We all are aware of the natural disasters occurring almost half a globe away in Myanmar and China. Myanmar has been devastated not only by a cyclone and major flooding, but also by a ruling junta who will not allow aid workers into the country. So many of thousands will die needlessly, simply because of the circumstances of their birth. In China, officials have confirmed deaths in the 20,000s and expect many more. The other day I heard a reporter on NPR relate what he saw in a remote mountainous village. What stuck out to me in his report is that he said the town had a well, but the people were dying of thirst because they dared not drink from the well, because they feared that death had contaminated the water.
So close to the living source of water, hundreds if not thousands of people will die. Many within feet or yards of a well.
The Gospel of John has a story involving a well - a well that has a different life outcome than the well in China.
John 4:5-29 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 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." Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?"
Jesus comes to the well thirsty. The theme of thirst is central to John’s Gospel.
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), "I am thirsty." John 19:28
One of the final words that Jesus cries out on the cross is that he is thirsty. Thirsty for water? No. Thirsty for us.
Mother Theresa wrote this about God speaking to us:
I thirst for you. Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe My love for you: I THIRST FOR YOU. I thirst to love you and to be loved by you - that is how precious you are to Me. I THIRST FOR YOU. Come to Me, and I will fill your heart and heal your wounds. I will make you a new creation, and give you peace, even in all your trials. I THIRST FOR YOU. You must never doubt My mercy, My acceptance of you, My desire to forgive, My longing to bless you and live My life in you. I THIRST FOR YOU. If you feel unimportant in the eyes of the world, that matters not at all. For Me, there is no one any more important in the entire world than you. I THIRST FOR YOU. Open to me, come to Me, thirst for Me, give Me your life - and I will prove to you how important you are to My Heart.
I know you, through and through. I know everything about you, the very hairs I have numbered, nothing in your life is unimportant to me. I have followed you through the years, and I have always loved you even in your wanderings. I know every one of your problems. I know your needs and worries, and yes I know all your sins, but I tell you again I love you. Not for what you have or haven’t done, I love you for you. For the beauty and dignity my father gave you by creating you in his image.
Dignity that you have often forgotten. Beauty that you have tarnished by sin. But I love you as you are, and I have shed my blood to win you back. If only you ask me with faith, my grace will touch all that needs changing in your life. I will give you the strength to free you from sin and all its destructive power., I thirst for you. That is the only way to describe my love for you. I thirst to love and to be loved by you.
No matter how far you may wander, no matter how often you forget Me, no matter how many crosses you may bear in this life; there is one thing I want you to always remember, one thing that will never change: I THIRST FOR YOU -just as you are. You don't need to change to believe in My love, for it will be your belief in My love that will change you. You forget Me, and yet I am seeking you every moment of the day - standing at the door of your heart, and knocking. Do you find this hard to believe? Then look at the cross, look at My Heart that was pierced for you. Have you not understood My cross? Then listen again to the words I spoke there - for they tell you clearly why I endured all this for you: I THIRST...).Yes, I thirst for you- as the rest of the psalm-verse I was praying says of MeI looked for love, and I found none... All your life I have been looking for your love - I have never stopped seeking to love you and be loved by you. You have tried many other things in your search for happiness; why not try opening your heart to Me, right now, more than you ever have before.
Whenever you do open the door of your heart, whenever you come close enough, you will hear Me say to you again and again, not in mere human words but in spirit: No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake. Come to Me with your misery and your sins, with your troubles and needs, and with all your longing to be loved. I stand at the door of your heart and knock ... Open to-Me, for I THIRST FOR YOU.
We hear these words, but do we know in our heart of hearts that God in Christ knows us completely AND, not despite, AND loves us completely. How much do we hide from God? How much do we try to conceal in shame or hurt, in embarrassment or in vanity? How many of us try to earn that love from God? How much do we try to be good or productive, or loving or nice so that we can be loved by God? But do we have it backwards?
