"Thirst and Companionship at the Well"- A sermon for the third Sunday of Lent by Andrew Green
Lent 3- John Ch. 3
When we were in college, my twin brother Marcus and I spent the summers working at Camp Crucis, the summer camp owned by the Diocese of Fort Worth. I suspect that many here present haven’t had the opportunity to spend any time at Camp Crucis. However, I know that many of you here have had the opportunity to experience Camp Allen’s timeless beauty tucked among the pine trees, and I’m sure that some of you have been to Camp Capers and witnessed the glory of the Hill Country setting. Camp Crucis, by contrast, is a sun blasted patch of scrub and baking caliche located in Granbury, Texas. The setting may be humble, but to us it was heaven.
I remember with fondness the sweltering afternoons I spent trying to figure out how to get activities ready for campers. It was important to us to do the least amount of labor needed to get the job done in the triple digit weather. We would zip around in golf carts with large coolers of ice water precariously balanced on the back, placing them on decaying picnic tables beneath giant old pecan trees that offered some hope of shade.
The water in those coolers, slightly tinged with the taste of sulfur, is the most delicious water that I have ever drunk. A rousing game of ultimate Frisbee or dodge ball required many happily slurped cups from those life giving orange coolers. As a program staff member, it was my sacred responsibility to ensure that every camper had access to enough water. My colleagues and I made sure that all who were thirsty would get their fill.
Thirst is a powerful thing. When your body needs water, it lets you know. Which one of us can judge the Hebrew people from our Old Testament reading, wandering in the desert? Displaced, lost, hot: a people who are learning to rely fully on God. They, like us, are a stiff necked people. But they’re thirsty! In all fairness, this was rapidly becoming a matter of life and death. Their passion to get water is unrestrained, to the point where Moses actually fears for his life. Their question: Is the Lord among us or not? God got us into this mess, where is God now? Of course, God hears their cry, and causes water to well up out of rock itself to sate the thirst of the people.
Thirst is a powerful thing. It is a deep desire, a physical longing. As physical creatures, we find ourselves in a state where we need to look to resources outside of ourselves to fulfill our very basic needs. Food and water are the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. Without these things, we cease to be able to fulfill what God has made us to be. Thirst is something that everyone can relate to on a very basic level.
That makes thirst a very useful concept to build some killer metaphors.
Which brings me to our Gospel reading for today.
We find Jesus, hot and tired, sitting by an ancient well near a Samaritan city. His disciples have gone to the city to find food, and so Jesus is all alone.
I think it is fair to ask, what is Jesus doing here? What has driven him to be sitting alone by this well? The most obvious answer is that Jesus is waiting at a well because he is genuinely thirsty. What is Jesus longing for? He’s longing for a drink of water from the well. This is a very human need, mundane and not complex in nature, but it leads to an encounter. Jesus meets this woman who has the solution to his longing, the key to unlock his thirst. For behold, she has a bucket! And so, he spoke to her. He reached out to her.
What follows is a conversation. And over the course of this conversation there is a shift. Before, the focus was on Jesus’ longing for physical water. Soon Jesus’ thirst is left behind as together they explore what the woman is thirsty for. What she longs for.
The woman answers Jesus’ first request for a sip of water with a question: How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? This is an understandable concern on her part. She has been told her entire life that there are divisions in place. Her people are considered to be outcasts by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, who also claim exclusive access to God. She perceives a socially constructed wall between herself and this man built on centuries of distain and distrust. Jesus, in offering conversation, shakes her worldview.
Jesus doesn’t stop here. Jesus pushes deeper.
Talking about physical thirst leads to talking about real longing. Jesus hints at the possibility of living water that quenches all thirst. Much deeper than a well, much more satisfying than cool water on a hot day. He is offering an end to longing, a spring of water that gushes up to eternal life. The only requirement is that she asks for it.
And she does.
She says, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming back here to draw water.” Her request: that she may never again be thirsty. Jesus, being who he is, reads behind what she is asking. Instead of her physical thirst, he addresses her deeper longing. The way that he does this appears very strange. Instead, he asks her about her husband, and they discuss her many failed relationships. He changes the subject from water altogether, and at this point it is pretty clear that they are no longer talking about buckets and wells.
I think it would be useful now to pause to address what to do with Jesus’ inquiry about the husbands. The church has done a lot of interpretive work over the years to figure out why Jesus leads the conversation from water to husbands, so there are many different ways that we can approach this puzzling topic.
