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March 7, l999
WATER BOY OR LIVING WATER? (John
4:4-l6)
The story of the grumbling Hebrews forcing Moses to
petition God for water was told endlessly around tribal
campfires in order to remind the Hebrews about the
wrong attitude with which to approach God. A certain
amount of whining is acceptable because God is a pretty
reasonable God who identifies with our needs. Should we
need water, we will usually get water. But God is not
our water boy.
The closing sentences of today's Old Testament text
suggests that underlying the clamor for water is the
anxiety that Yahweh might have deserted the camp of the
Hebrews: IS THE LORD AMONG US OR NOT? The Hebrews had
ample evidence that when God was present to them, as with
the crossing of the Red Sea, they would be given what
was needed to survive.
We face the same issue and anxiety: we much more need
the presence of God in our lives than we need to worry
about some particular material need. Most of us have
enough of everything…if our dependency upon God was
dependent upon begging for and receiving things, we
would ignore God. Yet we do call upon God because we want
divine presence in our lives. We know instinctively that
there is no more important presence and when we know God
is real with us we also know that all other things will
follow. What is true of individual disciples is equally
true of the Church: a Church can profess all it wants but
if it has the anxiety that God has deserted it the
congregation will end up clamoring for more of this and
that as substitutes for the living waters.
We don't need a spiritual water boy! We need spiritual
living waters. But we often are happy to settle for
buckets of spirituality conveyed to us by our obedient
but reduced sense of God.
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The story told by John would have been instantly
reassuring to Jewish listeners because the meeting at the
well in Samaria is identified as taking place at Jacob's
Well and that would have immediately called up another
meeting at the same well a thousand years earlier, as
told in Geneses 29, when the sojourner Jacob comes to
that same well at "high day" (just like Jesus at noon).
There Jacob beholds his kinswoman Rachel and, Genesis
adds, dryly, her father's sheep. He waters the sheep.
"Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and wept aloud." In this
earlier story it was pure boy meets girl, boy kisses
girl; boy and girl eventually (with a huge assist from
Leah) create a family of tribes, the children of Israel.
That's the way a love story is supposed to turn out.
In John's version of a man and woman meeting at the
same well, the story takes a different turn. From the
first sharply spoken words, the conversation assumes the
character of a confrontation that is charged with a
significance surpassing romance and the making of babies.
He is a teacher from above, but if his wisdom has a
divine component to it, she does not know it the first.
He is an unexpected presence and she does not understand
him. She is a woman hardened by the world, she is thirsty
not only for water but for something else she cannot
name.
********
The story illustrates John's frequent use of irony.
Irony is when two levels of reality or two types of
discourse are operating simultaneously with a seeming
unbridgeable gulf between them. You recall last week's
conversation in which Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about his
need to be born from above, and Nicodemus, operated on
another by thinking about the impossibility of his
biological rebirth. In ironic conversation, one party -
Nicodemus last week and the Samaritan woman this week -
are unaware, at least initially of the discrepancy. And
in that discrepancy there arises humor as with Nicodemus'
improbable image of an adult male passing once more down
the material birthing canal and in today's story the
humor of the woman responding to Jesus reference to
eternal waters by noting he didn't even have a
bucket.
We, who are the audience, are aware of the irony and
the tension and humor given off by the confused
communication.
Today's ironic encounter at Jacob's well features a
woman struggling in the dark for a genuine new day;
someone thirsty for something more than natural water,
something equally essential, but it is not named. So when
Jesus offers the woman "living water" she replies, at
first, with confusion about where's the bucket. But when
she hears more about the water welling up to eternal
life, she understands enough to say, "Sir, give me this
water…"
Jesus moves the conversation from its somewhat
ethereal level and cuts to the chase when he abruptly
tells the woman "Go, call your husband." That is Jesus'
reality check which confronts the woman with her need to
distance herself from her wrong lifestyle of receiving
different lovers.
TURN TO YOUR WORSHIP SHEET OR YOUR BIBLE AS WE READ
TOGETHER JOHN 4:4-l6)
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Perhaps the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman
turns out to be a love story after all, for only one who
loves you knows you as you are and not as you pretend to
be. Only one who loves you knows your deepest desires.
Only one who loves you can look at your past without
blinking. And only one who loves you can expect you to
accept accountability, make amends, and assume a new
way.
Like the Samaritan woman and the Hebrews in the
wilderness, we often make mistakes in our searching for
something more. We practice religion but often do not
connect it with a living Christ who comes to us. Jesus
has forever been misunderstood and worst of all captured
by special interests of our parochial and dried up
spirituality. We cry for something more than water and
yet often want to fit God's blessings into our spiritual
buckets of water. Knowing not that the water is to be
poured out liberally upon our parched souls, we keep it
in those buckets which we name "doctrine" and "prejudice"
not knowing that it will evaporate.
And when the living waters evaporate on us, we go
right back to where we are always more comfortable in our
search for ultimate satisfaction: our family, our assets,
our life styles, our fulfilled selves. We listen intently
to ourselves but, at best, listen occasionally with only
one ear to the One who can tell us everything we ever
did.
I find comfort and reassurance in the ending of the
story: "SO WHEN THE SAMARITANS CAME TO HIM, JESUS STAYED
THERE TWO DAYS. AND MANY MORE BELIEVED BECAUSE OF HIS
WORD. We see again one of the endearing qualities of
Jesus of Nazareth: he readily wasted his time and love on
persons whom the world would judge not worthy of his time
and love. Persons like us!
There are further ironies in the way the Gospel writer
John relates the story of Jesus. Recall that in John l9
John records Jesus on the cross crying out: "I THIRST."
Like the Hebrews in the wilderness, and the woman at the
well, he needed water, too; he was human. Yet his thirst
was not quenched. Jesus died thirsty in the material way
so that we might live not thirsty in the spiritual way.
And when he was dead, and his side pierced to prove
it, John says in l9:34: AND AT ONCE BLOOD AND WATER CAME
OUT. Ah, is that the writer's ultimate irony: the living
water pours from the pierced side of Jesus co-mingled
with his blood!
The Church believes so and that is why at Communion
some water is added to the element. It is not just the
practicality of diluting the wine, or in our case, the
juice. It is for us to remember that in Jesus we receive
the loving blood which sets us right with God and the
living water which sustains us.
At this point the minister poured water into the
communion cup and the Communion proper began.
It is this co-mingling of Jesus bodily fluid which
introduced the practice of the priest watering down the
communion wine.
The communion element represents the blood of Jesus
mixed symbolically with the water of life which Jesus
promised to the Samaritan woman. Jesus carried in his
person what humanity needed all along.
Pastor Gene Preston
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