Jesus Worldview: Who Is My Neighbor? John 4:1-26

Jesus Worldview: Who Is My Neighbor?
John 4:1-26

Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
June 21, 2026

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” 2 (although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized), 3 he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4 But he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 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.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

If you’ve been with us these past few weeks, you know what we’re up to this summer with our “Jesus Worldview” series:

·         Week one, we talked about the lens. Whose eyes are we actually seeing through — Jesus’, or our culture’s? I confessed to you that after thirty years of ministry, I’m still not always sure.

·         Week two, we found the center. Stand on one foot, summarize the whole of Christian faith — love God, love neighbor. Everything else, Jesus said, hangs on those two.

·         Week three, we got the map. The Beatitudes aren’t a checklist for becoming a better person — they’re directions. “If someone wants to find me,” Jesus told Matthew in that clip we watched, “those are the groups they should look for.” The poor in spirit. The mourning. The merciful. The persecuted. That’s the treasure map to Jesus.

Today, we watch Jesus actually walk that map.

Because it’s one thing to describe where the marginalized are. It’s another thing entirely to go there yourself — alone, in hostile territory, in the heat of the day — and sit down.

That’s exactly what happens in our text today. So the question for this week isn’t abstract. It’s geographic. It’s personal. It’s this:

Who is my neighbor — and how far is Jesus willing to walk to claim them?

Let’s set the scene, because the geography matters more than you might think.

John tells us Jesus “had to go through Samaria” on his way from Judea to Galilee. But here’s the thing — that’s not actually true. Geographically, faithful Jews traveling that route routinely went around Samaria. They’d cross the Jordan River, travel the long way, cross back — adding days to the journey — simply to avoid setting foot on Samaritan soil. The animosity went back centuries. Religious schism. Rival temples. Mutual contempt passed down through generations like a family heirloom nobody wanted but everybody kept.

Jesus didn’t have to go through Samaria. He chose to.

And he arrives at Jacob’s well at noon — the hottest, most miserable part of the day. Everyone with any sense draws water in the cool of morning, in groups, for safety and for company. A woman coming alone, at noon, in the blistering heat, is a woman who is avoiding people.

And there, at that well, in that heat, she finds Jesus. Alone. Waiting.

Two scandals before either of them says a single word: a Jewish man, by himself, in Samaria — and about to speak to a woman who isn’t his wife. By every social calculus of the first century, this conversation should not be happening.

But it does.

I want to introduce you to a phrase that’s going to do a lot of work for us this morning. Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr has spent decades teaching about something he calls “the edge of the inside.” Rohr describes the edge of things as a liminal space — a holy place, what the ancient Celts called “a thin place.” Most of us have to be taught how to live there. It’s not a rebellious position, he says, not an antisocial one. It’s a prophetic one. When we live at the center of something — fully insulated, fully comfortable, surrounded by people who already agree with us — we easily confuse what’s essential with what’s just trivia and tribal loyalty. Not much truth happens there, Rohr says. The real truth tends to live out on the edges.

This is exactly where we find Jesus in our text today. Not at the center of religious life. Not in the Temple courts, debating the finer points of Torah with people who already agreed with him. He’s at the edge — geographically, in territory his own people avoided. Socially, alone with a woman his culture told him not to speak to. Morally, by the religious respectability standards of his day, about to engage someone with a complicated history he will name without flinching — and without condemning.

And Jesus doesn’t critique the center by shouting at it from a safe distance. He doesn’t write an op-ed about Samaritan-Jewish relations. He simply goes. And in going, he reveals exactly what the center has been missing the whole time.

Rohr names something else that I think gets right to the heart of why this matters for us. He writes:

Because we are so afraid of nonsuccess, of being a refugee, not having a home, afraid of the opposite masculine or feminine parts of our own souls, we marginalize whoever represents those parts of our soul that we deny. We hate in them what we are afraid to admit in ourselves . . . We surround ourselves, unfortunately, with clones of ourselves.[1]

Sit with that for a second.

We build our lives — our friendships, our neighborhoods, our social media feeds, sometimes even our churches — to be surrounded by people who confirm what we already believe. The Pharisees stayed at the center, with people who looked like them, thought like them, worshiped like them, voted like them. Jesus kept walking to the edges.

If a Jesus Worldview means seeing the world the way Jesus saw it, we have to reckon with this: Jesus’ worldview was not formed at the comfortable center of religious life. It was formed — and revealed — at the edges. With Samaritans. With women. With the sick, the unclean, the excluded, the ones everybody else had stopped looking for.

If we want to see what Jesus saw, we may need to go where Jesus went.

So let’s look at what actually happens once he gets there.

Jesus speaks first — and not with authority, but with need. “Give me a drink.” He arrives at the edge not as a conqueror but as someone thirsty, someone vulnerable, someone willing to ask a Samaritan woman for help.

She’s stunned. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” She names the wall immediately, out loud, because she’s lived inside that wall her entire life and knows exactly where the bricks are.

