January 12, 2023
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
John 4:5-42
The Gift of Living Water
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
They call it “divining.” When you’re trying to determine where to dig a well, some people have the gift to locate the ideal spot by divining. It typically involves a forked tree branch.
When I was growing up, my father had taken a call to Burlington, Colorado on the High Plains. It was ranch country – sugar beets and cattle. One day, a parishioner, an older rancher, came into town to drop off something for my dad. My dad wasn’t home, so the rancher left it with my mom and my sister and me.
During the course of conversation, he said that he was on his way to help a farmer friend figure out where to drill a new well. His old one was petering out, and he wanted to dig a fresh one.
“How do you do that?” we asked. “How do you figure out where to dig the well?” That’s when he told us about divining. He could tell you how far down the water was located and how much of it there was. “A lot of people will use a willow switch, but me, I like my old set of pliers.”
Then he walked around to the rear of his battered pickup truck, and he pulled out a gargantuan pair of metal pliers. “I hold them like this,” he said. He held one handle in each hand with the working end of the pliers forming a vee in towards his stomach.
“Here, I’ll show you how it works. I’ll look for the water main in the street. When I get to the main, the water will pull down on the pliers.” He slowly paced across the street. When he stood directly over the water main, his hands started shaking violently. The pliers pulled down forcefully and it was all he could do to hang on. It was pretty remarkable to see.
Humans have been digging wells for a very long time. We have a long relationship with wells. In our gospel story, Jesus encounters a foreign woman at a very old, historic well. It’s still a working well to this day. The well had belonged to the patriarch Jacob. It was located in the region of Samaria. The woman at the well was Samaritan.
There was a long history of animosity between the Samaritans and the Jews. They were like oil and water. Both groups traced their ancestry back to Abraham, but their destinies took different courses. The Samaritans had been part of the northern tribes of Israel and were overrun by the Assyrians. Many of the Israelites were forcibly removed and exiled to faraway lands, but not all of them. Then the Assyrians brought in other ethnic peoples to occupy the land of Israel. Some of these foreign people intermarried with the remaining Israelites. Their mixed marriage offspring eventually became the Samaritans.
The Jews saw the Samaritans as compromised. They viewed their religion as corrupted. The Samaritans didn’t worship in Jerusalem. They built their own temple in Shechem.
So there was bad blood. They were feuding cousins. When the Samaritan woman arrived at the well, she spied that Jewish stranger sitting there. He was bold enough to address her, and she was flabbergasted that he asked her for a drink of water. First of all, it was inappropriate for a man to speak to an unfamiliar woman in public. And second of all, no self-respecting, kosher Jew would accept a drink from a Samaritan.
“How is it that you’re asking me for a drink?” she asked. Jesus replied that if she knew who had asked her, SHE would have asked HIM for a drink of living water.
The woman is confused. Jacob’s well is very deep. When it was measured in 1935, the water level was 135 feet in depth. How could this man get water when he didn’t have a bucket?
I just want to take a brief detour to address wells in Third World countries. Fetching water has traditionally been women’s work, and it’s very difficult. All of a household’s water needs – for drinking and cooking and cleaning – need to be hauled and carried from a well. Sometimes a woman will have to walk a very long distance to the water source. They typically carry it on their heads.
As you know, our ‘Noisy Offering” and our Lenten coin offering boxes are going to our synod’s cholera relief in our companion synod in Malawi. The flooding from recent storms has led to the contamination of many wells. Malawi has had 30,000 cases of cholera and 1000 deaths.
When I visited Malawi with a synod delegation in 2004, we saw a variety of wells. In cities, there were public pumps. Those were the best. But in rural areas and in remoter city regions, they rely on hand dug wells. Some of them have a built-up brim around them – with or without a cover, but others are just a hole flush with the ground. When it rains, the water drains into the wells and contaminates them. Our synod has a goal of sending $20,000 to aid in cholera relief and in digging safer wells.
End of detour.
Fetching water is women’s work, and it’s hard. So when the Samaritan woman hears about this living water, one that satisfies, she’s all ears. “Give me some of this water.”
Fetching water is an endless task. Thirst and going to the well reflect our human condition. We can thirst after so many things. But do these cravings ever satisfy? Or do they only leave us wanting for more? And although they never do fully satisfy, we keep coming back to the same old well.
The conversation between Jesus and the woman continues. Jesus reveals very personal aspects of the woman’s life. For whatever reason, she has been married five times. He doesn’t say this accusingly. He just states it as a matter of fact.
Women in Jesus’ day were extremely vulnerable. Their lives depended on being connected to a man, either a father, a brother or a husband. A husband could divorce his wife over very trivial reasons – for instance, he doesn’t like her cooking.
But despite that, if a woman was repeatedly divorced, she was the one to receive a negative stigma. That’s what had happened to this Samaritan woman. She lived every day of her life in troubled waters. She creeps around the margins of society. She’s done her best to become as transparent as water, to be invisible.
But now, in Jesus, she’s met someone who truly sees her. He knows everything about her but he still treats her with respect and full acceptance.
And this is exactly how Jesus regards you. See yourself standing by that well instead of this woman. Jesus knows you to your core. He knows every single aspect of your being – your history, your thoughts and fears, your errors and your yearnings. And he fully accepts you.
This was the living water which the woman most needed. In her lonely existence, someone finally saw her fully AND accepted her. This is the living water for us, too. It’s the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. It satisfies our deepest thirst in a way that nothing else can.
This discussion between Jesus and the woman is so overwhelming and intimate that she needs to back off a bit. She’s in uncharted waters, so she changes the subject. She talks about the differences between Jews and Samaritans and where the correct place for worship is.
Jesus points out how our practice of religion can construct something artificial. We carve out our own sacred well and we say, “Here is the place! This is the true belief! This is the pure way! Anyone who interprets or believes differently than we do, they’ve been corrupted.” We elevate our human constructs into gospel truth.
But today’s story is going to blow that kind of thinking out of the water. The disciples will be amazed that Jesus is talking to this foreign woman. And the entire Samaritan village will come to see that Jesus is the Savior – not just of Israel – but of the entire world.
This story at the Samaritan well tells us that we aren’t meant to carve out the wells of our own religion. No human divining is necessary. Our divine Lord invites us to drink from the well that we did not dig. We drink from him and him only. The gift of living water comes from our Lord. Abiding in his loving presence, we drink the waters of spirit and truth.
