St. James' Episcopal Church
Jackson, Mississippi
March 3, 2002
Third Sunday in Lent

Living Water
The Rev. William A. Kolb

Gospel Reading: John 4:5-39

It is interesting to note that the better we feel about ourselves, the better other people look to us. The higher our self-esteem, the more comfortably we are able to accept the eccentricities and differences of other people. The more we like ourselves, the less likely we are to take negatively things that others say to us or even about us.

So it is with the Samaritan woman. She seems to think little of herself. How do we know this? Well, we don't, but we can make an educated guess. First, she is very aware that as a Samaritan she cannot expect any Jew (the establishment, the power) to even speak to her. All Jews considered all Samaritans to be unclean. Just touching something belonging to a Samaritan was forbidden. Second, she is very aware that as a woman, no respectable rabbi would speak to her in public. Note also, that the woman comes to the well at NOON and not early in the morning with the other women of the town. This suggests that she sees herself as less worthy than the others. Maybe it was the five husbands. When Jesus tells her to go get her husband, she admits she has no husband. This gives Jesus the opening to tell her that she now lives with a man to whom she is not married, AND that she has been married five times before.

Now, we do not know how those five marriages ended, but it is possible that five different men had lived with her in wedlock and had ended up saying, "I divorce you." If that is true, or if even some of those five had done that, it surely would have affected this woman's self-esteem.

I can assure you that many divorced people, even if their marriage was abusive, have bad feelings about the fact that they are divorced. Nobody gets married intending to get divorced. One way or another a divorce is a failure. So we may very well feel bad about it or even feel bad about ourselves.

It seems, as we think about this reading, that Jesus' words could in some places be the Samaritan woman's and vice-versa. "You have no bucket and the well is deep," is the literal truth the Samaritan woman speaks. But they are the metaphorical words that Jesus could speak to her and to us, "You have no bucket and the well is deep." Christ offers living water to us and often we are ill equipped to receive it.
Jesus says the words, "Give me a drink." Isn't that our deepest desire that we are sometimes unable to articulate? "Oh God, slake my thirst for wholeness, my thirst for peace, my thirst for love."

The Samaritan woman, for all her disadvantages, has suffered enough and grown enough to be able to question and dialogue with this mysterious male Jewish stranger, and she is humble enough to be able to say, "I have no husband." She is able to own her own mess. If we make our confession we hear absolution and we may just find ourselves splashing around in living water. The Christian faith can help us deal with our own brokenness.

Is there anything in your life that makes you feel you have failed? Is there an event in your life for which you have not forgiven yourself? If not, you are most fortunate and quite unusual. But to carry on our backs, on our souls, the guilt or the low self-esteem or the regret and remorse that can come from such unresolved events can make us less than we could be; can make life less joyful than God means for it to be. Dragging guilt around behind us holds us back from the fullness of life. And that is where the Samaritan woman is, in her life, when she encounters Jesus. So he does something very special for her; he offers what he calls "living water." He offers what he says can change her life forever.

Let's look just for a moment at water. We need it for the new life of baptism. We need it to maintain health and life. We need it to maintain cleanliness. We find that water makes up 80% of our bodies and a similar percentage of our planet earth.
Yet, literal water is nothing as compared to living water. How patient Jesus is with this woman! She does not understand what he is talking about! She understands at first only in a literal sense, while Jesus speaks in a mystical sense.

What is this living water? It is the mystery of meaning in life, of love, of trust, of art. Living water is God in the mix. Living water is effervescence for life vs. the flatness of existing. Living water is true life. Jesus says that true life comes when we give up our lives for something bigger than we are. It is hard to know that there is something bigger or more important than we are. It takes a lot of living to find that we are but a speck, and transitory at that. Living water is what we have when we have let go of all that we had been grasping.

Boy, I'll tell you. This woman finds herself in an ever more complicated conversation with this mysterious stranger. Upon being asked for water, she wants to talk instead. She wants to know what is going on. Why do you, a Jew (the establishment), talk to me, a Samaritan? Why do you, a man, a rabbi especially, talk to me, a woman? Suddenly, the stranger is telling her that he can give HER water; not only that, he can give her water which is far superior to any water she can give him from the well. And poor woman, she still doesn't get it, not at all; she takes him literally and wants to know how on earth he can give her water if he doesn't have a bucket!

And then he says it. He says what we all want to hear. He says he has water that is better than water! He says, "If you drink of the water I give you, you will never be thirsty again!" It's better than re-chargeable batteries! Better than wireless speakers! Better than an energy bar. It lasts forever and you last forever! Jesus says that this living water makes you permanently refreshed. It gushes up in you to eternal life. Gushes up. Boy that sounds good.

Jesus has now moved into mystery--from things linear to things mystical. The water of which he speaks is not wet but it is life-giving. And he calls us to hear what he says, to feel it, to dive deeply into the waters of mystery. Mystery, by its very definition is not going to give us a neat, packaged set of answers. If we follow Jesus we are not going to be allowed to steer the car. He steers. We do not know exactly where we are going, and we do not know all the details about how to get there. We have to trust. We have to believe. And it is the ONLY way to go beyond the safe, predictable flatness of things that are passing away, things we can see, touch and taste.

Hear this quotation from Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist and writer and convert to Roman Catholicism:

I may, I suppose, regard myself as a relatively successful man. people occasionally stare at me in the streets; that's fame. I can earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue; that's success. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time; that's fulfilment. Yet I say to you and beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing, less than nothing, a positive impediment, measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective or who or what they are.

Jesus says, "I have living water with which you will never be thirsty again...not that your thirst will always be assuaged, but that once you know me, once your deepest sense of life is based on faith, on me, on God, there is nothing that can happen that can permanently take away the sense of ultimate security that comes from having living water coursing through your soul."

The Kingdom of God is here and now. It promises hope in the midst of bad news. It promises confidence when all of our tools and resources have disappeared. The Kingdom of God--pure mystery--promises living water that cannot be bought or bribed. It cannot be manufactured or understood with our human mind, but with trust we know that it feeds us, refreshes us, gives us true bubbly life. That life may make itself known when we are hugged, or when we give; when we empower others or bring a smile to one who has despaired. True life in its smallest quantity is greater and goes deeper than the greatest treasures we can pile up on earth.

Amen

Copyright 2002 The Rev. William A. Kolb

Gospel Reading: John 4:5-39
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, "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 woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" 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 water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no one has brought him something to eat?" Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, 'Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, 'One sows and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor." Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I have ever done." NRSV

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