Living Water | A Sermon on Vulnerability and Truth
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Third Sunday of Lent (A), March 12, 2023.
Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; Psalm 95; John 4:5-42
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 (John 4:14).
Water: we think of it all the time [writes Dyana Herron].
Water permeates our lives. We are told to drink eight glasses a day. We cleanse ourselves in it. We are mostly made up of it, lakes posing as people, swimming through each hour. When we are ready to eat, our mouths water. When a woman is ready to give birth, her water breaks.
Water permeates our metaphors. A lake is a body. The sea is a womb. Time is a river. When we die, we cross that river into a land beyond. [1]
Water is a powerful symbol holding sacramental implications. And this morning, it plays a central role in our Gospel passage, as Jesus sits beside a well in the heat of the day. He has journeyed three hundred miles to Jacob’s well in the heart of Samaritan country. On his way to Galilee, he has stopped to quench his thirst.
He sits there –alone and thirsty. Until a woman comes along with a water jar. And the first thing Jesus asks of her is that she give him a drink.
This scene casts strange shadows to be sure. First, consider that Jesus, the very Son of God, sits thirsty –in need and vulnerable –at the mouth of a deep well with no way to draw water to his dry lips.
The wilderness at noon is not for the faint of heart; death by dehydration is a very real threat. But there Jesus sits. And you’ve got to wonder, is he thinking back to his time of temptation in the wilderness.
If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread (Matt. 4:3).
Certainly, he could access the well water himself if he really wanted to. Instead, he waits.
Until someone comes along with a water jar. And not just any someone. A Samaritan! To say that Samaritans and Jews didn’t get along is an understatement. One might even say they were enemies.
And yet Jesus longs for water and requests it from this Samaritan. And not just any Samaritan. A Samaritan woman! Even she recognizes the strangeness of such a request:
How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? (John 4:9).
In Jesus’ time, women had no place in public life and were not even welcome to worship with men (and might I mention that men’s morning meditations at this time included the prayer, “Thank God I am not a woman”).
And yet Jesus longs for water and requests it from this Samaritan woman. And not just any Samaritan woman. A Samaritan woman divorced five times and currently living in sin!
This is why she is at the well in the heat of the day; why she has likely avoided the earlier, cooler hours when the other women went to the well for water.
There is a common characterization made of the Samaritan woman. It is as a harlot, a prostitute, a fallen woman. Many a preacher has gone on and on about her character and her likely sexual sins. This is maybe an aside, but maybe not. It is important that we question our conceptions (or misconceptions) of Biblical characters, particularly those on the margin, as they influence our theology, our lives of faith, and the lives we live alongside one another.
So, let me take a moment to say that we do not know how this woman came to be divorced and living in a partnership without marriage. But we can probably surmise that it didn’t happen by choice. Different theologians have suggested that perhaps she was married as a teenager, as was a custom, and then widowed, passed along among her dead husband’s brothers, as also was a custom. Maybe her husbands left her because she could not have children. Maybe she was abused. Maybe not.
Whatever the case may have been, we do know that in the first century, the authority to file for divorce was a man’s right alone.
And we know when she arrived at the well. We can then assume that she prefers to distance herself from the women of polite society (hence her trip to the well in the scorching heat of high noon). We can imagine that she hopes to get in and out without a scene –to go undetected and unbothered. Going to the well at the busier hour too painful to bear. Who knows who might be there to see her –the looks they might give her and the ways they might judge her. The distance they might keep from her.
These are the circumstances under which she encounters Jesus, vulnerable, in need, and speaking to her of living water.
The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. And the woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water” (John 4:14-14).
It is curious that, in response, Jesus asks after her husband –going right, it seems, to the source of her insecurities, her pain. Going right after the reason they are meeting this way at this odd time of day.
Go, call your husband, and come back (John 4:16). And the woman answered him, I have no husband (4:17). And Jesus knows. He’s known that all along.
He does not look away, walk away, nor otherwise distance himself. Instead, he seems to draw closer, to lean in just so, and to welcome her into Holy proximity.
He sees the whole of her –all that she was, is, and could ever be –and in his sight she is beloved. He asks after her husband not to shame her, to test her, or to trick her, but to invite her into vulnerability and truth. To invite us all into vulnerability and truth –for what is relationship, really, without these things?
Barbara Brown Taylor writes:
When she steps back, he steps toward her. When she steps out of the light, he steps into it. He will not let her retreat. If she is determined to show him less of herself, then he will show her more of himself. “I know that Messiah is coming,” she says, and he says, “I am he.”
It is the first time he has said that to another living soul. It is a moment of full disclosure, in which [this] outsider and the Messiah of God stand face to face with no pretense about who they are. Both stand fully lit at high noon for one bright moment in time, while all the rules, taboos and history that separate them fall forgotten to the ground. [2]
You see, Jesus isn’t there to simply heal or absolve her –he’s there to see her, know her, love her. To be in relationship with her. He’s there to draw her into the divine life. He wants to share his life with her. To share his life with each of us. A life of living water. A life without thirst.
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!” (John 4:28-29).
I don’t know about you, but that is a frightening proposition. That someone could see and tell me everything I’ve ever done. But in God and with God being seen is nothing to fear –because God knows us, has always known us, and loves us still.
And God knows we all find ourselves at a well from time to time, attempting to draw forth water that will never truly quench our thirst.
We find fault. We place blame. We consume and pollute. We tell unhelpful, sometimes hurtful, stories about others and ourselves. We grab when we should give. We keep ourselves busy with all the wrong tasks. We lie where we might otherwise be honest. We dwell on mistakes and forget to extend grace.
Yes, we all find ourselves at a well from time to time. Thirsty.
And yet, here is the Good News.
An indisputable law of physics is that water always finds the lowest point in an incredibly efficient manner. It penetrates any crevice or path that will facilitate its downward flow, steadily meandering and descending in search of lower planes. In our physical world, water is as efficient as gravity is unforgiving. [3]
And thanks be to God for that –because the water offered by the Messiah is living water. A water we might call Grace. And Grace will always find our lowest point and quench our deepest thirst.
G.K Chesterton once wrote, “I have found only one religion that dares to go down with me into the depth of myself.” And it is true. The Grace of God with great efficiency will find our lowest point and in so doing will lift us up into a new beginning. As many times as it takes.
Because Jesus knows. Knows not just us –our entire story-but also knows what it means to thirst. And so, he waits. He waits for us to stumble along with our water jars, seeking in all the wrong places what we can hardly bear and yet desperately want -to be seen and to be known.
Whatever your lowest point, your vilest sin, your deepest shame, you can rest certain that the living water of God’s Grace can find it, will find it, and has found it.
In the words of Taylor:
[For Christ] is the one in whose presence you know who you really are—the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is—who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises—speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.” [4]
Amen.
*Image courtesy of WikiCommons.
[1] Dyana Herron, “Water and Oil,” in Good Letters, The Image Journal, 2023 Center for Religious Humanism: https://imagejournal.org/2010/10/21/water-and-oil.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Identity Confirmation: John 4:5-42,” The Christian Century, 12 February 2008, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-02/identity-confirmation.
[3] Michael Bowe, Skyscraper of a Man: A Novel (2019).
[4] Taylor, “Identity Confirmation.”
