Dirty Water
Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42
March 27, 2011
Don’t you remember all those old hymns about the wish to be where Jesus was? My goodness, wouldn’t we like to be where the Lectionary stories are going on right now, because whether it is in the wilderness or at Jacob’s well in Sychar it is hot, really hot. There was no snow used in the making of either Lectionary reading today.
Just wait a few months. It seems a distant glimmer of a memory, but you know what it’s like to be really really hot. You become dehydrated and that means you are thirsty, often desperately thirsty, and desperation leads to desperate acts. Who was desperate in the wilderness of Sin – the Israelites, Moses, or God? Who was desperate at Jacob’s well – Jesus or the Samaritan woman? Are we thirsty enough yet to be desperate and risk something we’ve never done before?
The Israelites thought all their troubles were behind them until they came to the Wilderness of Sin, a place they hadn’t been through for over 400 years. No longer slaves, free at last, free at last, they had survived that spectacular affair at the Red Sea, and were fed manna from heaven in the barren wilderness, a moveable feast. But this was one more last straw. If there were any water for this multitude, it was brackish, dirty water, and they were dehydrating quickly. You blame the guy who brought you, and they were good at blaming, maybe better at threatening. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” Moses in turn cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are about ready to stone me.”
Was it a pun? Grab that trusty rod you used on the Nile way back when and strike the rock on Horeb or Sinai and water will come out and the people can drink. Moses struck and people drank, but there was a bitter taste for Moses. He named this place “Proof” and “Contention,” for the people had put the Lord to the proof, to the test we would say, “Is the Lord among us or not?” What have you done, God, for us lately? Love that dirty water.
Jesus had to get home to Galilee before things got too hot in Judea, for the leadership was starting to pay notice to Jesus in a suspicious way. He had to go back through Samaria and ended up in a town called Sychar – Macleans called it the worst neighbourhood in the Holy Land. Jesus arrives worn out and beaten down at Jacob’s well at precisely the noon hour and it was hot. Jesus was left alone since his disciples went on a food buying expedition. But he was not alone for long.
A Samaritan woman came to the well to draw water. That’s the kind of person you expect to meet in Samaria, a Samaritan, but of course this was told from a Jewish angle, making sure that we know this woman isn’t a Jew. When he asks for a drink of water, she knew this was inappropriate, all wrong. “What’s with a Jew like you asking for water from a Samaritan woman like me?” she murmured. She knew that he was in trouble by simply talking to her – and maybe she would be too. A good Pharisee would never speak to his own wife in public, let alone a woman who was worse than a Gentile. She was not happy to be placed into such a bind, murmuring all the way.
Despite her sense of being affronted, Jesus reverses the question, “If you knew what was going on here, the grace of God, then you would be the one asking for water, and he would have given you living water.” The woman doesn’t get it, like Nicodemus, wondering first how he thinks he will get living water out of a deep well without a bucket, and then accusing him of the traditional local heresy, so you think you’re better than Jacob? Jesus keeps coming back with the power of living water to quench all thirsts. She starts to get the idea, but not quite. Give me some so I don’t have to come here anymore.
Jesus asks to meet her husband, but she admits honestly that she has no husband. Amazingly, Jesus lays bare her past – five husbands and living with a man out of wedlock now, apparently the case. Don’t ask me how Jesus got the five husband detail right, but it didn’t take too much detective work to realize that this woman was here at noon, the hottest part of the day, so she could avoid the typical water well klatch of women who gathered around the cooler in the early morning and would have chewed her reputation up and spit her out. High noon was a hot time to come, and lonely, but at least she wouldn’t be degraded one more time. Jesus knew that, and yet he kept talking, talking eventually about the Messiah. The Samaritan woman is now fully engaged with a man who takes her seriously and when she says she knows the Messiah is coming, Jesus responds for the first time in the Gospel, “I am he.”
Take note that when the disciples arrived and express shock that Jesus was talking with a woman, she took off, leaving her water jar behind - Jesus never got a drink of water. Still, she went back to the city and started telling everyone she knew that you have to see this guy who told her everything she had ever done. She openly asked a driving question, “Can this be the Christ?” People started talking.
Jesus was hot. The disciples had brought him some food, but he declares he has food they don’t know about, sort of living food. Like the woman and Nicodemus they don’t get it. Has anyone been sneaking Jesus food? Meanwhile, Samaritans all over town believed in the woman’s testimony and so believed in Jesus and went and asked him to stay a couple of days. She was the first evangelist for what she told them was Good News. Funny, that Jesus didn’t even tell his disciples this Messiah business. He tells instead a foreign heretic female, three strikes and you’re on base. Four strikes really since she had exceeded society’s limit for husbands, but that’s the funny thing about the way Jesus operates – grace matters more than one’s accumulated sin.
After a couple of days with Jesus in their homes, these greatest of sinners in the worst neighbourhood heard for themselves what Jesus was saying and how he was saying it, and they believed him all the more and more believed in him. They came back to the woman and said, “We no longer believe him because of what you told us; now we believe because we have experienced him directly. Yes, this is the guy.” I assume Jesus got plenty to drink.
Wandering in the wilderness we Israelites have this habit of blaming someone for not letting us live the way we used to live. In the worst neighbourhood, we are given the opportunity not to live the way we used to live, and the grace to live an entirely new life.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan