Tuesday, February 23

by John Wilkinson, Pastor

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that 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 have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:7-15)

The unnamed Samaritan woman—an icon to me—understands, as do we all, that we experiences a deep thirst, and that the only way for it to be quenched is an encounter with this living water. This living water appears here not as doctrine, not as dogma, but as relationship, as flesh-and-blood, as conversation, as journey.

What the woman does for us at the outset of Lent is call us back to the well, reminding us of our deep thirst. Tradition has spent so much time analyzing what has been wrong, or less frequently, right, with this unnamed woman. That may be a worthy pursuit, but it’s a pursuit that Jesus seems not to be overly concerned with. Rather, his focus becomes her focus – what she needs, what we all need, to live the lives we are intended to live, to have the deep thirst of our life quenched, to come into contact with this one, this living water, who meets us in unexpected items and places, and who transforms our lives, changing everything.

“Give me this water,” she says. Give us this water, we say.