John often speaks of this thirst of Christ as a groom wooing his bride. Already in John before we get to our story for the day, Christ has attended a wedding feast at Cana where he turns water into wine. And John the Baptist has described his role as the friend of the bridegroom.
And listen to John’s words, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom.” John 3:29. We already belong to Christ. We are already betrothed to Christ, and he has come to earth to woo us, and to claim us as his bride.
The setting for John’s story of the Samaritan woman picks up this theme of betrothal, wooing and marriage. Stories of the beginning of the families of Isaac, Jacob and Moses all begin at wells. Resting at wells equates in the Old Testament as a place for God’s chosen to be nourished, and refreshed. It is the starting point of the next chapter in their lives, which always involve being connected to a woman and her family, through a courtship process.
At Jacob’s well, deep in the heart of Samaria, it is not a patriarch, like Isaac, Jacob or Moses, but a lone woman who comes to the well for water in the heat of the afternoon sun. How will God woo her? How will God begin her new journey?
Well, it starts strangely, for it is Jesus who asks a drink from her. It would almost be like you or I asking a homeless person for a bite of their burger that they have just taken out of the dumpster at McDonalds. Why would we possibly want anything from a homeless person? What could they possibly offer us, that wouldn’t contaminate or kill us?
But Jesus, who already knows the Samaritan woman, thirsts to come into relationship with her. He already loves her. Jesus begins the courtship process by asking her for a drink of water. Jesus, who knows that she is living with a man outside of marriage, could have condemned her, could have named her a sinner, could have demanded that she repent and ask forgiveness before he would have anything to do with her, but he does not. Instead he humbly tells her that he is thirsty.
The woman resists, after all she knows how others have judged her, how others have ignored her, how others have condemned her. She has most possibly experienced the rejection of courtiers and husbands before, after all she has had five husbands. Did she bury them all? She couldn’t have divorced them, only men could divorce womaen.
She wonders how Jesus could ask her for water. Doesn’t he realize that by receiving water from her that he could become contaminated? That by sharing water with her, they would be in a relationship that would be deadly?
Jesus responds to her by offering her living water. Jesus bends forward in conversation with her, resisting her attempts to distance herself with artificial boundaries set up by human beings.
Jesus does so in a riddle, just as he has answered Nicodemus the Pharisee in an encounter that has happened just before Jesus comes to Samaria. The riddle engages the woman, just as it did Nicodemus. It draws both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman into a relationship with Jesus, it causes them to pause and examine all that they know and all that they value and hold dear and to begin to receive Jesus into their lives.
Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that she has already been given a gift by God of living water and that all she has to do is ask for it. Jesus is telling her that he already knows her and loves her. That she is already his, if only she would ask Him into her life.
But the woman resists. Commentators since the reformation argue that this demonstrates the willful and bold nature of her sinfulness. They say she is taunting Jesus out of her wickedness and immorality, that at this point she is unaware that she is a desperate sinner. Her sick and injured soul speaks rashly to Jesus, they say, because she does not feel guilty for living with a man outside of marriage, therefore Jesus has to point this out so that she can feel guilty and thus thirst for the water of life. But the problem with this approach is that Jesus never calls her a sinner, never asks her to repent.
The early church saw the woman’s response differently. They see her as confused woman who is willing to try to understand what Jesus is offering her. She is trying to understand Jesus’ riddle through the religious structure of her time. First and foremost she is concerned that her water would contaminate Jesus, that it would bring Him shame and condemnation.
For years I knew there was a God. I would look at nature and see all His glorious work and I would be in awe of such a creator God. And then I would look at myself. I grew up in a household with a lot of verbal abuse. I can’t repeat the name my mother called me and my siblings. I thought I was contaminated, polluted, little more than pond scum. For years, I wondered, how could such a creator God ever love me, someone so worthless? How could God ever want me to draw near? Wouldn’t I just contaminate all that was good?
