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March 7, l999 WATER BOY OR LIVING WATER? (John 4:4-l6) The story of the grumbling Hebrews forcing Moses to petition God for water was told endlessly around tribal campfires in order to remind the Hebrews about the wrong attitude with which to approach God. A certain amount of whining is acceptable because God is a pretty reasonable God who identifies with our needs. Should we need water, we will usually get water. But God is not our water boy. The closing sentences of today's Old Testament text suggests that underlying the clamor for water is the anxiety that Yahweh might have deserted the camp of the Hebrews: IS THE LORD AMONG US OR NOT? The Hebrews had ample evidence that when God was present to them, as with the crossing of the Red Sea, they would be given what was needed to survive. We face the same issue and anxiety: we much more need the presence of God in our lives than we need to worry about some particular material need. Most of us have enough of everything…if our dependency upon God was dependent upon begging for and receiving things, we would ignore God. Yet we do call upon God because we want divine presence in our lives. We know instinctively that there is no more important presence and when we know God is real with us we also know that all other things will follow. What is true of individual disciples is equally true of the Church: a Church can profess all it wants but if it has the anxiety that God has deserted it the congregation will end up clamoring for more of this and that as substitutes for the living waters. We don't need a spiritual water boy! We need spiritual living waters. But we often are happy to settle for buckets of spirituality conveyed to us by our obedient but reduced sense of God. The story told by John would have been instantly reassuring to Jewish listeners because the meeting at the well in Samaria is identified as taking place at Jacob's Well and that would have immediately called up another meeting at the same well a thousand years earlier, as told in Geneses 29, when the sojourner Jacob comes to that same well at "high day" (just like Jesus at noon). There Jacob beholds his kinswoman Rachel and, Genesis adds, dryly, her father's sheep. He waters the sheep. "Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and wept aloud." In this earlier story it was pure boy meets girl, boy kisses girl; boy and girl eventually (with a huge assist from Leah) create a family of tribes, the children of Israel. That's the way a love story is supposed to turn out. In John's version of a man and woman meeting at the same well, the story takes a different turn. From the first sharply spoken words, the conversation assumes the character of a confrontation that is charged with a significance surpassing romance and the making of babies. He is a teacher from above, but if his wisdom has a divine component to it, she does not know it the first. He is an unexpected presence and she does not understand him. She is a woman hardened by the world, she is thirsty not only for water but for something else she cannot name. The story illustrates John's frequent use of irony. Irony is when two levels of reality or two types of discourse are operating simultaneously with a seeming unbridgeable gulf between them. You recall last week's conversation in which Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about his need to be born from above, and Nicodemus, operated on another by thinking about the impossibility of his biological rebirth. In ironic conversation, one party - Nicodemus last week and the Samaritan woman this week - are unaware, at least initially of the discrepancy. And in that discrepancy there arises humor as with Nicodemus' improbable image of an adult male passing once more down the material birthing canal and in today's story the humor of the woman responding to Jesus reference to eternal waters by noting he didn't even have a bucket. We, who are the audience, are aware of the irony and the tension and humor given off by the confused communication. Today's ironic encounter at Jacob's well features a woman struggling in the dark for a genuine new day; someone thirsty for something more than natural water, something equally essential, but it is not named. So when Jesus offers the woman "living water" she replies, at first, with confusion about where's the bucket. But when she hears more about the water welling up to eternal life, she understands enough to say, "Sir, give me this water…" Jesus moves the conversation from its somewhat ethereal level and cuts to the chase when he abruptly tells the woman "Go, call your husband." That is Jesus' reality check which confronts the woman with her need to distance herself from her wrong lifestyle of receiving different lovers. TURN TO YOUR WORSHIP SHEET OR YOUR BIBLE AS WE READ TOGETHER JOHN 4:4-l6) Perhaps the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman turns out to be a love story after all, for only one who loves you knows you as you are and not as you pretend to be. Only one who loves you knows your deepest desires. Only one who loves you can look at your past without blinking. And only one who loves you can expect you to accept accountability, make amends, and assume a new way. Like the Samaritan woman and the Hebrews in the wilderness, we often make mistakes in our searching for something more. We practice religion but often do not connect it with a living Christ who comes to us. Jesus has forever been misunderstood and worst of all captured by special interests of our parochial and dried up spirituality. We cry for something more than water and yet often want to fit God's blessings into our spiritual buckets of water. Knowing not that the water is to be poured out liberally upon our parched souls, we keep it in those buckets which we name "doctrine" and "prejudice" not knowing that it will evaporate. And when the living waters evaporate on us, we go right back to where we are always more comfortable in our search for ultimate satisfaction: our family, our assets, our life styles, our fulfilled selves. We listen intently to ourselves but, at best, listen occasionally with only one ear to the One who can tell us everything we ever did. I find comfort and reassurance in the ending of the story: "SO WHEN THE SAMARITANS CAME TO HIM, JESUS STAYED THERE TWO DAYS. AND MANY MORE BELIEVED BECAUSE OF HIS WORD. We see again one of the endearing qualities of Jesus of Nazareth: he readily wasted his time and love on persons whom the world would judge not worthy of his time and love. Persons like us! There are further ironies in the way the Gospel writer John relates the story of Jesus. Recall that in John l9 John records Jesus on the cross crying out: "I THIRST." Like the Hebrews in the wilderness, and the woman at the well, he needed water, too; he was human. Yet his thirst was not quenched. Jesus died thirsty in the material way so that we might live not thirsty in the spiritual way. And when he was dead, and his side pierced to prove it, John says in l9:34: AND AT ONCE BLOOD AND WATER CAME OUT. Ah, is that the writer's ultimate irony: the living water pours from the pierced side of Jesus co-mingled with his blood! The Church believes so and that is why at Communion some water is added to the element. It is not just the practicality of diluting the wine, or in our case, the juice. It is for us to remember that in Jesus we receive the loving blood which sets us right with God and the living water which sustains us. At this point the minister poured water into the communion cup and the Communion proper began.It is this co-mingling of Jesus bodily fluid which introduced the practice of the priest watering down the communion wine. The communion element represents the blood of Jesus mixed symbolically with the water of life which Jesus promised to the Samaritan woman. Jesus carried in his person what humanity needed all along.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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