Sermon: Drinking in the Living Water

John 4: 5-42

March 27, 2011

The Rev. Shelby Ochs Owen at Trinity Church

Thirst. Just hearing the word can make us feel the need for water. Anybody thirsty? Thirst indicates a very basic human need for water. In today’s gospel reading from John, Jesus is thirsty. Lest we over spiritualize Jesus, John reminds us that Jesus, fully human, has been traveling and is tired and thirsty. And so he goes to a well. Logical step, except that folks are usually not to be found at a well at noon. His disciples have left Jesus to get food from the city and Jesus is sitting alone by the well waiting and a Samaritan woman arrives to draw water. What may seem to be a fairly normal request to our 21st century American sensibilities, is pretty much an affront to the social norms in first century Palestine. A Jewish male would not have spoken to an unknown woman in public, much less a Samaritan woman, who would have been avoiding others by showing up at the well at off hours.

In this story Jesus’ ministry is reaching a new stage. You may recall that in last week’s gospel reading, Jesus was engaged in conversation with a named Jewish leader, Nicodemus, who represents the powerful and prestigious religious establishment. In today’s reading just a few verses later, we have Jesus speaking to an unnamed Samaritan woman, who represents the enemy or if not the enemy at least an outsider. Even though both Jews and Samaritans descended from the nation of Israel, they had been in enmity with one another for hundreds of years. So they tended to stay apart from each other, tended not to have anything to do with one another, tended to avoid each other whenever possible.

So this is no ordinary encounter between two people at a well. “Give me a drink” Jesus says. The woman expresses her surprise, “How is it that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” “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.” The Greek words hydor zon can mean fresh running water or life giving water. John cleverly uses a word with a double meaning. The woman hears “running water” and she wants to know how Jesus will get that running water without a bucket. But Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I give will never be thirsty. The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” And the dialogue continues as one of the longest conversations Jesus has with anyone in the gospels. And as the conversation continues, the woman slowly comes to recognize who Jesus is. They go back and forth about this water deal but it is when he shows his intimate knowledge of her, that he knows all about her life, (and he doesn’t run away) something shifts for her. She begins to see that Jesus accepts her for who she is. In her eyes he goes from being simply a thirsty Jew, to one who asks strange questions and makes strange statements, to being a prophet, to at least her wondering if he is the Messiah, the Christ.

As the woman begins to understand who Jesus is, she also begins to recognize who she is: one in need of water from a well, but also one in need of this living water that Jesus is offering. She sees herself as one in need of belonging, one in need of an eternal connection, one in need of God’s love and attention. And the woman receives this living water that Jesus offers her. And as the woman receives the living water, it bubbles over in her life to the point where she leaves the water jar and runs back to the city bearing witness to the love of God as it is shown through Jesus. Jesus shows this Samaritan woman, this person usually seen as the enemy or as the outsider by most Jews, as worthy of attention, worthy of belonging, as worthy of God’s love. For the Samaritan woman:

Shame gives way to grace.

Self hatred and self doubt acquiesce to Jesus’ love for her.

Social stigma yields to God’s compassion and mercy.

Jesus offers water that will give eternal life; he meets a spiritual need that goes beyond the physical need for water. At first the woman at the well does not seem to understand what it is that Jesus is talking about. But even though Jesus has no bucket she believes in what he says. At some mysterious point in their conversation she accepts the invitation to believe, even though the woman does not fully know who Jesus is. Blaise Paschal, a Renaissance scientist who believed that science was not the only path to knowledge, is known for saying, “We know the truth not only by reason, but even more by the heart…The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” (McQuarrie, Two Worlds are Ours, p.185) The woman at the well is allowing her heart to inform her being that Jesus not only is speaking the truth but is the truth.

Even though the woman has water at her fingertips, she begins to see and acknowledge another type of thirst, the thirst for God; and it is this very human Jesus, the Jesus who is tired and thirsty for plain old tangible and visible water who helps her not only acknowledge her deeper thirst but who offers her the living water that will assuage her deeper thirst. Jesus touches a place in the woman nothing else and no one else can reach.

We, too, have a thirst for God, a divine restlessness in our hearts. It surfaces in myriad ways throughout our day, both consciously and unconsciously, sometimes in joyful and peaceful ways and sometimes in very jarring and disturbing ways. The divine restlessness surfaces when we feel the desire to praise God and thank God for all that he has done for us; but it also surfaces when we feel a sense of failure, when relationships are troubled, or when we have disappointed someone; the divine restlessness surfaces in our helplessness as we face illness or as we see radiation seeping into the lives of our Japanese brothers and sisters or as our country struggles to figure out the best way to help Libya and other middle eastern countries in the middle of major strife. We as human beings have our limitations. And we have a deep need for God.

The living water Jesus offers assuages that thirst that lives within our hearts. So how do we tap into that living water that Jesus offered the woman at the well and offers us? We tap into it through prayer, by asking God’s help and by being open to the gift of God. We tap into the living water through the receiving of communion at this altar rail, through the reading of scripture and through service to others. And as we tap into the living water, we find that sense of eternal connectedness to God and to one another. As we get to know God, we move into a deeper sense of who we are, people in need of God’s love and attention. And as we tap into the living water that Jesus offers, we find we are indeed worthy of God’s love and attention. To thirst for God is a good and holy enterprise. Thirst for God and drink deeply from the living water that is God’s to give and ours to receive.

Amen.