If I ever was going to get near to God, I thought that I had to make myself clean. I had to become better, I had to scrub hard to get the slime off of me. But the more I tried to be better, the worse I seemed to become. It became a vicious cycle; one I think that the Samaritan woman knew well. We both did not need condemnation; we had enough of that to go around. What we needed was love and truth. We needed someone to know us and to thirst for us. No wonder the Samaritan woman was wary about responding to Jesus’ offer of water, I was wary too.
Then the Samaritan woman takes Jesus’ offer of living waters literally, as something that springs forth from an earthly well that she must draw from. Here the woman might be testing Jesus, but not out of unconfessed guilt, but out of woundedness. Too many had come before offering promised potions of love, that too often were just shallow pits of mud. What the woman needs is a deep eternal well of love to sustain all who she is.
For many, when we don’t feel love, when we don’t experience the thirst of God for us, we go in search for it in the shallow offerings of earthly love. We seek meaning in imaginary relationships based on sex, or we take drugs, or we acquire things or claim status. Anything to fill the emptiness. But what happens is we end up drowning in the random meaninglessness of life from the rising waters of our amoral sensual constructs.
Jesus knows this about me. He also knows this about the Samaritan woman, so he helps her to understand that the living waters are not from earthly wells that condemn us to death, which only lead us to more thirst. The living waters he offers are ones that quench our thirst because they will be an eternal spring of water that lead to life. They are living waters that allow us to worship in spirit and in truth.
And there is no part of her, no place of shame that she can hide from Jesus. Jesus knows her and he loves her. He knows what is true. His love for her is so deep, that nothing about her or her circumstances can change his thirst and love for her. And because of this, his waters can bring truth to the woman who came to the well and experienced God’s thirst for her.
And this promise is for us as well. We too can draw near to the well and receive God’s thirst for us. We can experience his love and truth for us. Truth that is life giving. Truth that allows us to see ourselves for who we are, to see ourselves as God sees us, as his beloved bride, whom God desires to woo, and wed.
I will never forget when I came to Christ almost nine years ago. I walk my dogs every morning, and during that time, I walked with Christ and each day he told me about my life and who I was. Deep personal truths stripped of the falsehoods I or the world had constructed. He told me who I was, and where I had been. He revealed how much he had always been by my side thirsting for me, wooing me, knowing me and loving me. Continuously offering life to me.
The Samaritan woman has only known husbands who leave her for dead, Jesus is offering her a different marriage proposal, one that will leave her with the promise of life eternal, because Jesus will eternally thirst for her.
And boldly the woman asks for this water, and with this request she receives the water.
Now the conversation goes deeper. The wedding is soon to take place, vows exchanged. The woman says her vows, “I know that the Messiah (called Christ) is coming. “ John 4:25
And Jesus responds, with his vow “I am”.
We are fond of saying traditionally in weddings, I do, but Jesus responds with “I am.” His words echo his Father’s love for the people of Israel: God said to Moses, “I AM” WHO I AM" He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'"Exodus 3:14
The greatest words of love ever heard by anyone is not I love you, but “I AM”. For it is God’s declaration of love for his people. A love that is an action word that will bring deliverance and salvation first extended to God’s people, the Israelites, and now offered to all in Jesus.
The wedding is finished. Jesus has declared his love for his bride. He chose to make his declaration of love, not to the Pharisees, not to the disciples, not to John the Baptist, not Nicodemus, but to the Samaritan woman. A woman who was open to the thirst of God in Christ for her.
The time of celebration has begun. The woman, liberated, gets up and leaves her water jar behind. She is no longer in need of water that leaves her thirsty, she has been wedded to the living waters and she will thirst no more, for her groom will thirst for her eternally. She has become the vessel unto which she can receive the living waters of Christ. And because of she has become this vessel she in turn can worship in spirit and in truth. A miracle has happened and out of it comes the Samaritan woman’s worhsip that God eternally thirsts and desires, for it is in her worship that she gives all to God through Christ. For ours is a jealous God who seeks nothing less than all of us in union with him.
What if we stopped trying to convince people that they are thirsty? What if instead, we turned our attention to God’s thirst, for us and for others? What if we carried that message to the world? What would it look like?
