Lent 3, March 23 2014
Ex 17:3-27; Rom 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42
I have to confess that the story of the woman at the well has never been my favorite. Jesus always sounded arrogant and boastful in it. “If you knew who I am, you’d ask me for water”; “Whoever drinks the water I will give him will never thirst again”; “You people worship what you do not understand”; “I am the Messiah.” In irreverent moments, I could imagine the Samaritan woman saying to him, “Look, you were the one who asked me for a drink. Why don’t you drink your own never-thirsty-again water, if you’re so great?”
But that is because I was looking for Jesus of Nazareth—what he was really like as a human being—which of course is not what this story is about. It’s about what it means to become a disciple, and the predominant metaphor here is living water.
What is living water? The term refers to flowing water, but especially to springs. In the first reading, Moses strikes the rock at Meribah and a spring gushes out. At first this sounds like just another miracle story about how God helped the Israelites. Have you ever been on a walk and discovered a spring? Every spring is a miracle. Out of the ground or even out of a rock, flows pure water. In a parched land, springs are precious. Long ago when my husband and I were traveling and camping in Kenya, we stopped and asked a ranger where we could find water. We walked in the direction he indicated, and there was a pond, with a thick coating of green scum on top. That was where local people got their drinking water, in the absence of a spring.
Our text calls Jacob’s well at Sychar a cistern—that is, a place where rainwater is collected and stored. The original Greek says that Jesus sat on the well, which was literally possible, because the well was wide but covered with a large flat stone about a foot thick. A narrow hole in the middle of the stone was wide enough to lower a small bucket. There was no oaken bucket associated with the well. Instead, people brought their own buckets, which were small and made of leather. Travelers always carried such buckets. When you came to a well, you unfolded your bucket, put in a frame of sticks to hold the top open, and lowered it into the narrow opening. A woman might lower it many times to fill her water jug.
In this story, the woman loves the idea of living water, because then she won’t have to come to the well alone in the heat of the day. Most women went together early in the morning, for companionship and safety, but she is clearly a pariah who is not welcome to go with them.
There is a lot going on in this story, but one thing is that Jesus invites the woman to a new relationship with God. We all learn about God from scriptures and tradition. People long ago experienced something and passed it down to us. They preserved it, like we save water in a cistern, so that even after the prophet is gone, we remember his words and deeds. That’s good. But Jesus tells the woman that she does not have to depend solely on such traditions. She can have the equivalent of a spring of living water in her soul, and she can worship God and commune with him without having to go through the priests of Mount Gerazim.
John’s Gospel is all about having life now and having it more abundantly. Jesus was in constant communion with God, and that was the spring of living water that he wanted to share with the woman at the well. He accosted her even though she was a woman, a Samaritan, a sinner, and a social pariah. Because when the living water is within you, you do not see pariahs. You see only souls.
We don’t hear what happened to the woman at the well after this episode, because the ending is up to us. The living water gave her the strength to change her life. Did she in fact change her life? Not easy to do. Did the other villagers become a community that was willing to forget her past and accept her? The story doesn’t say. It says that we can have life and have it more abundantly, but the ending is still up to us.