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Sermon for Lent 3A

March 3, 2002

Today we continue with our Lenten series of Gospel stories from John about encounters between Jesus and someone to whom Jesus offers enlightenment—a new experience of God’s presence that leads to a new quality of life. The encounter today is between Jesus and a Samaritan woman who meets him at Jacob’s Well outside the town of Sychar.

The conversation between Jesus and this woman ranges over several topics and touches several levels of meaning; but the crucial part, the turning point from earthly understanding to spiritual insight, comes in their talk about water—especially the living water that Jesus promises to give her if she will only believe and ask. Jesus says to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and if you knew who was speaking to you, you would ask me, and I would give you living water, so that you would never be thirsty again.”

Now that’s a pretty big offer. It’s a big offer even on the worldly level on which the woman first hears and understands it. You see, the phrase “living water” could be taken in two ways in the Aramaic language that Jews and Samaritans would have spoken in common at that time. The worldly sense, the everyday sense, the obvious sense, of “living water” was running water, water that flowed, water that was in motion rather than water that simply sat still. The woman and Jesus are sitting by Jacob’s Well, which was a hole, a pit, a cistern for collecting water that welled up from the ground water layer or seeped down from occasional rainfall—and then sat there, a little pool of standing water, until people came and drew some of it out for their daily purposes. Cistern water, of course, is better than no water at all; but the problem with standing water is that it’s not always very fresh. It can get stale, it can get muddy or clouded with sediment, things can start living in it. It would be far better to have living water, running water, water that comes from a spring that bubbles up on its own, or water that comes from a stream that flows by and constantly renews itself—or best of all, if you’re rich enough to afford to live like Romans, you could have indoor plumbing, you could have water than comes in aqueducts and pipes that come right to your house. Best of all to have fresh water that runs right to you, rather than having to trudge all the way out to a cistern or a well and collect the water for yourself.

That is what the woman thinks Jesus is talking about when he offers her “living water.” Not that she thinks this socially inappropriate Jewish man, who dares speak to her, a Samaritan woman, could possibly give her a spring or a stream or indoor plumbing—but she would desperately like to have those things, she would desperately like not to have to come out to this well and draw water anymore. Because coming to the well was not a pleasant experience for her. And it wasn’t just the physical drudgery of pulling up the water bucket and lugging her heavy water jar back and forth to her house—coming to the well was a lonely, emotionally painful task for this woman, and something she would like to be rid of forever.

In Samaritan society of those days, gathering water was women’s work; and it was something most women did early in the morning, before the sun got too high and the heat of the day became too intense. The morning gathering around the well was a social time, a time for the women of the village to be together, a time to swap news and share gossip and see who needed help and who had help to give. Gathering at the well was a great time for networking, as we would put it today. But this woman doesn’t go out with the other women at daybreak; she’s waited until noon, about the hottest time of the day, to come out to the well all by herself, and all on her own to get what she needs for the day.

The story soon makes it clear that there’s a reason why she comes to the well all by herself. This woman has had five husbands, and now she’s living with a sixth to whom she’s not even married—her life has been irregular, to say the least, and her moral conduct has scandalized the entire town. When the women gossip around the well in the morning, she is one of the topics they gossip about most. No wonder she wants to avoid them! If this Jesus could give her indoor plumbing and running water, that would mean she’d never have to come out to the well again; she’d never have to put up with their disapproving looks and their whispers behind her back; she’d never have to admit how much it hurts her to be treated like that, how thirsty she is for some respect and some dignity and some friendship; she’d never have to confront the fact that she’s kept looking for someone to love her, someone to make the emptiness and dryness inside her go away, and five husbands and one lover and a whole townfull of people could not make her feel loved if she did not have love inside her to begin with. If this Jesus could just give her running water, then she’d never have to face any of that again. And so she says—with more than a little sarcasm in her voice, I think—she says, “Sir, give me this water always.”

But that is not the kind of offer Jesus is making. He says “living water”; she hears “running water”; but what he wants her to hear is “water of life,” the flow of something that makes you alive and more alive, the Spirit that comes from God and wells up inside a person and becomes a spring gushing up to eternal life. Jesus isn’t offering her a way to avoid her thirst or deny her thirst or put off her thirst; Jesus is offering her a way to face her thirst—her real thirst, not just a thirst for water but a thirst for love—Jesus is offering her a way to face her thirst and name it and have it fulfilled in the love of God, have it fulfilled in the worship of God in spirit and in truth.

And it is that jump in understanding—from running water to water of the spirit that gives life—that jump that provokes the woman to her enlightenment. When she realizes what Jesus is really offering, when she realizes that he is treating her with a respect and a love that she doesn’t have  to earn from without, but that touches something deep within her heart—when she feels the love of God within her in the presence of Jesus—then everything is changed. She runs back into town—the very town she’s been avoiding—and calls together all the people—the very people she’s gone to great lengths to keep from seeing—and says “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done”—the very past she’s been trying to cover up. She is so energized by the spirit and truth she’s found in Jesus that she cannot wait to share it with others. The realization of God’s love in Jesus wells up within her and makes her life new.

And it is that same living water that Jesus offers to us. It is that same experience of the love of God that comes up from within and doesn’t depend on external standards of popularity or acceptability or social success, that Jesus offers to us. It is that same freedom from trying to find our value from other people, but instead finding our value in God’s love for us, and then sharing that value with others in relationships—it is that same freedom that Jesus offers to us. Like the woman at the well, Jesus says to us, If you believe and if you ask, I will give you the water of life, and you will never be thirsty again. And like the woman at the well, we can turn around and offer the good news of that living water to those who are most thirsty to hear it. To the teenage girl who thinks she’ll never be popular unless she caves in to peer pressure and goes along with what “all the other kids” are doing. To the hard-driven working man who fears that only his success on the job makes him valuable, and if he should fail in that then no one will care about him as a person at all. To the elderly widow who has no one to tell her stories to, and is afraid that her life will end up being meaningless because there’s no one to share it with. To anyone who has ever felt they’ve had to look for their worth outside themselves, Jesus offers a love that reveals the value and the dignity and the worth they have in God—and Jesus offers that love, Jesus offers that water of life, through us, through our words and witness, through our compassion and caring, through our community and fellowship, through our failure and forgiveness, through our faithfulness to look for the beauty that God has put in each and every one of us.

Jesus offers us living water that can change our lives and make us instruments for change in the lives of others. That is the gift of Lent, the gift of repentance and renewal and redemption, that God gives to us today.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.