What would it mean to put down our vessels that we use to quench our thirsts, and take time to enter into God’s thirst for us? What if we allowed ourselves to become vessels that quench God’s thirst?
What if we knew, not just with our minds, but with our hearts, that there is nothing about us or our circumstances that could ever bring contamination or death to Christ’s deep well of living water?
Maybe it would look like this.
One summer, I worked as an interim pastor in a small rural church in the Midwest. During that time I met Dan, a fifty-two year old man scheduled to have a quadruple bypass heart surgery. His parents, Pearl and Ed, were parishioners, whom I had visited regularly. In Pearl and Ed’s small cluttered but clean parlor I had shared refreshments and heard stories of their family. Back in the early 1930’s James was a fieldworker. He first saw Pearl on the back of a covered wagon as her family moved all they had into town. They soon married, but life was hard, and they barely eaked out a living in the harsh climate of the dusty plains. When the depression hit, they lost everything and had to start over. Pearl and Ed had five children, two who died as infants. Ed and his two brothers dropped out of school so they could work the fields next to their parents. Eventually the family prospered and owned thousands of acres of land, and several businesses.
One of the things that the small framed but wiry Ed would almost proudly tell me was that when he would need to discipline his boys, both who grew to be strong giants compared to their father, he would stand on a footstool and pummel them. And Ed was proud, not necessarily of the violence per se, but that he had raised his boys to know the difference between right and wrong. All of his boys lived in their own homes on the land that Ed owned, but I never saw them or their families at church.
Pearl called me one day and asked that I visit her son Dan in the hospital before his surgery. She was worried about Dan and the state of his soul, she said. At the hospital, I encountered an overweight but strong man, sitting alone in his hospital gown, vulnerable in the darkness of his single bed hospital room. I told him who I was and that his mother asked me to visit him; he was not glad to see me. I am sure that he thought at some point I would either try to convert him or pray for his lost soul. He must have decided that the best way to get rid of me would be to tell me scandalous things about him. “I have two wives,” he began. He then recounted portions of his life story, one of much pain and sorrow. He described how at one point his business failed, which led to bankruptcy and the end his first marriage. Dan wanted to divorce, but his parents would not let him because it was against their faith. Dan had to leave the family church, one that had shaped his faith since a child. He set up the first wife in a new house, and then after ten years met another woman and common law married her. For over fifteen years, he had taken care of both of them and his children.
When Dan realized he had not scared me off, we told some funny stories that made us laugh. As I was preparing to leave, Dan shared with me how he was worried about his surgery and if he did not make it what would happen to his wives. I asked him if he wanted me to sit with his wives the next day during the surgery and he nodded. He tried to speak again, his head downcast; I could tell that he was worried about what would happen to him. He had had a faith that abandoned him when he was down, would it be there for him now? I told him that he was a child of God and that God loved him very much. He looked up, a tear forming, and nodded. I asked if I could say a prayer for him and he said yes. The next day I sat with Dan’s wives. They were anxious but not distraught. I did not say much and they seemed to be a comfort to each other. When the news came, that Dan made it through the surgery; they both broke down in tears. I left them as they went to visit him in post-op.
The truth that needed to be spoken that day to Dan, was that he was much loved by God. That God still thirsted for him over all these years and that God could still draw close to Dan and his family. God knew Dan so intimately that He named him as His child. It was in that naming, in that claiming of God’s thirst for Jim that healing occurred.
Dan did not return to our church, but over the next couple of years, reconciliation between Dan and his father did occur. When his father died just last year, Dan and his wives attended the funeral.
In the beginning, God made creation and saw that it was good. There was no hunger, there was abundance for all.
John tells us that in the end God will prepare a final heavenly banquet, a wedding feast where the living waters will turn to wine, and all will come to the table and thirst will be no more.
Until then we live in the in between times where we can catch glimpses of God’s love for us and hope that one day, we may hunger and thirst no more.
Revelation 21:1-6 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.
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