The Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman of Samaria in John’s gospel has always been one of my favorites (Jn 4:5-42). Each time I hear it, another wondrous slice of wisdom seems to emerge. As the story goes, Jesus and his disciples are traveling through Samaria, and just around lunch time, they come to a well, which is just outside of the town named Sychar. The disciples go off into town to get some food, while Jesus stays behind near the well. It is noted that Jesus is tired, as he sits by the well – tired and thirsty and without a bucket to draw water. As he is waiting there, a woman from the town arrives with a bucket…
Jesus engages the Samaritan woman, which itself was quite scandalous in that he was a Jewish man and this was a Samaritan woman. This type of encounter was doubly unacceptable to say the least. On top of that, Jesus asks the woman for a drink of water. The woman is appalled at the request given the social and religious distance between the Samaritans and the Jews and the inappropriateness regarding the gender issue. And, it is here in the story where Jesus gives the curious and somewhat hidden invitation to the woman. What started out as a request on his part for a drink of water, now becomes an opportunity for the conversation to move beyond the social surfaces and go deeper into the cistern.
“If you knew the gift of God
and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink, ‘
you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep;
where then can you get this living water?
Jesus did not have a bucket. Telling the woman that there is a possibility for Living Water, her sensibilities are offended, knowing that the well is deep and he doesn’t even have a bucket. On top of that, the well was built by Jacob himself, and here is this stranger claiming to be able to provide Living Water. I can imagine she may have felt that Jesus was playing games with her here in the heat of the day, talking about thirst, water, and…without a bucket. Then Jesus gives a description of this Living Water as compared to the water drawn daily from Jacob’s well:
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again;
but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst;
the water I shall give will become in him
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty
or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Immediately, the power of Jesus’ words seems to flow over the woman in a way that reaches down into her deepest inner thirst and releasing the divine inner spring within herself that she may never have been conscious of before. The exhaustion of her constant striving to keep her ‘bucket’ filled she now could express by asking for this Living Water. Then, the other shoe drops so to speak. Jesus’ reply to her is a request that she go and get her husband, which she confesses to not having one. Indeed, Jesus reveals that he is aware that she has had many broken relationships, and oddly enough the woman does not react in defensiveness. She is already trusting this strange man, who not only seems to know more about her that she knows herself, but cares in a way that she may never have experienced before.
So, what does she do? She leaves her water jar! She goes into the town and tells everyone that she encounters that she met someone who told me everything I have done. She already is tasting this Living Water and she realizes she does not need a bucket to draw it. There is no bucket big enough to contain the Divine offering. Indeed, the only real response for her seems to be the need to share this with others. The Living Water is flowing!
Could it be that we don’t need a bucket, because we ourselves are divine containers, only we don’t realize this most of the time? We feel the need to try to slake our thirst with any number of ‘containers,’ blinded to the reality that the divine spring is within – the Living Water is Christ in our lives now – right here and right now. What we are called to do, is to allow that water to flow, just as Jesus helped the woman to release that flow into her own life. And that release is always overflowing –compelling us to SHARE it with others.
How does this happen? Sometimes it is a confrontation with those ineffective plans, strategies and things, which we are dependent upon to satisfy our thirsts. We all know those things we constantly return to even though we know that won’t really satisfy. As God instructed Moses in the desert when the Israelites were complaining about their thirst in the desert, “Strike the rock and the water will flow from it for the people to drink” (EX 17: 3-7). We many times have to strike the hardness of the patterns in our lives of trying to fill empty containers that will never satisfy the divine thirst within us, to allow the source to well up within us and spill out from us. Isn’t this the Christ – the overflowing abundance of divinity in humanity, just waiting or thirsting to be set free?!
We don’t have to wait. We simply must start paying attention to our daily lives, naming the ‘wells’ or cisterns from which we draw stagnant water, identifying the ‘rocks’ that may need to be struck, the buckets that need to be abandoned, in order to release the Living Water of Christ to flow through and out from us to all! I am so reminded here of what Thomas Keating’s says about the ever-availability of Christ in our lives, “Jesus chose to be a part of everyone’s life experience, whatever that is, and to raise everyone up to divine union.”[i] Flowing Christ is everyone’s vocation!
Dare we believe that our own thirsts are the deep echo of God’s thirst within us to “Give me water,” i.e., allow the Divine wellspring within all of us to flow out without buckets into a world yearning to be watered!
“…hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts…” (Rom 5:1-2, 5-8)
[i] Thomas Keating, Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit (Lantern Books: 2007), pp. 38-39
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