The Well is Deep
By Rev. Daniel Smith
February 24, 2008
Third Sunday in Lent
Lessons: John 4:4-29
Friends, in a few moments, we will invite you into a time of healing prayer. Before we do so, I’d like to offer some brief observations about our text from John in the hopes that it might give you a handle, if not a bucket, from which to draw upon the living and healing waters to which the passage refers.
First, I invite you to notice how Jesus himself primes the pump of our need. Unlike so many other stories, this passage doesn’t start with someone coming to Jesus, asking for help or healing. Instead, Jesus needs something from this woman, and so from us. His words are so plain-spoken, its easy to miss what it might mean to have Jesus asking us for something that he needs. How often do we consider this as a starting point for conversation and encounters with our Savior. “Jesus, nice to meet you, what can I do for you today?” The one who says “Come to me you weary and rest” makes his no-nonsense request. “Give me a drink”. He knows what his thirst is for. He needs agua, plain and simple. In this way, as in so many others, he is a model and guide. Before he knows and can respond to our needs as deep as life, as the hymn goes, he if first in touch with his own need and he expresses accordingly.
As we move more deeply into this story, we can find there is something even more refreshing than this image of thirst and of having water to quench it. If we look at her response to her encounter with Jesus, the way she talks about it with others, we can find in her too a model, this of authentic testimony. To testify for God’s power in one life may not mean that one has to be full of certainty, and beyond doubt. The great preacher Fred Craddock says of the woman at the well: “She is a witness, but not a likely witness and not even a thorough witness…She is not even a convinced witness.” Her saying “Can this be the Christ?” is literally “This cannot be the Christ, can it?” Her witness is itself a paradox. Even so, Craddock writes: “her witness is enough: it is invitational (come and see), not judgmental; it is within the range permitted by her experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty; it is for everyone who will hear. She does convey, however, her willingness to let her hearers arrive at their own affirmations about Jesus, and they do. And did you catch what is the basis of her testimony: “Come and see a man who just told me everything I have ever done!” which leads me to my next point.
Before this woman bears such a witness to Jesus, before she can bow down to the spirit and truth he represents, she must first bear witness to her self. She first has to see and come to terms with her whole self, with all her gifts and burdens, all her shadows, all her embarrassing insecurities, all her moral, physical, spiritual disgraces (even regardless of how much of her story was within her choice and control). In standing face to face with Jesus, she stands face to face with her own humanity in all its broken fullness. Barbara Brown Taylor has written: “By telling the woman who she is, Jesus shows her who he is. By confirming her true identity, he reveals his own, and that is how it still happens. The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are – the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it. The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is – who crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguises – speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper, so that you go back to face people you thought you could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he spoke to you. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.”
Come and see, indeed. By looking honestly at the brokenness of my own life and humanity, by recognizing my moral blundering and being honest with myself, there I have found a truth that is beyond me, and there I have found my help, my strength, my guide. Like the woman at the well, we may come to realize that God’s love for us runs deeper than the hatred of our lives, of what we have done and left undone, and of those burdens we bear that are both within and beyond our control. And, she bids come and see, not only to her friends, but through them to God as well. In the words of the hymn we will later hear the choir sing at the offertory, “Come break the rock, and bid the rivers flow from deep unending wells of joy and worth, for tears, for drinking, drowning and new birth, and I shall find and give myself and know the keys, the living water and the light.”
Though the word healing is nowhere mentioned in this text, its clear that this living water is all mercy and all healing. From this well, we are invited to drink, even now. But first, like Jesus, we must know our thirst and name our need. I ask you…for what are you thirsty?
Are you, too, thirsty for rest? Come and see. Are you thirsty for wholeness? Come and see. Are you thirsty for freedom? Come and see! Feminist interpreters remind us that this text illustrates how a woman is freed from her assigned task to carry water – the reason she is there in the first place, and freed to become a disciple of the one who indeed provides “living water.” Are you thirsty for a newfound freedom in your life? Free from and free for what? Come and see! If your soul is parched by some untold suffering, come and see. And let God come and break the rock from which rivers and underground streams of life giving water can flow. In both the Exodus wilderness, in Samaria and right here in this community, God provides living water to all who thirst. Come and see.
