The Rev. Austin K. Rios
12th March 2023: The Third Sunday in Lent
Last week, we explored some of the assumptions of John’s worldview and spoke of how Jesus’ invitation to Nicodemus to be “born from above” calls us to enter more fully into our baptismal life.
Today, we have before us another long scene from the Gospel of John that has water as an organizing theme and touches the heart of the messianic mission of reconciliation that arises through Jesus.
But before we speak more about that reconciliation, let’s discuss a few helpful background notes to this scene at Jacob’s well.
First, the earliest hearers of this encounter would have recognized this frame of “meeting at the well” as a familiar literary pattern in biblical times.
Jacob meets his future wife Rachel at a well around mid-day[1], and it was at a well that a servant of Abraham found Jacob’s mother Rebekah to be a suitable wife for Isaac.
Because of these encounters and others, hearers of this story of the Samaritan woman and Jesus meeting at a well would have them anticipating a similar kind of betrothal story.
This expectation of wells leading to weddings is addressed explicitly in the part of the scene when Jesus brings up the Samaritan woman’s husbands and marriages.
And for those of us who have come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, it is worth noting that this literary device of betrothal brushes against Jesus’ identification as the bridegroom of Israel, the Church, and of all creation.
We who know how the gospel story will proceed from this encounter at Jacob’s well—how Jesus will run afoul of the authorities because of the company he keeps and the message of reconciliation he preaches—how hope for the living water of love will become the parched and painful cry from the cross, “I thirst”—we have an understanding that the story of salvation has always been about the wedding of heaven and earth, of things temporal and things spiritual, of God and humanity.
The water from the rock at Massah and Meribah which satisfies the very real physical needs of the Exodus-weary Israelites is intimately tied to our fundamental thirst for connection to the ultimate source, and we refer to the bridging of this divide as religion (re-ligare) and reconciliation.
When Paul writes to the early Christian community in Rome about “God’s love being poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” and of being reconciled to God through Christ and receiving reconciliation through grace, he is referencing the very heart of this whole religious pursuit that comes into great focus in today’s encounter at the well.
Instead of Jesus and Photini, the name by which the Eastern Orthodox call the Samaritan woman, getting betrothed to become husband and wife through a traditional wedding, we see how their encounter is instead a foretaste of the reconciling of all sorts of divides:
The unhelpful and destructive divides between men and women, between Jews and Samaritans, between holy hopes and earthly realities.
The “living water” that Jesus offers is connection to the fullness of God in the here and now—an experience of the reconciled eternal reality we will one day know more fully, but which we can already taste and glimpse our lifetime.
It is up to us whether we will agree to receive this graceful gift of God or not, and if we will choose to pattern our lives according to Christ’s own in order to serve as channels of living water to a thirsty and divided world.
If Jesus’ mission of reconciliation is about collapsing the divide between heaven and earth and transforming warring factions into fellow parts of a re-membered Body, then we who are called by baptism and conscience to this reconciling mission must be evangelists and enactors of the same.
Practically, this means assuring that the Church’s work is about satisfying worldly needs like thirst, hunger, healing and community as part and parcel of any talk of heavenly connections.
This is one of the main reasons our ministry among refugee guests in the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center comprises help with basic needs like food and clothing as well as higher needs like language and job training and psychological support.
If Christ has reconciled heaven and earth, then the entire connected realm deserves our attention, and like a well that requires both subterranean and surface elements to be a conduit of water, we who acclaim Christ as Lord need to attend equally to the various components of our visible and hidden lives.
If you are wondering how you can allow this reconciling living water to flow through you this week, I encourage you to attend to two practices this week.
First, take some intentional time in prayer in which you open yourself to what God is continually offering you through Christ.
Go to the spiritual well of your soul in silence and allow the same Christ who spoke with Photini and transformed her life to meet with you.
Don’t be afraid if God “tells you everything you ever did” and instead of condemning you for the burdens of your past calls you to a new reconciled and reconciling life.
Our patron saint Paul did the same and his willingness to do so led to the faith we have received today— so perhaps your own encounter at the well will lead to the evangelism that God has uniquely gifted you to do.
Secondly, after you open yourself to receiving the living water of reconnection, pay attention to the details of your daily life and listen and look to where God might be calling you to respond.
Photini left her encounter with Jesus and went back to the city and the community to tell the good news, and to live in a new way as a result of her reconciled world view.
If our testimony of faith is to have import and a Christ-like shape, then any proclamations we make need to be accompanied by actions that reveal our deepest truth.
Jesus reconciled heady theology and philosophical questioning with very tangible acts of washing feet, feeding the hungry, and touching outcasts.
We would do well to follow his example, and the strength and hope we have to keep doing so arises from drinking from the ever-available spiritual well of living water through prayer and worship.
As we keep journeying together in this Lenten season, let us go to that reconciling well with frequency, and like Moses, Photini, Paul and all our ancestors in the faith, find there the strength, the will, and the hope to serve as channels of reconciliation in this lifetime, and in the age to come, know that union fully realized through Christ—our brother, our bridge and our bridegroom.