• Exodus 17: 1-7

The memory of God’s miraculous deliverance from slavery in Egypt has evaporated in the heat and desolation of the desert.  At “Rephidim” God’s people demand water.  Moses takes their demand as an affront to his leadership and a “test” for the Lord.  But their “murmuring” grows louder.  Their gripe is direct: Why did you/You bring us our of Egypt only to die in the desert?  Moses implores the Lord: “what shall I do with this people?”  He fears for his life.  The Lord instructs Moses to go directly before the crowd, accompanied by some of the “elders,” carrying the same [shepherd’s?] “staff” with which he struck the Red Sea.  The Lord also tells only Moses that the Lord will go ahead to “the rock in Horeb,” which Moses should strike.  When he does, “water will come from it and the people will drink.”  Moses complies and names the place  “Massah and Meribah, Testing and Dispute.”  When the people have plenty of water to drink, Moses confronts the people: Now what do you say?  “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”

• Psalm 95

The psalmist summons God’s people to praise “the Lord our maker,” who “tends” us like a flock, before bringing up the unhappy memory of “Meribah and Massah.”  And, a reminder of the Lord’s bitter promise to that faithless generation that they would “not come to My resting place.”

• Romans 5: 1-4

The one factor that can alter every human vicissitude, Paul writes, is our experience of God’s “love,” which “has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Furthermore, God proves God’s  love for us “in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

• John 4: 5-42

The schism between the Jews of the North (Samaria) and South (Jerusalem) was bitter and had been exacerbated over centuries by the conquering Greeks and then the Romans, who played each group against the other.  That a Samaritan woman would be shocked that someone like Jesus, traveling through Samaria from Galilee to Jerusalem,  asked her for water has historic verisimilitude.  The Jesus in John’s narrative ignores her concerns with a cryptic response: if you “knew the gift of God” and who it is asking you far water, Jesus tells her, you would asked him to give you “living water.”  She first challenges Jesus: you have no bucket to get water out of the well.  As for something you call “living water,” she continues, are you implying that you are “greater” than the patriarch, Jacob, who gave us this well?  This water satisfies only until you will be thirsty again, Jesus responds, but “the water that I will give” will make all who accept it to never “thirst” again;”  “the water that I will give will become in time a spring gushing up to eternal life.”  Still not fully grasping what Jesus is saying, the woman asks for some of “this water” so she never has to come back to the well again.  Now the story becomes much more personal and direct.  When Jesus tells the woman to go home and bring back her husband, she replies she does not have a husband.  Jesus tells her she is technically correct, because she has had five husbands, and the man she is living with now is not her husband.  She calls Jesus a “prophet,” and assumes he wants her to shift her loyalty to his destination for worship, the Temple in Jerusalem, as the rightful place for God’s true worship. But Jesus says that none of these ancient rivalries will matter, “for the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth….”  She raises the question close to the heart of every Jew, North or South– the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus reveals: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”  Just then, the disciples return and wonder why Jesus is speaking to “a woman,” but they dare not ask him.  Meanwhile, the woman leaves her water jug at the well, rushes back to town with her amazing testimony: “come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”  Can he be the Messiah, she asks?  The disciples ask Jesus if he is hungry.  But, once again, Jesus ignores the immediate question.  Instead he says cryptically that in just “four months,” “then comes the harvest.”   Doing his Father’s work “feeds” him right now.   He is on the lookout for some who will “sow” and others who will “reap” when the “harvest” is ready.  The woman returns to the well, bringing many from the town with her.  They see Jesus for themselves and then listen to him for “two days.”  Now they believe not just because  of her testimony, but because of their own experience.

Surrounded by the great deserts of northern Africa and Asia, humankind’s earliest civilizations flourished in the “fertile crescent” where the presence of reliable water was literally the difference  between survival and extinction.  It should be no surprise that water is used as a frequent and powerful metaphor in all the earliest religions that originated there.  (For a rich description of the use of water as symbol and metaphor, see The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, pp 1081-1088.)

In the account from the Book of Exodus, when the Lord’s people at “Rephidim” ask if they were brought out of slavery in Egypt (where at least they had water) to die in the desert, the Lord  instructs  Moses to use the same staff with which he had stuck the Nile to strike “the rock in Horeb,” from which will gush more than enough water to satisfy the people’s needs.   In John’s gospel, Jesus initiates a conversation at the town well with a Samaritan woman, with a scandalous local reputation, (thereby Jesus crosses the heavily fortified religious, legal, ethnic, and moral barriers of the day).  The story is an important episode in John’s narrative, which presents Jesus as the source of “living water.”  Furthermore, it becomes a “spring gushing up to eternal life” in those who accept it!  It is Paul who explicitly names that to which this powerful symbol and metaphor points– God’s LOVE.  This very same LOVE has been “poured” into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and “proven” to us in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

Reflecting on this excerpt from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Jean-Luc Marion finds that the only natural response to God’s love is to become loving.   In his Prolegomena to Charity Marion writes:

“the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,’ who reveals himself in Jesus Christ as love, love alone is suitable for reaching him.  Perhaps this is so  because ‘the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us’ (Romans 5:5): in knowing God by the loving act of the will, man imitates God in his highest name… and becomes, by the grace of love, himself of God.  God is approached only because he [or she] who jettisons all that does not befit love; God, who gives himself as Love only through love, can be reached only as long as one gives himself to him.  Surrendering oneself to love, not surrendering oneself to evidence.”  (p. 61)

Marion’s comment, although in specific response to Paul,  reflects on the story of the Samaritan woman, too.   Although Jesus already knew her darkest secrets, he engaged her without judgment or condemnation;  although there were numerous barriers between them, he initiated conversation/relationship with her.  In these actions, the woman recognized that this was an anointed   one of God in her life.  It was such a pure experience of love that it created a crisis, a choice, an opportunity for a fresh start.  Jean-Luc Marion continues:

“Christ does not judge, he provokes the completed and unsurpassable before powerless man [sic], but  because, in meeting the ultimate word, each man [and woman] enters into his [or her] own crisis– and must, on his [or her] own decide himself [or herself] for or against ‘the word of God…”  (pp 118-119)

The Samaritan woman in John’s story was not judged by Jesus.  The ease with which this anointed one talked with her convinced her she had indeed encountered the Messiah and she immediately brought the whole town to him.   (The seed which Jesus had “sown” in the woman resulted in a spectacular “harvest.”)  This kind of love, which “died for us while we were yet sinners,” is of God and from God.  It is a “gift” given to us through Jesus, the Messiah.  It truly sates our deepest thirst.  And “love alone is the only suitable” response to God’s love.  The barren flourishes again.  The thirst is sated.