Exodus 17:1-7 From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’ Moses said to them, ‘Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?’ But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’ So Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’ Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’
John 4:5-29 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 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.) 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.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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.’ 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.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back.’ The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ 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.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am he ,the one who is speaking to you.’
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’ Then the woman left her water-jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’
The word of the Lord…
“Give me a drink.” An encounter with God often begins with God demanding something of us. Not a big thing, like going to the Amazon as a missionary. But a small gesture: Show compassion to someone you find difficult. Do something little to better another’s life. Volunteer for a committee. Do something that goes beyond your normal circle of concern. Go beyond yourself, to others. “Give me a drink.”
“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” A long history of hatred and patriarchy are behind her words. This demand from God is a bother and a blessing – we come face-to-face with two questions about ourselves. 1) “Who am I, God, that I have something to give to You? To give to the world? I’m just a woman of Samaria, a man from Denver, a they/them from Golden. I’m just who I know myself to be from the inside out. What can I possibly give to you? If you really knew me, God, you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Self-doubt is real. 2) Who am I, God, to you? What do I mean to you? Perhaps God knows us better than we know ourselves, that God has something to do with us, that we have something to offer God and the world, that we are beloved of God. Self-worth is real.
“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.” Somewhere in our encounter with God, perhaps mere minutes into it, or long years into it, we begin to see that the One who demands something of us, has a gift to offer. The demand seems to till the soil for reception of the gift. When we recognize who is doing the asking and what kind of gift this one is bearing, we turn the question around. “No, give me a drink! Give me the kind of thing I’ve been searching for all my life!” Living water.
For those in first century Palestine, living water was priceless. Mostly a dry and arid land, the most important thing for sustaining life was living water, a flowing stream or river, or a deep well fed from underground springs. Living water tapped into the story of the Hebrew children wandering in the dessert and Moses striking the rock with his staff and living water flowed forth. Living water is the thing we long for.
“Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” Like the Samaritan woman, we don’t see where the thing we’ve longed for, will come from. We see it only on our terms, through means familiar to us. We tend to look for it literally.
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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.” Jesus redirects her attention. It’s not from this well, or any well. It’s not anything external. It comes from the inside. It’s within us, gushing up. Living water is the life of God within us. That for which we thirst most is within our reach. It’s right under our nose!
“Give me this water so I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming to this well.” She still doesn’t quite get it. We have trouble getting it, too. Somehow the promise of God’s life within us becomes mistaken with this notion that life will now become incredibly easy. Give it to me and I won’t have to work, face conflict, face difficulty, face struggle. But that’s not what it means to no longer be thirsty.
Rowan Williams, in his book The Truce of God, writes “Pure desire is desire that longs to grow endlessly in knowledge of and rootedness in reality and truth. Impure desire desires to stop having to desire, to stop needing; it asks for a state where, finally, the ego can relax into self-sufficiency and does not have to go stuffing bits and pieces of the world into itself in order to survive. Real desire can live with an unlimited horizon – which religious people call God – while unreal desire stumbles from moment to moment trying to gratify an immediate hunger, without accepting that hunger – thirst – is part of being human and so cannot be dealt with or understood by an endless succession of leak-plugging operations.”
Our thirst, paradoxically, is quenched by an insatiable desire that C.S. Lewis calls joy: “An unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it joy.” He first experienced this joy by reading a book that contained a description of autumn. He went back to this book over and over, not to gratify the desire for autumn, for how can you possess autumn? But to reawaken the desire, to keep that desire, that thirst alive. That which quenches our human thirst is the desire for God, “the joyful agony of learning to love without possession, manipulation, and control.”
The Samaritan woman wanted to end her thirst, her soul thirst. So do we. Jesus wants to quench our thirst with an unsatisfied thirst that is more thirst-quenching than any other satisfaction.
Jesus now, in his usual round-about way, gets to the heart of the matter. “Go call your husband and come back.” Go get the thing that has been your Source, the thing you were hoping would make your life livable, bearable, secure. Go get your equivalent of living water. Jesus asks her to go get her well. If Jesus asked you and me that question, how would we answer?
“I have no husband.” Honesty, to Jesus, and to herself. The truth is she’s had five and she hopes the one she’s with now will become that, but her hold on some Source of life is more tenuous than ever. She now realizes she’s talking about things of the Spirit. Samaritans worship God on their holy mountain, but Jews worship in Jerusalem. She’s still concerned with externals. Jesus says, “Spirit and truth.” That’s where the well lies. The living source for life is spirit and truth.
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!!” she tells others. Of course Jesus didn’t give a replay of her entire life. But he did name the impulse behind everything she had done. Her life had been a search for a living source, one that would take away her thirst. Each marriage revealed that wasn’t it, but maybe if I just find the right husband, the right relationship, the right job, the right this or that. Everything she had done had been a looking outward, for an external well from which she might draw life.
In our conversations with Christ, he will ask us to go get what we think is our source, the thing that promises life and security. A relationship, a career, success, money, fame. He asks us to go get it, so we can honestly see that these things don’t quench our thirst. They are not able to secure us. Jesus invites us to look within. There, in spirit and truth, is God’s life gushing up in us.
An anonymous woman wrote a poem that reflects the many wells she drew from to try and secure her life, and how they all proved to be inadequate.
I will show you the skins I have shed
Left in the grass as I crept away
They are proof that I have lived.
Skin one: docile child
Skin two: obedient adolescent
Skin three: scholar masked in niceness
Skin four: stunning career girl
Skin five: charming child-mistress
Skin six: loving wife
Skin seven: marvelous mother
Skin eight: admirable Christian
Skin nine: heroic savior of abandoned children
Skin ten: nervous breakdown
Skinned alive!
Alan Jones, author of Soul Making, writes “You can’t sell Christ the way you can sell a car, a deodorant, or a bottle of scotch.” And I would add, a bottle of water. “Jesus doesn’t sell well except as a narcotic that will take away all your pain and make you intensely happy all the time.” p. 161.
This desire for God lives within us. The more you drink of it the more the desire increases. Yet it is this unsatisfied desire for God that quenches our thirst, brings an aching joy. But there is a saying: “You can lead a horse to water…but you can’t make it drink.”
In Germany there is a fountain in the middle of a square with words inscribed on the side: “Come, and drink of the living water.” The fountain is a circular basin of beautiful marble. But the would-be drinker runs into a dilemma. Desiring to take a drink, you search in vain for the handle. But all the way around there is no handle to be found. And, for that matter, there is no spout either. Just a round basin with an internal lip of marble and a moist bowl. Others have quenched their thirst here, but how?
Only when you bend your head over the basin and cup your hands as if the water is there, does the basin fill with cool water from holes under the marble lip. The water is there inside us – act as if it’s there.
Amen.
