Living Water...

A word of thanks to Rev. Kathleen Lambert, who posted her sermon on her blog, and helped me consolidate my thoughts about this passage.

Honestly, there is so much to unpack and explore with this passage. I didn't even touch on the disciples' reactions, and the whole part about Jesus having food they didn't know about.

All I'm saying is that this is not the last time you'll hear from me about this passage...

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?”

Romans 5:1-11
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

John 4:5-42
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 worshiped 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 worshipers 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?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”
So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

This is the Word of the Lord.



We met Nicodemus last week, sneaking through the dark of night to meet with Jesus. Since then, Jesus has spent some time in the Judean countryside, spending time with his disciples while they baptized people.

But now they’re headed back to Galilee, along the most direct route available. Even so, the long, dusty walk in the relentless heat has taken its toll. They near a village, just another huddle of tiny homes and shops poking up out of the dirt and sand like broken molars. There’s a well, though, encircled with rocks worn nearly smooth by the centuries, and built just high enough to create a shady spot. It is there, at last, Jesus rests. The disciples all go on onto the town to try and find some food. Jesus doesn’t pay attention to the grumbles about how hard it’ll be to find something permissible, something even edible amongst all these Samaritans.

There are people who will tell you that Jesus chose this time and this place for the specific purpose of meeting who he was going to meet and for teaching the disciples what he was going to teach them.

I have no problem at all with that kind of view.

But it seems to me that there is a simpler, more wonderful explanation. One of the hardest things for people to remember about Jesus is that, though he is and was fully God, he was fully human, with all the pain and weakness that so often marks the human condition. He lived in a place and time where nearly everyone lived on a subsistence diet, one meal a day, mostly beans, perhaps a few vegetables, bread, and some kind of meat once a week or less. Water was as scarce as food. Most people were too poor to afford the luxury of a riding animal, so they walked everywhere.

So with all of this in mind, it isn’t hard to imagine Jesus, bone-weary from walking, caked in sand and dirt, sitting into the shade and leaning up against the well’s cool stones with a sigh of relief. Slowly his back stops throbbing, his legs stop cramping, and he might have drifted off to sleep, but as the pain subsided he realized… he was thirsty!

Wells being what they are, of course, he couldn’t just turn a tap. Luckily, someone showed up just when he was thinking about going to look for something to dip water with, a woman shows up with a water vase.

He says, “Give me a drink.” It’s a simple enough sentence, and I’m betting it sounds a lot less demanding in Aramaic, but with that one sentence, Jesus takes centuries of prejudice, hatred, distrust, and naked fear and grinds them into the dust.

You see, to say the Samaritans and the Jews hated one another is a breathtaking understatement. The Samaritans were the descendants of Jewish people deemed too insignificant to deport to Babylon and of Gentile people whom the Assyrians had settled in Palestine. Over time, these Samaritans had developed different worship habits and different beliefs than the Jews. The central place of worship for the Samaritans was Mount Gerizim, and as if that alone weren’t enough to drive home the wedge between the two people, the Samaritans recognized only the first five books of the Bible, the Penteteuch, as authoritative.

So the Jews considered these Samaritans to be less than pure, less than honorable, less than human, when you get right down to it. In fact, the really good Jews who had to travel from Jerusalem to Galilee would usually add days to their journey by actually going around Samaria, because to touch the soil of that land was to be made unclean!

So for a Jewish man to be simply sitting in the shade of a Samaritan well was a shock. That this Jewish man would speak to a strange woman was another shock. That this Jewish man would speak to a strange Samaritan woman… well, I imagine the woman about dropped her jar in shock. She may have even looked around to see who Jesus was really talking to.

She asks, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” and Jesus answers her, not with the same words, but in the same fashion that he answered Nicodemus in our Gospel reading from last week.

You’ll remember that Nicodemus had started off on a rather pompous declaration of how all his colleagues had decided that Jesus was worthy of respect as a man of God, and Jesus interrupted him with a bold statement: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

To this Samaritan woman, Jesus answers, “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.”