For a historical example, Thomas Aquinas approaches them symbolically. He says that the five husbands are her five senses, which are not adequate for understanding. The man that is not her husband is to be understood as her intellect. He also muses that the five husbands could be seen as the five books of Torah, which the Samaritans also hold as sacred texts. Okay. That’s an interpretation.
There is a very paternalistic reading of this text that interprets this part of the conversation. Read in this way, Jesus is condemning this woman’s sexual sins. The reason that he calls attention to the fact that she has had multiple partners is so that he can shame her into seeking repentance. Understood this way, the true well of eternal water that Jesus is offering can only be accessed by asking forgiveness for her sins.
I don’t buy this interpretation. For one thing, there isn’t a point where Jesus says, “Your Sins are forgiven, go and do not sin again”. Once the husbands are mentioned, in fact, Jesus doesn’t bring it up again. Instead, they move on to speak about worshiping the true way. Nothing that Jesus says or does in this conversation comes off as judgmental to me.
I’d like to offer a different interpretation. Jesus isn’t naming this woman’s sins. He is naming her deepest pain and her deepest longing. This is a woman who has been abandoned by five different men. Historically, at this time, the most likely explanation for her multiple husbands is that she is unable to produce children, so the men leave. Not only is she looked down on by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem for being a Samaritan, she is marginalized in her own society! This woman isn’t guilty of anything; she is the victim of an oppressive social system that has rejected and abandoned her. We can begin to see the reason why she is coming to the village well alone, in the hottest part of the day.
Moving back to the subject of thirst and longing, we can ask, “what is this woman truly thirsty for?” What is her deepest longing? In asking about the woman’s husbands, what has Jesus just named?
She longs for safety. She longs for true connection. She longs for relationship, something lasting that will not abandon her. She longs for a role in her society, to no longer be marginalized. She longs to not come to the well alone. She longs for Love. And Jesus points beyond human relationships to the source of all relationships and the source of all love: God.
In this conversation, Jesus has already started the work of bringing her to the water of life. Jesus rejects the idea that they should be separated due to their social standing or their tribal allegiance. Jesus does not rebuke her for speaking back to him, or for her questioning his words. Instead, he converses with her as an equal. He treats her no differently than he treated Nicodemus, who came to him by night.
Jesus offers her the true and living water that sates her thirst. He offers her companionship and conversation. He recognizes her. He knows her intimately. He does not ignore her or cast her off. He points to true relationship with God. And, Jesus imbues her with purpose. From her relationship with Jesus, she gets a new identity. Her role is now to bring people into relationship.
She abandons her old way of being, she leaves her bucket, and she goes to the people. She breaks down the barriers. Using the same words that Jesus himself used to call his disciples, she urges the people of her city to “Come and see!” And they come, and they believe. This stiff necked people recognize that indeed, The Lord is Among Them.
This curious, faithful woman becomes an evangelist that brings many to know Jesus. Interestingly, she is not named in the Gospel of John. She has no name because she could be any of us. We, too, are being called to confront our deepest longings, and to attend to the needs of others. We are called to bring all to the spring of eternal life, into relationship with each other and with God.
Jesus shows us the way to do this. We are to meet people where they are the thirstiest. Like Jesus demonstrates, this means breaking down barriers that block the ability to form meaningful relationships. Jesus shows us that we need to reach out to those that are on the margin, and strike up a conversation. True relationships are formed when we treat each other as equals. This requires us to accept what each is bringing to the conversation.
Instead of looking at this woman with judgment, Jesus looked at her with love. He accepted who she was- broken, lonely, and lost. He did not demand repentance, he offered his company. We, too, must look with compassion instead of judgment. When we look with compassion, we forgive the shortcomings of our neighbors, and we can forgive our own shortcomings. We can do the work of helping each other be mindful of where we thirst for the water of life. And we can offer company to the lonely, healing to the broken, and direction to the lost. Where there is longing, there is satisfaction in the Lord.
We do this when we invite our neighbors over for dinner- like the Ammadya Muslim community. We do this when we look out for those seeking shelter from war torn areas of this world. We do this when we assemble bags of hope on Sunday mornings. It is our sacred duty to make sure our neighbors have enough to drink. We must make sure that all who are thirsty get their fill. There are so many opportunities to notice, to be mindful of the thirst of others. And to be mindful of our own thirst, our own longings.
When we find ourselves wandering in the desert places, lost and thirsty, remember that indeed, the Lord is among us. The Lord is present when we seek to be in relationship with each other. The Lord is present when we recognize the needs of those who have been downcast or marginalized. Jesus causes living water to bubble up between us, and all who drink that cool, deep water will discover that their longing leads to God.