Jesus doesn’t pretend the wall isn’t there. He doesn’t say, “Oh, I don’t see Samaritan or Jew, I just see people.” He acknowledges it — and then simply walks through it anyway. He offers her living water. He takes her theological questions seriously — not condescendingly, the way you might placate someone, but as a genuine conversation partner. And then, gently, without shame, without a lecture, without an asterisk of judgment attached, he names her actual life: five husbands, and the man she’s with now isn’t one of them.

And here’s what I want you to notice: he doesn’t ask her to clean up her story before the conversation can happen. He doesn’t require her to defend herself, explain herself, or prove she’s worth his time first.

He simply meets her exactly where she already is. And then comes the moment that should stop us cold.

She mentions the Messiah — “I know that Messiah is coming.” And Jesus says to her, plainly, without parable, without hedging: “I am he.”

Stop and let that land. Think about everyone Jesus spoke with in the Gospels — the religious leaders who tested him, the crowds who followed him, even his own disciples, who spent years piecing together who he really was, mostly through hints and questions and slow-dawning recognition. And here, at a well, at noon, in hostile territory, Jesus hands the plainest, most direct statement of his own identity in the entire Gospel of John to a Samaritan. A woman. Someone with a complicated past and absolutely no religious standing whatsoever.

Not to Nicodemus, the respected religious teacher we meet in the chapter just before this one. To her.

She is the first person in the Gospel of John — female, Gentile, twice marginalized by the standards of her day — to whom Jesus explicitly reveals himself as the Messiah.

And what does she do with that revelation? She doesn’t keep it. She runs — runs! — back to the very town she’d been avoiding by coming to this well alone at noon, and tells everyone what she’s found. Scripture tells us that many Samaritans in that town came to believe in Jesus because of her testimony.

Which makes her, by any honest reading of the text, the first evangelist in the Gospel of John. Before Peter preached at Pentecost. Before Paul ever picked up a pen. A Samaritan woman, with a reputation that sent her to draw water alone, became the first person to carry the good news of who Jesus is to anyone else.

The woman hiding from her community becomes the first evangelist to her community — and very likely beyond it.

There’s an old story from Thailand that has nothing to do with Christianity and, somehow, everything to do with what just happened at that well.

In the 1950s, a group of monks in Thailand were tasked with moving a giant clay statue of the Buddha. The statue had sat outdoors for years, largely ignored, considered minor — not particularly valuable, not particularly important. It had been shuffled from place to place over time until finally a new building was constructed to house it at a temple.

During the move, as the monks attempted to lift the statue from its pedestal with ropes, the ropes snapped. The statue crashed to the ground.

One of the monks, inspecting the damage, noticed something strange in the crack that had formed — a faint golden glow. He began chipping away at the broken clay. And before long, the clay exterior had come away entirely, revealing a solid gold Buddha underneath — three meters high, weighing five and a half tons.

As the story goes, some two hundred years earlier, monks at that monastery had deliberately covered the golden statue in a thick layer of clay — stucco, painted and inlaid with bits of colored glass — to disguise it and protect it from an invading Burmese army. They made it look precious enough to be respected, but not valuable enough to be stolen. And then, tragically, every monk who knew the statue’s true identity was killed in the invasion. The secret died with them. For two centuries, an enormous treasure sat in plain sight, disguised as something ordinary — until a snapped rope and an accident of force cracked it open.

The gold had been there the whole time. It just took a fall, a crack, and a monk willing to look closely at what most people would have called a flaw.

The woman at the well had been covered in something similar. Five marriages. A complicated arrangement. A reputation that sent her walking to that well alone, in the heat of the day, away from anyone who might judge her with a glance.

Jesus didn’t see the clay. Jesus saw the gold — gold valuable enough, real enough, trustworthy enough that he handed her the single clearest revelation of his own identity in the entire Gospel.

That is the Jesus Worldview in its purest form. Not: fix yourself first, then I’ll love you, then maybe I’ll trust you with something important. But: I already see what’s underneath. Let’s talk. And by the way — here’s who I really am.

So let me bring us home.

The title of today’s sermon borrows from a different story Jesus told — the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the question “who is my neighbor?” gets answered by an enemy who shows mercy. But here, at this well, Jesus doesn’t tell a parable about it.

He enacts it.

He becomes, himself, the one who crosses the line his own culture drew in the sand, finds a neighbor exactly where he’d been told not to look — and then trusts that neighbor with the truth about who he is before he trusts almost anyone else in the entire Gospel.

So the question for us this week isn’t abstract. It’s geographic. It’s relational. It’s specific:

Where is your Samaria? Whose well have you been avoiding — not because the journey is too far, but because the company makes you uncomfortable?

And who, in your life, has been covered in so much clay — by their reputation, their mistakes, their politics, their difference from you — that you’ve stopped looking for the gold underneath, and stopped imagining they might have something important to tell the rest of us?

A Jesus Worldview doesn’t ask us to fix the world’s divisions from a safe, comfortable distance. It asks us to do what Jesus did: go to the edge, sit down at the well, tell the truth — and trust the person across from you with it.

In this world, may we be like Jesus.

Amen.

[1] Richard Rohr in Job and the Mystery of Suffering.