The Living Water
24 February 2008
Water, even living water, which is the subject of this sermon, may not seem the most exciting of subjects, not gripping, not something to have you erupting in spontaneous liturgical dance. You might prefer to watch paint dry as to contemplate a pool of water. However, water has an elemental force and a power to destroy and sweep away, as we have seen within the recent past. Equally, properly harnessed and directed, water can and does bring life to dry land, fertility to previously barren soil. Add a splash of water to a very good malt whisky, Glenmorangie perhaps, and it will the better release the fullness of texture, fragrance and flavour. That dedicated alcoholic W. C. Fields, however, spurned such subtlety as he was highly suspicious of water because of what fish did in it.
We cannot avoid it this morning because water is central to the encounter in the Gospel between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. There is an important context, or back-story, as some would now have it, to this incident. We know well enough from the story of the Good Samaritan that there was a long-standing enmity between Jews and Samaritans: “For the Jews have no dealing with Samaritans,” S. John’s Gospel reminds us this morning. So here is another encounter which Jesus has with an outsider, someone on the periphery of respectability. But even within the community of the Samaritans, this woman seems something of an outsider: an outsider’s outsider, if you like. She comes to the well to draw water at noon. In that society, at that period it would have been more usual to draw water from the well in the cool of the early morning, rather than in the heat of mid-day. There is the clear suggestion that she is shunned by others in the village and wishes to avoid their baleful stares and whispered, disobliging and censorious comments; scorned, perhaps, of her succession of marriages: she has had five husbands and, as Jesus points out in a section we have not heard this morning, the man she is currently living with is not her husband.
Not only do we have an encounter with a Samaritan, but if that was not bad enough, with a Samaritan woman with an unsatisfactory past and a less than satisfactory present but even beyond that in that culture and community men and women were not seen in public together, never mind a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman. And Jesus himself is tired and he is thirsty; in these expressions of his humanity he shows an open vulnerability, to match that of the woman. With this background, we can appreciate more fully the significance of this encounter.
When Jesus asks her for a drink, he is crossing boundaries and traditional taboos and he is inviting her to do the same. His salvation was for all humanity in its fallen and broken state. There were none to be turned away. There was to be no distinction between Jew and Gentile, Jew and Samaritan, slave or free, male or female. All who are athirst for the water of life may have it and may have it in abundance and with the promise of eternal life.
Here Jesus is seeking someone who shares his thirst for the healing and reconciliation of humanity, for the repair of a broken spirit, for the rehabilitation of a fractured life, for the bringing into one family the broken of heart, life and spirit. Such an outcome requires only the response of faith and trust in him who gave his life for the sins of the world and for the outcasts of the world. The Samaritan woman makes that response when she says: “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst. By Jesus reaching out to her in his own need, “Give me a drink,” and at some risk of rejection, he shows her a respect that she did not have in her own life, and a dignity she did not have in her own community. She can do something for him and he can do something for her by according her an identity and a purpose. Here is something new for her, something that has been missing in her life which has been to a degree wretched and tawdry. It is a new confidence, a new spirit, perhaps, and a thirst which will not be satisfied by drawing water from Jacob’s well but from the words and actions of Jesus. The encounter necessitates risk on both sides but once we are willing to risk a response to Christ’s generous and unconditional invitation, like the Samaritan woman, there will be a sense of liberation from all that weighs down and restrains, all that is arid and barren in our lives and a life of authentic engagement in relationship with God in Christ Jesus and with one another is opened up and made available and possible.
And it is crucially a relationship of reciprocity. The Samaritan woman could provide something that Jesus needed: he could provide something for which she longed and yearned: it is as if she was waiting for someone to touch the right nerve.
And, of course, this significant story leads us to the heart of the matter. Not only did Jesus thirst at Jacob’s well it was he, and he alone, who gave to the Samaritan woman and to us in our baptism, freely of the water of life and who said those very same words on the Cross as he said to her at the well, “I thirst.” In the agony of his Passion and Death, however, they gave him vinegar and gall to drink: bitter drink to go with the bitter herbs of the Passion. But as he endured the Passion, that slow strangulation of innocence, from his side, pierced by a spear, flowed his blood mingled with water. It flowed from his side physically onto the dry and dusty ground, but it flowed figuratively, sacramentally, into the chalice, the cup of our salvation, that chalice soon to be offered, that chalice where water will be added to the wine as one of the Deacons whispers, “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity.”
Our death to original sin through the waters of our baptism and our salvation from the slavery of sin through the spilled blood and water of Christ’s sacrifice, re-presented here in the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass, drowned in the waters of our baptism, washed in the Blood of the Lamb, these are brought together in the Cross.
Particularly conscious of our weakness, our failings in this Lenten season, conscious of our need, with the Samaritan woman, for the living water of new life, we look to Christ nailed on the Cross to see amidst the dereliction, the blood, the sweat and the pain, the radiance of the love of God freely, selflessly poured out, drop by drop of sweat, blood and tears from our dying Lord. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.” It is to that consummation that we are summoned and drawn, to that well-spring of love where we will meet Jesus. There is “an harmonious agreement” between our new creation in baptism and our redemption through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
There is enough evidence for us to know that baptism does not exclude us from the possibility of sinning but it provides our indispensable context and the necessary setting for putting things right, for the conscious re-adjustment of our lives, for the acknowledgement and the correction of what has gone wrong, those times when we have fallen far short of God’s purpose for us in our lives and relationships, our failure to live up to the expectations, obligations and the privilege of being a follower of Christ, a child of God. And it is not only about, perhaps not even about, our wretchedness, our pride, vanity, hypocrisy, our lapses into lust and the rest of the dismal and tedious faults to which we are prone, but it is even more importantly to embrace the new reality, the new life that Christ offers, the possibilities of love, deliberately and consciously to seek a closer union with Christ through a considered pursuit of holiness of life and the sanctification of our lives.
By dying to sin through the waters of baptism, by slaking our thirst and satisfying our hunger in the Body and Blood of Christ, we commit ourselves, along with vast numbers of others, to be changed, to transform our moral indifference and lethargy, to animate our spiritual laxity into a more intense and lively realisation of our divine destiny; to enter into the possibilities of the life that Christ offers more fully and intensely in the sure and certain hope of sharing in the glory of God.
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library