Thirst
James E. Gilman
February 24, 2008
John 4: 5-42
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 [living] water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life…. The hour is coming and is now here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth”
Thirst is the heart of Lent. Thirst is our strongest physical drive; it’s the drive to survive. We experience other strong drives; hunger and sex, for example. But we can live without sex; just ask any married person. And we can live longer without food than we can without water. Several of today’s bible lessons speak of thirst. In Exodus we read that in the Sinai wilderness the Israelites “thirsted for water.” And John’s gospel speaks of quenching thirst. Jesus and his disciples are traveling from Judea in the south to Galilee in the north. To do so they travel through Samaria, which is desert. In the middle of it is Jacob’s well where locals and sojourners rest and refresh themselves. In his remarkable encounter with a Samaritan woman, the desert of Samaria represents for Jesus a wilderness of the soul, a metaphor for spiritual thirst. And for Jesus the water of Jacob’s well becomes a metaphor for a kind of spiritual water, a ”living water” that alone can quench a thirsty human heart.
Our bodies are about two thirds water. We get thirsty and then dehydrated when the amount of water in our bodies drops below the level needed for normal body functions. If we drink the water we need, our bodies do not get dehydrated and they function normally. Analogously, humans get spiritually thirsty and eventually dehydrated when the amount of spiritual water in our lives drops below the level needed for normal spiritual functioning. But if on a regular basis we do not drink from a well of spiritual water, we get thirsty and dehydrated and cannot function spiritually. At Lent we contemplate our thirst for God and how to quench it.
So, what are the ways we get spiritually thirsty and dehydrated? Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well suggests three ways: neglect, prejudice, and false worship.
(1) Neglect of our spiritual lives is perhaps the most common way we become spiritually dehydrated. We fail to exercise our souls and keep them healthy. Tell the truth, now!! Don’t we focus way more time and energy and resources on physical health and personal entertainment than we do on the health of our souls. This apparently is the case with the Samaritan woman. John’s story indicates that the woman has had five husbands and the one she is with now is not her husband. Apparently she is a vain woman; preoccupied with herself, with satisfying her desire for romance. Aren’t we similarly preoccupied with meeting our material, professional, and social needs and neglecting our spiritual thirst? Think of our own personal schedules and priorities. Compare the time, energy, and resources we expend entertaining ourselves, and making ourselves comfortable, with the amount of time, energy, and resources we expend on hydrating our souls. Simply going to church on Sundays, won’t quench our thirst. Like the Samaritan woman our default mode is often just romancing ourselves and our desires. We get so wrapped up in taking care of ourselves materially that we often neglect ourselves spiritually. Our souls get so flabby and fat and immobile, that we cannot even draw up a bucket of living water from the well of love and compassion that Jesus offers us.
(2) A second way we allow ourselves to become spiritually thirsty and dehydrated is by harboring prejudices. Prejudices and “living water” are mutually exclusive. Prejudices express our own insecurities; they are our personal excuses for not loving people. In contrast, living water means loving people, including those we don’t like. So, we can’t have it both ways—we can’t hold prejudices and at the same time quench our spiritual thirst. Prejudices dehydrate not only the dignity of our victims, but also our own dignity. The Samaritan woman is a victim of two cultural prejudices—sexism, racism, and nationalism. These prejudices isolate her and drain her of her dignity as a child created in God’s image.
Take racism and nationalism, for example. Jews and Samaritans both routinely quarantined each other through ancient habits of racial and national hostility. Jews considered Samaritans half-breeds and renegades. They were forbidden, by law, to interact with them. The gospel says, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” That is why the woman is surprised when Jesus talks with her. “How is it that you, a Jew, asks a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” she asks. Jews and Samaritans lived isolated in their insecure, parched, narrowed-minded little deserts of racial and nationalistic self-centeredness. Only love could penetrate, but neither culture was about to show that. So, the Samaritan woman’s thirst partly resulted from her being trapped in the spiritual wilderness created by her culture’s racial nationalism.
Think of our own cultural/nationalistic prejudices: immigrants, homosexuals, women, non-English speaking foreigners, mentally disabled, Muslims, Arabs, Jews. Or think of your own personal prejudices: boss, strange neighbor, dysfunctional co-worker, in-laws, parents. What an empty, parched wilderness prejudices creates for us, as they did for the Samaritan woman. They evaporate the dignity not only of the victim but also the vendor of prejudice. By holding them we imprison ourselves, and cut ourselves, as well as our victims, off from the living water of God’s compassion and love. And it is that compassion and love that alone can quench our thirst. By holding to our prejudices we deny ourselves the joy and dignity of showing to those who most need it the Jesus’ living water of love and mercy.
