THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT: YEAR A

March 12, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 17:1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5:1-11

John 4:5-26, 39-42

 

The image running throughout today’s readings is that of water: a necessity of human life. We human beings can go without food for several weeks before we starve to death. But without water to drink we die of thirst within a few days. Human survival depends on the availability of water to drink.

 

Today’s Old Testament reading [and Psalm] recalls a crisis occasioned by the lack of water. This part of the Book of Exodus tells of the wanderings of the Hebrews led by Moses into the desert after their escape from Egypt. 

 

At one point the Hebrews come to a place called Rephidim, where there’s no water. The people start grumbling against Moses: “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” 

 

This moment represents a crisis not merely of physical thirst but also of faith. Just a short time earlier, God liberated the Israelites from captivity in Egypt by opening a path through the Sea. But even after this miraculous escape, the Hebrews are doubting that the same Lord who delivered them from dying at the Egyptians’ hands can also deliver them from dying of thirst in the wilderness.

 

Moses cries out to the Lord, “What am I going to do? These people are ready to stone me.” In response, the Lord tells Moses to go before the people to the rock at a place called Horeb, and strike it with his rod. When Moses does so, water comes gushing out of the rock, and the people drink.

 

This provision of water in the desert solves two problems at once. At the physical level, the people are saved from dehydration and death. And at the spiritual level, God reaffirms his continuing presence and commitment to provide for his people wherever they go.  So, the stream of water gushing from the rock of Horeb becomes a sign: not only of survival and life, but also of God’s providence and care.

 

In the Gospel reading, the image of water bears the same kind of double meaning. Jesus is traveling through Samaria. Wearied with his journey, he sits down by a well. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. So, tired and thirsty as he is, Jesus asks her for a drink. 

 

But when she questions how it is that he, a Jew, is crossing all kinds of national, religious, and ethnic boundaries by asking her, a Samaritan, for a drink of water, he takes the conversation to a whole new level. “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.”

 

What follows is one of those wonderful dialogues of double meaning so typical of John’s Gospel in which someone totally misunderstands what Jesus is saying because they’re using the same words in completely different ways. In ancient Palestine, “living water” meant the kind of water you get from a spring or a running stream: fresh, clear water that flows, gurgles, and bubbles: not like the murky still water that stagnates in wells and cisterns.

 

When Jesus tells the woman that he can give her living water, it sounds like a pleasant alternative to what’s in the well. “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” She’s probably being sarcastic, doubting that Jesus can give her any such water, just as the Hebrews once doubted that God could provide water in a barren desert.

 

But Jesus isn’t speaking of literal water. Pointing at the well, he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

 

Although the Samaritan woman doesn’t get it, Jesus is speaking of a spiritual gift that only he can give. The point is that, whether we realize it or not, just as our bodies thirst for water, so our spirits thirst for God. And Jesus is saying that he’s come to offer us a new relationship with the God who alone can quench our deepest thirst of our souls. 

 

In today’s epistle reading Saint Paul says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” Here Saint Paul likens God’s love to a stream of water poured out into the parched interior landscape of our souls to make us blossom and flourish.

 

Both Jesus and Saint Paul are using the image of water to describe the gift of the Holy Spirit. Just as Moses gave the Israelites water flowing from the rock, so Jesus gives us flowing rivers of grace and peace. And just as physical water sustains the biological life of our bodies, so God’s Spirit imparts eternal life to our souls.

 

After this woman’s encounter with Jesus, many Samaritans in the city come to believe in Jesus on account of her testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” Clearly, she did receive the living water that Jesus was offering her. Earlier on, she doubted Jesus, just as the Israelites doubted Moses in the wilderness. But just as the Israelites ended up drinking water from the rock, so the Samaritan woman and her neighbors ended up drinking of God’s Spirit.

 

At those times in our lives when we feel spiritually dry and arid, we may even feel abandoned by God and tempted to doubt him. Then, more than ever, we do well to remember the Israelites in the wilderness, and the Samaritan woman at the well. Despite their doubts, questions, and fears, they received what they needed in the end. Likewise, we may trust God in Christ to quench our spiritual thirst with springs of living water welling up to eternal life.