“Living Water”
It is a little known fact that, like us, the people of ancient Israel
had singles bars. There are some slight differences in custom, of
course. We might see the occasional service dog in a Portland pub,
but they had a much more inclusive policy on livestock-sheep, goats,
and camels were all welcome. And where one of the classic pick up
lines in our culture is “Can I buy you a drink?,” in theirs
it appears to have been “Can you give me a drink?” The
singles bar of ancient Israel, my friends, was better known as the
village well.
There is a standard pattern in the Hebrew Bible in which a man traveling
far from home visits a well and converses with a local woman. One
of them helps the other get some water, and the next thing you know,
a marriage feast is being prepared. The story comes in many variants.
Rebekah meets the family servant of her future husband, who knows
she is Isaac’s destined bride when she generously draws water
for his whole troop of camels. A generation later Rebekah and Isaac’s
son, Jacob, is running for his life after cheating his brother Esau
out of the elder son’s birthright. He sees Rachel coming to
water her flock, and falls for her so hard that he is able to singlehandedly
move a huge boulder blocking the entrance to the well. And Moses,
who brings forth water from a desert rock in our first reading, meets
his wife Zipporah while fleeing an Egyptian murder charge. He helps
her and her six sisters get to the front of the water line for once,
defending them from the daily harassment of a group of macho shepherds.
People who suffered an arid climate for much of the year were especially
sensitive to the fact that water is life itself, and they saw no better
place for the beginning of a partnership of life and love than an
abundant source of water. Our Journey community is blessed with a
similar insight this year, as our Lenten preparation to renew our
baptismal vows at the Great Vigil coincides with our preparation for
Laurie and Guillermo’s wedding vows on the Sixth Sunday of Easter.
Tonight’s Gospel story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman
at Jacob’s well follows this familiar folkloric pattern from
the Old Testament, which would have been immediately recognizable
to at least the Jewish members of the Johannine community. And just
in case they—or we--might miss the point, the Gospel writer
hammers home images of marriage and baptism in the preceding chapters.
John the Baptist recognizes Jesus as the one who will baptize with
the Holy Spirit; then Jesus’ first miraculous sign is turning
water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana after a spirited exchange
of views with another feisty woman. Jesus invites Nicodemus to experience
God’s maternal tenderness by being reborn through water and
the Holy Spirit. Finally, Jesus and his disciples begin to perform
baptisms--something claimed only in John and not the Synoptic Gospels.
This makes some of John the Baptist’s disciples jealous on his
behalf, but John tells them: “Jesus is the bridegroom—I’m
just the best man.” Keeping in mind all of these connections
helps make sense of Jesus’ comment that the Samaritan woman
has had five husbands, and is not married to her current partner.
Some traditional interpreters see this as a stern admonition—this
is a loose woman, and she had better change her ways. But biblical
scholar Sandra Schneiders suggests that Jesus’ repartee here
is not harsh, but playful—that he views the woman as “a
potential spouse to be invited to intimacy.” This tender, committed
intimacy is the “living water” of rebirth that Jesus offers
her and all who turn to him. In the words of Paul’s letter to
the Romans it is “the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts”--
the passionate love of God reaching out to the woman at the well and
to every wounded, gifted human person. Through this experience of
God’s acceptance in Christ the Samaritan woman begins to reframe
her self-concept and find freedom from the shame and pain that had
bound her. Then she, in turn, shares this good news with the villagers
from whom she has been estranged, being welcomed back into the community
and honored as the first evangelist to her people.
This meeting of two people marginal in their own opposed communities
initially seems to have all the potential for meaningful encounter
of a Democrat and a Republican watching the latest news from Iraq
together. In visiting Samaria, Jesus leaves his own territory and
encounters people with whom his own group has a history of severe
hostility. In requesting water from a female and thus doubly unclean
member of these despised folks, he does not just defy the Jewish purity
codes, but puts himself at risk of a scornful refusal from someone
he could reasonably expect to despise him in turn. And this is not
just any Samaritan woman, but someone who seems to be at odds with
the rest of her village—otherwise she wouldn’t have chosen
the blistering heat of high noon as the time to walk to and from the
well bearing a heavy stone water jar, but would have come with the
other women in the cool of the early morning or evening. We can’t
tell from the story whether the woman has been repeatedly widowed
and is thus seen as bad luck for husbands, or traumatized by multiple
divorces—which in her culture could only be initiated by the
man. In either case, she would most likely have become highly sensitive
and more than a little suspicious of an intruder in response to this
painful life story. Yet she and Jesus are able to reach out, overcome
all these barriers, and enter into a challenging and life-giving dialogue
that is at the heart of what both marriage and baptism are all about.
To me, the most striking thing about the story is the key to the
woman’s, and then her fellow villagers’, recognition of
Jesus as prophet and messiah. John repeats it twice, lest we miss
its significance: “Come, see someone who told me all that I
ever did. Can this be the Christ?” Does being told “all
that you ever did” sound like an appealing prospect? It makes
me squirm—there are plenty of things in my life that I don’t
share with someone I’ve just met, and certainly wouldn’t
appreciate being detected by some mind-reading guru. And remember
that Jesus doesn’t actually tell her everything in her life—he
mentions just one thing, the painful marriage history that is presumably
the reason for her semi-outcast status. Jesus’ naming of this
tender spot aloud could have plunged the Samaritan woman into an abyss
of shame, and the fact that she instead finds it life-giving tells
us two things. The first is that she has tremendous courage, to be
able to look so deeply and honestly at her own life. The second is
that Jesus must have said those words with tremendous compassion and
not an ounce of judgement. By acting as a reverent witness to her
self-revelation, he helped her to look at herself with new eyes and
heal the wounds that had left her thirsting and questioning the possibility
of real joy. This is our call in life-partnership, committed friendship,
all forms of family and authentic community—to free each other
from shame by facing our demons, speaking our truth, and “hearing
one another into speech.” If we can learn to do this, we can
experience the rush of living water within. We can reclaim—at
least in part--the blessing lost by Adam and Eve, of which we heard
the first Sunday of Lent: to be fully revealed to God, and to one
another, and to feel no shame.