Now, just like with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at first doesn’t understand exactly what Jesus is saying. Living water, you see, is a phrase which was commonly used to describe water which was moving, constantly refreshed, like in a stream or a river, as opposed to water which accumulated and grew brackish, like in a cistern. So in the same way that Nicodemus completely missed what Jesus was saying about being born anew, born from above, the Samaritan woman thought Jesus was either joking with her, or crazy.

Unlike Nicodemus, though, it didn’t take her long to go from doubt to understanding.

Isn’t that interesting? Throughout the long, nighttime conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, we are never sure the Pharisee understood what Jesus was saying to him. He very likely left that night more full of questions, doubts, and frustrations than when he snuck out the back door to go and see Jesus in the first place. Despite his education, his standing, his riches and his authority, the spiritual truth that Jesus offered him hung in the air, unclaimed. Desptie everything in his favor, he simply did not get it.

For all the things Nicodemus had in his favor, this Samaritan woman had enough strikes against her to end a ball game. Aside from being, well, a Samaritan, she was a woman in an oppressively patriarchal society. We don’t know whether she had lost husbands through death or through divorce, but she’d been through a lot of them. She had to, though; a woman in that era and that region had no standing and no legal rights apart from a man. Couple this with the fact that she came to the well alone, and in the middle of the day, rather than in the late afternoon, when it was cooler, and when the women of the village gathered together to share the news of the day as they filled their water jugs, and we have the picture of a person who was considered an outcast even by her own.

Sure, the Woman at the Well had issues. She was uneducated, she was a Samaritan, she was an outcast. Yet in spite of all of these things working against her, this Samaritan woman got it. And because she got it, many more people in that Samaritan town were able to meet Jesus, to hear the Good News of the Gospel, and believe for themselves.



You know, it all began, though, with Jesus asking a question. A simple question. But with that question, this Jewish man, this Jesus of Nazareth, broke the rules. He broke the rules by speaking to her, but he did something more. He asked her for water, which gave her value. He spoke of her life in specific terms, but, and I want to be clear on this, without condemnation. In fact, at no point in the conversation, be it her current living arrangements or how the Samaritans rejected the Temple in Jerusalem as the proper place to worship God, did Jesus use words which rebuked or condemned her. To the contrary, Jesus removed the stigma, erased the shame, destroyed the walls of separation…

In our Epistle reading today, Paul says something earth-shattering. I know, big surprise, it’s Paul, duh, he does that stuff all the time, right? But listen to what he says in Romans, the fifth chapter and the eighth verse: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we got baptized, Christ died for us.” Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we went through confirmation and joined the church, Christ died for us.” Not, “But God proves his love for us in that once we prayed a prayer and publicly confirmed that we gave mental assent to all the right things, Christ died for us.”
No, while we were still sinners. While we were as far from God and as averse to relationship with God as it is possible to be, while we were at our darkest and most venal, that was where and when and how God loved us. Loved us to the point of death – loved us to the point of resurrection.

Do you see the power in that? It means that whoever we are, whatever labels society has pasted on us, whatever we’ve done in the past or the present to reject God, wherever we are – regardless of disparities in geography or philosophy or theology or politics or culture or ethnicity or gender, we, like that Samaritan woman, are of utmost value in the eyes and in the heart of God.

This is the Good News! This is the living water which flows in us and through us and which must be shared – shared with those we love… and shared with the Samaritans in our life.

I promise you that I could go on with this passage for the remainder of the afternoon. If I ever decide to take that fateful leap into becoming someone who does sermon series, the first one will be on this passage, because there is so much to say. But I’ll close with this:

Who are the Samaritans in your life? The people you don’t really know that well, because they are different? Perhaps they live in a way that you find repugnant. Perhaps they believe things that rub you the wrong way. Perhaps they’re just people from a worldview or culture you just haven’t had any experience with. Beginning today, why not be Jesus to them, in the way that Jesus was to the woman at the well? Speak life to them, rather than standing in silent judgment. Reach out in the love of Christ, with the same heart with which God loves you, rather than pulling away, as so many do. Proclaim the grace of God that loved you when you were and are at your worst, rather than pontificating condemnation and wagging your allegorical finger at them.

How dare we hold back living water from people – from a world – dying of thirst?