Lent 3

Today’s gospel starts with water. That substance is important, indeed essential, for life, and people in biblical times probably realized that better than we do. They were closer to the earth and knew how necessary water was for the crops and animals with which most of them were immediately concerned. That’s why many biblical stories have to do with water and why there are so many allusions to it — to rain, wells, rivers, and drought.

            And, of course, we need water for ourselves, just to stay alive. You can go a long time without food but after a couple of days without water, you’ll be in bad shape. If you exercise vigorously, you know the importance of “hydrating,” and parents know how quickly a sick baby can dehydrate. We have to have water, and a lack of clean water is a problem. Just look at Jackson, Mississippi. The need for water was always obvious to people in the Bible because they couldn’t get it by just turning a tap.

            Like many women in the Bible, the one in today’s Gospel had to spend part of her day going to the village well for it.

            But I’m guessing that you aren’t too excited about water. To be honest, I’m not either. Everything I just said is true, and we know it’s true. Water is a critical resource that’s essential for life — but it’s not thrilling. You get no buzz, no rush, from a glass of water. We generally don’t think about it at all unless algae are growing in the reservoir and the stuff from the faucet tastes funny.

            Jesus, though, talks to us in today’s Gospel about “living water.” Like many things in John’s gospel, this can be understood on two levels. By “living water,” Jesus means water that gives fullness of life, a truly meaningful life that’s more than just metabolizing. The literal meaning of the phrase, the way the woman at the well understands it, is running water from a spring rather than flat-tasting water from a cistern. That living water may be more enjoyable to drink than what comes from the well, but it still won’t give us any rush. We probably crave something more.

             You can get a thrill, a rush, from a lot of things. Living water — we have an English word whose original meaning was quite similar to that: “whiskey.” It comes from a Gaelic word which means “water of life.” That can give you a rush! You can imagine those old Irish monks who came up with it drinking their product for the first time: “Wow! That’ll open your eyes!” In the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” from which James Joyce took the title of his book, a fight starts at Tim Finnegan’s wake, whiskey spills over his corpse, and he rises from the dead!

            There are many jokes about that particular “water of life”: “Everybody should believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” Amusing, but for some it’s all too true. Alcohol is what they believe in, what they trust to relieve pain and loneliness, to make life tolerable. For some others it may not be alcohol but a different chemical — cocaine, meth, or whatever. It may be money, or knowledge, or family, or power over other people, or sex, or science, or art, or the nation — the list of idols is pretty long.

Back to this morning’s Gospel. In Jesus’ day, the Jews walked around Samaria on their way to and from Jerusalem – even though it added a full day to their journey. The Samaritans were the descendants of Jews left in the homeland during the exile, and their foreign spouses. They were considered by many of the Jews to be “unclean.” To distinguish themselves from their Jewish cousins, the Samaritans set up a temple in Samaria, and considered only the Pentateuch as canonical. In addition to these bothersome characteristics, the Samaritans were also a constant reminder of the pre-exilic Jews’ failure to honor, serve and obey God – which resulted in them being expelled from the land.

In the midst of this acrimonious tension, Jesus walks right into Samaria, delegates some grocery shopping to the disciples and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water. Scandalous! There was a tradition of separatist purity here that Jesus seemed to be ignoring, and the woman wastes no time pointing this out to him.

The woman who encounters Jesus at the well in Samaria had had five husbands and was living with yet another man. We don’t know the details of her life and why those marriages ended. In that particular culture, a man could divorce his wife but she wasn’t able to divorce him, so this woman could not have initiated any of the breakups herself. Still, with that number of failures, it’s not too speculative to suggest that she had some problems in relationships with men. She may have been looking for something in them that they just couldn’t supply.

            Marriage, happy or not, is not the final goal of life. That’s no criticism of marriage itself: Scripture speaks about it as something instituted and blessed by God, and there’s a whole book of the Bible, The Song of Solomon, devoted to the love of a woman and a man. But if you look for ultimate purpose and meaning in marriage and family, just as in your job or your country, you’ll be disappointed. That’s not as obvious as it is with looking for happiness in a bottle, but equally true. It’s an even more dangerous illusion because the greatest created goods can also be the most alluring idols.

Jesus’ rebuke of the woman is a gentle one, but it is a rebuke. He doesn’t dwell on her marital situation, but his insight into her life moves the woman to say, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.” She begins to talk about what she considers important religious questions, who God’s chosen people are and where people are to worship: Is it the Samaritans or the Jews, Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans had a temple, or the Jews’ Mount Zion?

            In reality, the meaning of life is not a matter of being in the right denomination or in having located a holy place. But Jesus doesn’t just reject her questions. Nor does he immediately give answers to questions she isn’t asking — which is often a temptation for religious people. But then the woman speaks about her hope for the coming Messiah. For the Jews, that generally meant a kingly figure like David, while for Samaritans the expectation was of the prophet like Moses promised in the book of Deuteronomy.Both of those images are only partial aspects of what God offers, but this gives Jesus an opportunity to tell her more about the living water. When the woman speaks about the Messiah, Jesus answers, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

            “Jesus” is not a simplistic answer that immediately solves all our problems. If you are literally dehydrated, you need ordinary H₂O, not religious talk. But if you’re faced with the really big problems of the world and ultimate questions about the meaning of life, “Jesus” is indeed the answer.

“Salvation is from the Jews” because the Word of God came into the world as a Jew, born of Mary. True spiritual worship can take place in Samaria, or Jerusalem, or anyplace else for that matter, but it takes place in and through Jesus because (as his cryptic words in an earlier chapter of Johnsuggest) he is the true temple, the one in whom God is encountered. Centuries earlier the prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a river flowing from the restored temple, and now Jesus is the source of the true living water.

            We might expect that Jesus, having declared himself to be the expected prophet, would now give some detailed moral and theological instruction to the woman. She doesn’t wait for that, however, but goes into the town and tells others about him. Jesus’ teaching is indeed important, and the gospels give us a good deal of it, but the important thing is that it is Jesus who is doing the teaching! As the beginning of this gospel of John emphasized, he himself is the Word of God, God’s fullest communication to us.

            At the beginning of his Confessions, St. Augustine addressed God and said, “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” That is often quoted, but it’s too bad that people often think it means that it’s up to us to find our way to God. They expect success in that search to be a big “religious experience,” a kind of spiritual rush. But the Christian claim is that God finds us — in ordinary situations of life.

God comes as a thirsty Jewish man to a not especially moral or religious woman. And the result may or may not be an emotional high or intoxication with religious feeling. Instead, it may be as simple as knowing that God is with us, and he starts with us just as we are.