How does Jesus deal with prejudices? He is subversive. He refuses to submit to his culture’s racial and nationalistic prejudices; he refuses to live cramped in their arid desert of ignorance. He simply obliterates them; he refuses to use them as excuses for not loving, for not quenching the his enemy’s spiritual thirst.
(3) But that’s not all; Jesus is relentless. He doesn’t let even the religious (you and I) off the hook. Not only do neglect and prejudice dehydrate our spiritual lives; so does false worship. The very act of worship that is supposed to quench our thirst, Jesus says, sometimes withers us. How so? Jesus seems to say that when our worship is self-centered, when we worship in pride, when we idolize our religion and our way of worshipping as better than others, then our worship is bogus; because it divides us from others instead of unites us.
Both Jews and Samaritans considered their religion to be more authentic and true than the other’s. Samaritans believed that only the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were authoritative; they rejected all the other writings accepted by Jews. This made them think their beliefs were more pure and authentic. Another idol, mentioned by the Samaritan woman, is that Samaritans considered the proper place of worship to be their temple at Mt. Gerizim, whereas Jews considered the temple in Jerusalem as sacred. Such conceits make worship an idol and prevents it from being the well-spring of living water that quenches spiritual thirst. True worship inspires extraordinary love; it unites, not divides.
It’s remarkable what Jesus says about these two hostile religious traditions. “Believe me” he says to the Samaritan, “the hour is coming when you will worship [God] neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, …” neither her religion or his. “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshippers will worship God in spirit and in truth…. God is spirit and those who worship [God] must worship in spirit and in truth.” Jesus is insisting that devotes of any religious tradition, despite all their differences, can worship God in spirit and in truth. Jesus demonstrates what worshipping God in spirit and truth means; it means transcending the differences of their two religions; it means showing to her compassion and love to all regardless of religious affiliation; it means collaborating with people of other religious traditions to deliver God’s grace and love to a thirsty world. Jesus is declaring that worship, in whatever tradition, is true worship only when it inspires us to offer living water, only when it empowers us to subvert racial, nationalistic, and religious hostilities and offer even to enemies love and forgiveness and compassion. If our worship does not do that, it is idolatrous and vain.
This lesson from Jesus is for self-examination. Do you and I contribute to our own spiritual thirst and dehydration? Do we thirst because we neglect our spiritual life? Do we thirst because cultural and personal prejudices isolate us from living water? Do we idolize our religion instead of receiving from it the grace and mercy to love in spirit and in truth?
Jesus quenches the woman’s thirst with compassion, love and mercy. This is the “spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Jesus doesn’t just talk about living water, he gives it to her. And she gulps it eagerly. It bothers Jesus not a whit that she is a woman of ill repute; he pays no attention to class status; he gives her what she wanted all along: the endlessly refreshing water of compassion and love. Nor does Jesus give a nanosecond to his culture’s prejudices; he obliterates them simply by talking to her as a woman and as a mongrel Samaritan. Despite his culture’s insecurities and prejudices, he affirms her dignity as a child of God. He draws her into true worship, into an intimacy with God that crushes the dividing walls between two hostile religions. He invites her into the spirit and truth of living water, into drinking at the spring of love and compassion that gushes up to eternal life.
Finally, Jesus shows the Samaritan woman and us that if you drink at the spring of living water, if you make a habit of love and compassion, you never thirst again? Why is that? Why will we never thirst again if we take the initiative of love and compassion? For two reasons: because love is both renewable and reciprocal. God’s love is an endlessly renewable energy. It is inexhaustible; no matter how much you give and no matter how many you give it to, its supply is never depleted. That’s why it is eternal. And secondly, God’s love is reciprocal. When you give it away you get it back in kind. That’s why it quenches our spiritual thirst. The more you give the more you get. So give God’s love, compassion, mercy and forgiveness away and it will return to quench our thirst. Visit the lonely and shut-in; feed the hungry; care for creation; house the homeless; assist the immigrant; visit the prisoner; help your enemy, liberate the oppressed; even uphold the in-law. In so doing you will drink a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The Samaritan woman did and many in her village believed and never thirsted again.