to Jesus about this Samaritan woman, surprisingly, is not that she is a woman or a Samaritan. Those are her issues, not his. We assume that that's an issue for him. And yes, it's true, Jesus does choose to go straight through Samaria on his way to Galilee, rather than going around Samaria like most Jews of his day. He does want this conversation. Wow, that was a spider. Just dropped down from there. Not touch that. Well, thank you. So Jesus goes straight through Samaria on his way to Galilee rather than going around Samaria. So he does want a conversation with this Samaritan woman. But look at where Jesus steers that conversation once he starts it. She's the one who brings up her own gender and ethnicity, not him. And when she brings it up, Jesus actually ignores her comments about her own identity and reorients the conversation back to his identity. If you knew who you were talking to, you'd be asking me for a drink. This is not about you, this is about me, Jesus says. He wants her to think of Him, though, as far more than just a Jewish man. He challenges her to see Him as the Son of God who can give her the Spirit of God. She's surprised a Jewish man is asking a Samaritan woman for a drink. Jesus is surprised that she is not asking Him for the Spirit of God and eternal life. So what is most important in this conversation is not her femininity and ethnicity. What is most important in this conversation is Jesus' divinity and her eventual confession of his divinity and repentance from her own sexual sinfulness as a result of encountering Jesus' divinity. What I want us to see here then is, again, Jesus makes nothing at all of the fact that she is both a woman and a Samaritan. That's what the purveyors of intersectionality would want us to think, right? That she's a woman, she's a Samaritan, Jesus engages her in her femininity and in her Samaritan-ness. No, what matters to Jesus is that she is a sinner. That's where he takes the conversation. And she's a sexual sinner in need of the only savior that there is for any of us, whether we're black or white or Asian or Hispanic, whether we're male or female. Jesus makes no excuses for this woman because of her gender or her ethnicity. He makes no attempt to see her as a victim of a supposed patriarchy, even though she has had five men. And he has no interest in getting her to see herself as a victim. She's not a victim, not in Jesus' eyes. She's actually a perpetrator of sexual sin and false worship. That's where the conversation goes. That's where he leads her. And this is why Jesus will become a victim in her place, to suffer the penalty of her sins and then rise victorious for his own glory, for the justification of all those who will confess him as Lord and believe in him. Jesus, that God raised Jesus from the dead. Fourth, what we think of Jesus matters more than what we think of ourselves. This is surprising. My idea of my own whiteness or blackness or brownness is not the ultimate issue. My idea of my gender and sexuality is not the ultimate issue. Jesus' idea of his identity, that is the issue. That's what he makes this conversation about. Woman, you should think about me, Jesus says, like I think about me. Who is Jesus? How must I relate to Jesus? How must I worship Jesus? What must Jesus do for me, not what can I do for him? This doesn't mean that gender and ethnicity are totally meaningless or unimportant to Jesus. We'll see later again in this same conversation that Jesus does care deeply how this woman was not honoring God in Christ with her sexuality. She's had five husbands. The man she's living with is not her husband. Jesus was not willing to sweep her sexual sin under the rug. Cohabitation is wrong. Any sex is wrong outside of marriage between one man and one woman, even when it is consensual, whether it's heterosexual or homosexual. The Samaritan woman did not get a pass from Jesus merely because she was Samaritan or a woman, not even because she was both. She would have to repent of her sins and believe in the divinity of Jesus just like everyone else. Fifth and finally, Jesus' identity then transcends ethnicity and gender. Jesus' identity transcends ethnicity and gender. It doesn't make it matterless, but it does transcend it. For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. We could say the same about all too many corners of society today. Whites have no dealings with blacks. Puerto Ricans have no dealings with Mexicans. Well, they do now. They do now. In Christ, they do. But we've got to deal with that. Part of the reason Jesus came as a Jewish man was to transcend ethnic divides and gender gaps. Jesus confronts all stripes and types of people to see themselves not just as skin colors or social groups, but as sinners. And this should be evident in our churches. If Jesus is our ultimate issue, then we can be united together in Christ with others in Christ from different ethnicities. That doesn't mean, again, that all social and ethnic disagreements are immediately and easily resolved, but it does mean that we quit accusing and vilifying each other, and we start confessing our own sins and forgiving and receiving each other in the one Christ who died for all of our sins. We have to model that for the world as a church. So Jesus is surprisingly kind, he is surprisingly incorruptible, and he is surprisingly important. He is so important that what we think of him is more important even than what we think of our own gender and ethnicity. He certainly cares what we do with our maleness and our femaleness. He cares how we treat our own ethnicity and the ethnicities of others, but his identity is more important than ours. because he is far more than a Jewish man. He is divinity and humanity. He is the God-man, the one mediator between God and man, two natures, one person, to reconcile us to God by his own blood and righteousness. So we should think less of ourselves, less of our own identity markers, and far more of Christ. His righteousness is infinitely better than ours. His grace is more powerful than our sin. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He alone can save any sinner of any ethnicity or gender, however you've sinned in your own ethnicity or gender. And if He has saved you, then this woman's question should linger on your own lips with the same wonder that it lingered on hers. How is it? How is it? Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for Jesus Christ. We thank you particularly that you sent him from heaven, from outside this world, to become a Jewish man. in order to unite every ethnicity in himself as one new man in Christ. So we pray that in this church and in myriad other churches, the person and identity of Christ would be preeminent. that we as Christians would think less and less of ourselves and our own identity markers, and that we would be identified, that we would identify ourselves completely and wholly in and with Christ, and that as we do that, we would become a people who loves those of other ethnicities better and that we would be known and recognized to be his disciples. For Jesus' sake, we pray. Amen.