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St. Andrew's Church
An Anglican Church • Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Preached by
Stuart Pike
Rector
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Lent 3 A - The Well
Exodus 17: 1-7
John 4: 5-42
St. Andrew's Church, Grimsby
24 February 2008
One of my strongest memories of Africa is about waking up at dawn each morning in Dar Es Salaam, in coastal Tanzania to the Muslim call to prayer canted by the Muezzin. Within minutes if I looked out the window I would see a line up of women and children forming before the only source of drinking water: a single water tap on a stand-pipe, overseen by a man who would ration out each person's quota. Then these women and children would place their heavy containers on their heads and begin their walk home. It was a daily routine - as natural and rhythmic as breathing to these people. They gathered to get this water at the beginning of the day, before the heat of noon-time. This gathering place was also a place for the people to exchange greetings and news. It made me appreciate the value of water.
I remember seeing a young and skinny woman heading home with her jerry-can of water balanced on her head and her child strapped to her back. The child looked sick - feverish - perhaps she had malaria.. When the woman saw me, I saw a look of such resignation on her face. But she just kept on going, bearing the life-giving water upon which her family absolutely depended.
Water is something which most Canadians take for granted. We turn on the tap and it gushes out - either hot or cold, as we wish. In Tanzania, we would have a couple of cups of water with which to wash in the morning. We left hot and humid Dar Es Salaam to skirt the dry and dusty edge of the Serengeti plain. Most of the humidity was gone and when we got to Dodoma it was simply hot and dry. Each mouthful of water was gratefully received.
A communal water-tap becomes the centre of a community. It means life for a parched land. There might be just dry ground all around it, yet this life-giving precious water miraculously pours out of the pipe in the midst of it. Many communities have to dig hundreds of feet down to find the water they need.
Israel is a dry and hot land as well. So are the countries that surround it. When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, finding water was a life-and-death necessity. And when Moses struck the rock and the water gushed out, their lives were saved. I wonder if we can imagine their joy and relief.
And so it is natural that Jacob's well is the setting for today's Gospel story - a story about new and eternal life. The well is already ancient by the time Jesus met the Samaritan woman there. And here is the woman looking for physical water, but also thirsting for the spiritual water of which Jesus speaks.
We don't know this woman's name, but we know several things about her. We know that she has had five husbands and that the man she is currently living with is not her husband. We don't know whether all of her previous men had died, or whether some or all of them divorced her. Either way her situation would have excluded her from civil society.
We know that it is about noon - the hottest time of the day - when no one would go out to fetch the water. Is this her daily ritual, to go out at the hottest hour so that she can fetch the water alone? - to avoid the scathing glances and comments of the townspeople?
She is astounded that Jesus spoke to her and asked her for a drink of water. She is right to be astounded, for Jesus broke all the social rules his time.
1) He spoke to a woman alone which was forbidden.
2) She was a Samaritan and Jews would not associate with them. They were considered unclean.
3) He wanted to drink from a Samaritan container which would also have been forbidden.
4) She would have been considered a woman of ill repute, living with a man who was not her husband.
Not only does Jesus converse with her, but this is the longest-recorded conversation which Jesus has with anybody in the Bible! And she is the first person in John's Gospel to whom Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah. In Jesus' time, you could not find a person more outcast and socially unacceptable than she. But Jesus enters into a relationship with her, which is about life and renewal.
I don't know if there could be anyone more in need of renewal than she was. It is hard to imagine how this woman must have felt about herself. Through design or circumstance she had been passed from man to man over and over again and still now was living in sin. What must her spiritual thirst have been like? Her life is dry and parched and she is all used up by the time she meets Jesus.
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt used up and worn out by your life? Have you felt spiritually parched? I think that many of us are often spiritually dry, and sometimes we don't realize that we have been that way for a long time, and it is only when we have had a sip of Jesus' life-giving water, that we realized just how dried up we had been.
Have you ever felt to be too outcast or worn down or spiritually sick or sinful for God to reach? Today's story is for everyone like that. Today's Gospel show us that there is much more grace in God than there is sin in us. God will reach us wherever we are.
Barbara Brown Taylor says that we tend to be spiritually anorexic. We starve ourselves of spiritual nourishment, but don't see ourselves starving to death. She says that we must learn again how to be hungry.
One thing about that Samaritan woman: she threw away her shyness in front of her neighbors and told them all about this man who she thought was the Messiah. What was it about her face and her manner that would have convinced them to come down to the well in droves to see Jesus? Had Jesus living water already healed her enough so that they would listen to her? Did they already see the change in her?
And what about you? Do you know your thirst? Do you feel your lack? What part of you is like a dry and parched land? In what inner way do you feel to be outcast or unworthy of unreachable?
Come to the well. Come and ask Jesus for this living water. Have your thirst quenched and be made whole. Jesus will reach you just the way you are. Your soul can be filled up with a bubbling spring which can reach out to others with the precious gift of living water. Amen.
