The Dangers of Stagnant Water

John 4:5-30, 39-42

He was just sitting there, alone, by the well…in the hot, noonday sun…WHY? Her heart started to beat a little faster. The well was out a bit from the city proper, isolated. No one was ever here in the middle of the day. If she shouted now, no one would hear her. Wells were places of “romantic encounters.” What were his intentions? Should she turn and run? As she walked closer, she saw that he was a Jew. A Jew. Alone. Sitting in the sun at noon. In Samaria?

Jews didn’t travel through Samaria. When they traveled north/south between Jerusalem and the Galilee, they didn’t take the 2.5 day route that would take them through Samaria. They took the extra time and went the 5 day route AROUND Samaria. Jews considered Samaritans unclean. The Samaritans were sort of, in Harry Potter terms, half-bloods. They had been Jews, but during the Assyrian exile, some 800 years earlier, when the Assyrians conquered Israel and forced most Israelites to move, to leave their homeland, these Israelites around Samaria had stayed. And they got cozy with their captors. They intermarried. They mixed up their worship practices of the one true God of Israel with the idol worship of the Assyrians, but they remained monotheistic, worshiping Yahweh, the God of Israel. They only believed in the Torah, the first 5 books in our Old Testament, as they believed Moses had written them. They didn’t worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, but they had established their own temple on Mount Gerizim, where they claimed that Moses had originally intended for Israel to worship. And they claimed that they were the true descendants of Israel, the true people of God. The Jewish people liked Gentiles better than Samaritans – at least they weren’t heretics. No upstanding Jewish man would walk through Samaria and risk having to encounter those stagnant muddy unfaithful traitors.

So you can see why this woman is concerned – this might not be a friendly encounter. What is this Jewish man doing in the middle of Samaria – travelling alone? Sitting by the well in the hot noonday sun? And she has no safety net if he attacks her, and he knows it – anybody would – because she is coming to the well mid-day.

The women come to the well to draw water in the cool of the early morning. It is hard work, lowering the bucket, filling the water jars, carrying the day’s water back for their families. But, it is also an opportunity for them to have female companionship, to share stories…gossip…support one another. Their laughter bubbling like a brook as they walk together.

This woman, though, she doesn’t join in their giggling, in fact she figures she is likely part of their gossip. Her life is like stagnant water. She once had joy, hope. She had been part of that early morning ritual. Now, she tries to just make herself small. Remain unnoticed. She waits until she is sure that she won’t have to meet anyone on her way to the well and back. She never speaks unless she is spoken to. She has been excluded, marginalized so long, that she minimizes herself. She has been treated like standing water in a ditch that has started to smell – people walk by and pretend they don’t notice. She doesn’t have to avert her eyes, because she never raises her head to make eye contact.

“Give me a drink,” the Jewish man says. “You know better,” she responds. “We aren’t supposed to talk. Don’t get me in trouble.” There were not supposed to be any words, much less water, exchanged between them. Men and women who were not related did not have conversations. Jews and Samaritans did not socialize.

“If you knew who I was, you would ask, and I would give you living water.”

“Are you saying you are greater than Jacob, Abraham’s son, who built THIS well?”

There are two levels to this exchange right here –God provided this well to Jacob, who handed it down to his descendants – are you saying you can provide water that is better than what God has already provided? And you know Jacob, right? are you saying you are greater than Jacob, the son of the father of our faith, Abraham?

Jesus responds in a cryptic way about his water permanently quenching everyone’s thirst and becoming a spring of water welling up inside them to eternal life. His words are as mesmerizing as watching eddies of stream water as it courses around rocks. She wants some of that water!

And then Jesus puts his finger right on her pain – on the source of her shame. “Go, call your husband.” And then he reveals that he knows it all – her whole story. She has had 5 husbands, and the man she lives with now hasn’t married her. We don’t know what her story is – why she has had 5 husbands and now is living with a man to whom she isn’t married. We may have been told that she was immoral, or assumed it because in our culture a woman can divorce a man. But she couldn’t. Men held the rights of divorce. Perhaps she hadn’t produced a child, or someone else caught her husband’s eye, and she was divorced. It would be hard, though, for a woman who had been married and divorced to get another man to marry her…especially to have managed for it to happen 5 times. It makes more sense that her first husband died, and his next oldest brother was obligated to marry her, died, the next oldest brother…until the youngest son refused to marry her. She lives with the family, but she has no status. She likely has no children, because children would have given her some status, some rightful place in the family. Instead, she is allowed to stay, in shame and out of pity, rather than put out to choose between supporting herself in the only way available to women who have been left to the streets or wander into the desert and die of dehydration.

When Jesus knows all about her, she realizes that this knowledge comes from God and that he is Jewish. Who is right, she wants to know. Where should we worship? Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim? For so long the water has been puddled in these two options – either you are right or we are right. And Jesus says, God is spirit. It’s not about when or how or where God is worshiped, it’s about how YOU worship. It is about your spirit as you worship. The time is coming, and is now, when true worshipers will worship God in spirit and in truth. Dividing into separate ponds and insisting that your way is the only way to worship, the right way, only leads to two stagnant ponds. The focus of worship isn’t where you go to worship, what religion that worships God you are a part of, the focus of worship is God flowing through you.

It sounds good, but it’s murky. She just can’t quite understand what Jesus means for her to do. So she speaks of her belief that God will one day send a Messiah who will make all things plain. “I know that the Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will make everything clear.”

And the answer comes, it is like a dam breaks, a flood of fresh, clear water, “I AM.” Jesus reveals his identity just as God did to Moses at the burning bush. “I am; I AM” I am life itself.

Living water courses through her – Washed away is her place as a woman, washed away is her shame in not having children, washed away is her place of shame from her marriages now ended and her desperate situation living with one to whom she is not married, washed away is being the lowest of the low, washed away is the stagnant water of the women refusing to talk to her, turning away instead and talking about her, washed away is even the social constraint holding her back from talking to men – living water courses through her and she can’t hold it. She rushes back to the city, leaving her water jar, leaving her shame, running to let what is gushing up inside her, what has saturated her dry spirit, flow like a fountain out of her.

“Come, see,” she says to EVERYONE. “See this man who knows all about me, and still met me, still interacted with me. My encounter with him has transformed me. I was like stagnant water, and now living water is flowing through me. See, it spills out even now – meet him for yourselves.”

May transforming, living water like that flow through you and me. Amen.