The Rev’d E. Bevan Stanley
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2023
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Jesus said: “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” In the Name of the one, holy, and undivided Trinity. Amen.
Setting aside the Passion narrative that we will hear in Holy Week, I think this is the longest Gospel passage in the lectionary. As a result there are a number of issues and themes in it, any of which could be the basis for a sermon. For example, one could focus on how Jesus crosses the boundaries between Jews and Samaritans and between men and women. One could focus on how Jesus knows everything the Samaritan woman did and still accepted her.
(By the way, whenever I read that the woman’s testimony was that Jesus told her everything she had ever done, I am reminded of a book my daughter had as a child. It was called One Thousand Monsters. It was a spiral bound flip book with ten cardboard pages. Each page was divided into three pieces, so with ten pages one could have one thousand different combinations. For example “This slimy beast has five arms and hides under your bed.” Or”This hungry horror likes to jump up and down and chases bicycles.” But the most frightening ones were those that ended “ . . . and knows what you did.” It’s bad news when a monster knows what you did. It may not be easy news that Jesus knows what you did, but it is good news. )
One could look at how the Samaritan tradition looked forward to the coming of a “prophet like Moses” as predicted in the Pentateuch more than a new Elijah as foretold in the prophets. We could think about what constitutes true worship in spirit and truth. We could look at the incomprehension of the disciples. One could speak about readiness of the harvest and the need for more laborers. One could speak about what it means to acknowledge Jesus as Savior of the world.
Instead of any of these I suggest that we take a hint from the first reading and reflect on
the gift of water. Before we look at how water is used in today’s readings, let us first acknowledge that water is a powerful archetype and carries many different and even conflicting associations. It can represent the quenching of thirst, cleansing, the source of life both in evolution and in the amniotic fluid in the womb. It can be pictured as a peaceful lake, or a raging storm. It can represent life or death. In can be the primeval abyss of chaos and creativity over which the Holy Spirit moved at the creation. It can remind us of Baptism. And on and on.
In our reading from Exodus this morning, the Children of Israel are crossing the dessert, perhaps the Sinai. They run out of water and are in danger of dying of thirst. Before we go any farther, lets take a moment and recall a time when we were really thirsty. Maybe you were on a hike or had been mowing the lawn on a hot summer day. I remember a very long portage on a canoe trip. The trail just kept going on, the canoe on my head kept getting heavier. At last I saw a flicker of blue through the trees. I plodded down the last slope to the lake shore and just walked in up to my thighs, threw the canoe off and plunged my head into the blessed, cool, divine water. I am sure each of us has a story like that. For the Israelites it was worse. More than a discomfort, their lives were in peril. God tells Moses to use his magical staff and strike the rocky cliff. He does so, and water gushes out. The people are saved by God intervention through the mediation of Moses. Water is salvation, and it comes from God. A note in my Bible says that in the Sinai there is a water table beneath the layer of sandstone.
In the Gospel, Jesus comes to a Samaritan town or city and sits down by the well which tradition held had been dug by Jacob a couple of thousand years earlier. It is the middle of the day. A Samaritan woman comes out to draw water at the well. Commentators have often pointed out that noonday is an odd time to draw water; it is usually done first thing in the morning or near dusk. There is a suggestion that, given the problematic nature of this woman’s personal life, it may have been less socially uncomfortable for her to get her water at a time when she could avoid the other women of the town.
In any case, she comes to the well, and Jesus opens a conversation with her by asking for a drink of water. She had a bucket, and he did not. When Jesus asks for water because he is thirsty, he is in the same position as the Children of Israel in the desert. He needs water and asks for it. This puts the Samaritan woman in the position of Moses who is called upon to provide the water or to be the means by which God will provide it. Unlike Moses, she does not produce the water. Instead, she asks why he is even asking.
Somehow she knows he is a Jew and asks why he is breaking the norms and speaking to her who is a Samaritan. Jesus responds, “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.” Jesus starts by asking for water from the woman, and now he has turned the conversation around. He is offering water to the woman. Jesus is now offering to take the place of Moses in providing the water. This would make him the “prophet like Moses” predicted in the Torah. This more like the messiah the Samaritans would be looking for than the Son of David for which the more southerly tradition would be waiting. In this context, it is a messianic claim.
Much as in the conversation Jesus had last Sunday with Nicodemus, there arises a misunderstanding on the part of the Jesus’ interlocutor. The woman thinks Jesus is still talking about literal water and asks how Jesus thinks he will get water without a bucket. And who does he think he is anyway? Someone greater than Jacob who gave them the well? Jesus responds by making it clear that he is talking about something more than just wet liquid. “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.” Also, the water that Jesus is offering is living water, that is, water that is bubbling up as in a spring, not just sitting in a cistern or at the bottom of a well.
So, what is this water that Jesus is offering? The Spirit? Knowledge of the Law? Life? Salvation? What ever it is, it is eternal. And it leaps up. The Greek verb is used of living things. If we drink of this water, we will never by thirsty again. Not only that. If we drink of the water from Jesus, we ourselves will become springs. We will be the source of the life-giving and life-saving water gushing out and leaping up for others.
This is Lent. Lent is a time for us to get real about ourselves and our relationship with God. It is a time for self-examination and a time to attend to spiritual maintenance, including patching up holes or healing wounds. It is a time for facing the truth about ourselves. It is a time to let Jesus tell us everything we ever did. This may be frightening, and such truth will set us free. This truth will contain things that we regret and things of which we can rejoice. On Ash Wednesday we were reminded that we are mortal. We are made the dust of the earth and the divine breath. We are made of dirt and God. Today, we are reminded that we are thirsty mortals, and, unless God gives us water, we will die. And then Jesus teaches us that God does not want merely to be a source of water for us; God wants us to become sources of water. Like the rock at Massah and Meribah, Jesus invites us to be springs of living water gushing up from our stony hearts to eternal life.
So, come my friends and let take this journey by stages. First, we acknowledge our need, our thirst. We ask for God to meet our need and give us water. We rejoice when we receive it. Then we encounter Jesus who, in taking on our flesh, experiences thirst and asks us to draw some water from whatever well we may have. Then when we ask who he really is, he tells us that he has water for us to drink that will change us from needy, thirsty people, to creatures of abundance and life, providing joy and healing and life for others. This is the path of Lent. This is the path of the Christian life. God does not want us to wallow in self-abnegation, or to be defined by our frailties. God wants us to become godlike in dispensing life and joy and grace to all around us to the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the holy Spirit. Amen.