Lent 3: Living Water

We often hear words like freedom or free will thrown around in various circles, so much so that it can be hard to define what exactly freedom is and so what it means. This matter of freedom is at the heart of Jesus’s approach to the woman at the well we hear about in our Gospel lesson this morning. We hear that Jesus is sitting at a well because he’s tired out by his journey. While he’s there a Samaritan woman comes along and Jesus asks her to give him a drink.

This is an unusual act for two reasons: first, he talks to a single woman who is alone, something not done in that time and place; second, the woman is Samaritan. Thousands of years ago her family would have been part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and so they would share a common ancestor in Jacob; but Jews were of the Southern Kingdom of Judea, according to Rabbinic law; and of course she is talking to Jesus, a rabbi. 

The woman is astonished he addresses her at all. But then Jesus opens the floodgates, so to speak: “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.” She challenges him: “are you greater than our common ancestor Jacob who gave us water to drink from the well?” Jesus replies, “of all the prophets who brought you water, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, you would need to keep coming back to be replenished.” At this point, Jesus moves from talking about literal water as life-sustaining, to talking about himself as the true and living water of life that gives people new life as they are gathered back to him again and again by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’s words move her from understanding things at a literal level to understanding at a Spiritual level: immediately, as an ancestor of Abraham, her mind would go to what is written in Genesis 21 about the well from which the old man Abraham and his barren wife Sarah, drew water upon the birth of their only son, Isaac, a type of Jesus Christ; and of course as she mentions, to Jacob who provides water from the well to sustain his family, and to Noah’s ark where a dove, returns fruit of the ground to Noah after three days to demonstrate that the water which had drowned evil itself was dried up, pointing forward to the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus at his baptism to symbolize new life in him. And of course this Samaritan would know of Moses striking the rock in the desert to quench the thirst of the Israelites; a rock that Paul says is Jesus Christ following the Israelites in the desert. 

So through this Samaritan woman, once of Jewish lineage, now more gentile than Jew, becomes a sign to us gentiles. No longer is God simply calling Israel to account for their failure to follow him and care for one another. Here he goes to someone who bridges the gap between Jew and Gentile, one who stands not through biological lineage, but through how it is that she’ll respond to Jesus’s judgment and mercy: “woman tell your husband to come here,” he says. She tells him that she doesn’t have a husband. Jesus says: “I know. You have five husbands and the one you’re with right now is not your husband. I know everything about you. I know what you hide in your heart; I know what you’re afraid of; I know what you do; there is nowhere you can go in all of creation, in the innermost rooms of your house or your mind, to hide from me.” This is not a statement of special judgement of this particular sin. Rather it is a declaration for all time that no one can deceive the one who knows and sees all things. 

The woman doesn’t cower in shame or disgust. She doesn’t throw herself a pity party for being called out. She doesn’t argue with him. She has the humility to recognize her sin: “what you said is true.” At with this humble admission, Jesus declares to her, just as God does when Moses asks God his name: “I am who I am. I am the promised Messiah.” At this the woman, still astonished, leaves her water jar, as if to say, perhaps I no longer need it. The first step out of her own comfort onto the road of faith. It's not necessarily an easy road. She leaves Jesus and goes back to her village and she says, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" The new believer, faith mixed with doubt as she goes down the mountain of a transfigured Christ appearing to her. She drops her water jug out of humility and while still battling with doubt - "Lord, I think I believe, but help my unbelief" - God transforms her into a witness to his own mission.

As she rushes home to declare her experience to her Samaritan village, she becomes an apostle and evangelist. She comes to symbolize for all generations the power of Jesus Christ to simultaneously judge and exercise mercy; to release us from our slavery to the distorted means and ends that we have developed in this world to mitigate our fears and pains, our frustration, anger, envy, bitterness, jealousy, and our lack of belief. She comes to symbolize for us what it looks like to discover true freedom. From slave to her own needs and desires - the need to consume constantly - whether we're speaking of water, or of sex, of alcohol, of drugs, of drama, of attention, of possessions, of self loathing and fear so people will not demand of you; from slave to these things, to witness to God: the source of life and so of all meaning.

And here it is: freedom, for a Christian, is confessing our sin, actually allowing ourselves to be changed as we engage in God’s own life revealed to us in Scripture, and then taking this with us wherever we go in the world. It is to step into the shoes of the Samaritan woman, to proclaim, to share, to bear our faith not hidden under our bushel baskets of shame or fear, or anger or lust or greed, or indifference, but in trust and courage that we are loved by perfect eternal love - God himself - and so are free to love others as we were made to do. AMEN