Third Sunday 0f Lent

‘The water that I will give will become a spring of living water gushing up to eternal life’

On Boxing day of  last Christmas a mini disaster struck the Rectory in the shape of a burst pipe. All of a sudden life falls apart – no shower, no washing, not even a coffee to calm you down : and all on Boxing Day! Thank the Good Lord for Dave the plumber who even on Boxing day came and sorted us out. You don’t realise how valuable something is until you don’t have it.

Most of us who live in the developed world take water for granted. I guess we are even wasteful with it. We leave the tap running and neglect to repair the ones that drip. Local water companies say that up to 10 per cent of water used is either lost by them in leaking pipes or wasted by us. But we don’t worry because we think that it is just a never ending natural resource. Countries like ours that have traditionally had a plentiful supply of water through regular and dependable rainfall will find ourselves ill-equipped to conserve water.

Millions of people who live in the developing world know the value of water. Where the rainfall is meagre and undependable. Where there is no such thing as piped water. Where the nearest well is miles away and where the possibility of water contamination is real and deadly. In these water is treasured for what it is, the greatest God given resource and fundamentally necessary for human life. No wonder water is such an important religious symbol, not only in Christianity but also in Judaism, Islam and other great world faiths. Water is a symbol of life, of cleansing, of refreshment. It symbolises power. Water reminds us of birth. But it also reminds us of chaos and of death. All of those aspects of life can be filled with religious meaning – and water is highly symbolic of that meaning.

The people of Jesus’ day knew the value of water as vital to life. Every drop of water had to be carried by hand from the well to the home, and used with the utmost economy – just as it is in many parts of Africa today. It was mostly the job of women – like the Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar in the Gospel story for today.

There are quite a lot of stories associated with wells in the Old Testament. Abraham’s servant found a wife for his son Isaac by a well in Haran when the young Rebecca helped him get water for his camels. Moses met his future wife by a well when she needed to get water and was being prevented Moses intervened on her behalf. Maybe this Samaritan woman was looking for more than water when she came to the well and found a strange young man sitting beside it? It was certainly an odd time of the day to be at the well. John tells us that it was mid-day – the hottest time of the day. The time for drawing water was usually morning and evening when the day was cooler, which is when the women would usually make their way to the well. But this woman was there at mid-day.

As the story unfolds we are told she has as they say a past – a series of husbands. She has a present too. The man she is living with is not her husband. No-one would bat an eyelid today, but then when the religious law was so clear and strict - she would be considered a great sinner and an outcast. Maybe that is why she was at the well on the edge of the village in the noon day heat – there would be no-one there. She could avoid the scorn of wagging tongues and pointing fingers. Jesus asks her for water.

How could he a Jew ask her a Samaritan for water? Jews and Samaritans had had trouble sharing the land for centuries, how could this Jew ask to share a bucket of water with a Samaritan woman. According to law and convention he shouldn’t even be alone in the company of a woman – and certainly not this woman both a Samaritan and a sinner. Religion, ethnicity, nationality and morality should have kept Jesus and this woman miles apart. But a thirst for water brought them together. Jesus asks her for water. But she ends up with the promise from Jesus that he is the source of ‘water that will become a spring gushing up to eternal life’.

St John’s Gospel is the one Gospel where we get to know some of the characters who meet Jesus and we see the effect that he has upon their lives. The way John tells his story of Jesus is that he develops these characters and allows us insights into who they are and even what their lives must be like before and after they met Jesus. And so it is with this woman at the well whom we meet today.  She seems lonely and isolated.  Ill-used and tired. Perhaps cynical. Certainly marginalised. As the Psalmist would say ‘her heart and her soul are like a dry weary land without water.’

Her meeting with Jesus makes all the difference. Now her life blossoms and flourishes. She feels fresh and clean and renewed and refreshed within. ‘A spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. The water of life, cleansing, renewing, refreshing, bringing life, powerful to change a life completely. And in the refreshing tide of this water she bears fruit.

We are told later in the story that she goes and tells everybody in the village what or rather whom she has found. She was offered the water of life. She uses it wisely to irrigate her entire village. Because of her many people came to drink from the water that Jesus was offering, the only water that can truly satisfy. That water is the Holy Spirit – refreshing, life giving, cleansing, renewing.

‘A spring of water within us welling up to eternal life’

The Holy Spirit is the life principal of all Christians putting to death within us all that hinders our true and eternal life with God. It brings to us the life in all its fullness which is Jesus’ promise to us. Jesus and our life with him is the only source of this water which is the Holy Spirit. When we become aware of how lonely and thirsty we are or can be without the love of God our Father.

When we come to know how much we need that love to transform our lives. Then we shall ask the Lord as this woman did. ‘Give me this water that I may not thirst’.