Water from a rock, living water by a well
The readings this morning are brought to you by the letter “W” for water. Moses found water in rocks, and Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for water from a well. I am reminded of a phrase you may have heard before that goes, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” That is a line from the epic poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. The poem tells the story of a ship captain who is frustrated by an albatross that his crew believes is bringing wind to the ship’s sails, and he kills the bird. Misfortune then follows them, the ship and crew are lost, and the captain eventually makes it ashore. He is doomed to tell his story because of the weight of his guilt. At the end of the poem, the captain says “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all.” The mariner futilely searches for redemption for his sin of killing the albatross, but we see redemption in the story of Moses finding water at Meribah, and in Jesus at the well, despite sin being present in Meribah. In Samaria, sin was imposed on people that Israel didn’t like.
A story of redemption means that there was a sin committed to be redeemed from. In Moses’ case, the sin at Meribah by Moses or the Hebrews, depending on which version of the story you read, was a loss of faith in God. Another way to look at it is that someone took God’s favor for granted, an expectation of God’s protection and grace or at the very least there was a lack of gratitude. This is echoed as God’s voice speaking at the end of Psalm 95 that we rarely read, that says,
So, we have a complex situation where God saves the Hebrews from dying of thirst, but God is also angry that they took God for granted. For Jesus, the offer of living water to the Samaritan woman was an act of redemption because the Samaritans were looked down on and held in contempt by the Israelites, as John politely points out, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” It was an act of redemption because Jesus offered the woman living water, water that was the spirit of God. It would not only give her eternal life, but the Samaritans, and by extension all who believe in Jesus would become a source of this living water themselves, despite what the people in Israel thought of them. At first the woman didn’t understand what water Jesus was referring to, confusing physical water from the well with the spirit of God from Jesus.
We are sometimes confused by the physical and the spiritual as testimonials of faith vs. the facts. They are two different ways of looking at the world that together provide us with a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world than either one could alone. Testimonials tell us we believe God is involved, to answer the question of why or what does something mean. Facts tell us what happened and how. An example of this that I have been following with interest is the continued support of the belief that vaccines cause autism. When you listen to the facts that a parent presents for why vaccines should be ended, what you most often hear is a testimony to what they have endured: time and money spent on care of their autistic child, lack of understanding on the part of family and friends, fear of the unknown, and grief over a child and a life they expected to have but felt they have lost. The thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent on science, by my peers, looking for a non-existent link don’t enter into conversation, because what is most important is the testimony, the experience of raising an autistic child. The testimony is a fact of their experience, and it crosses a boundary to become the fact that such a link exists.
We look for redemption and righteousness in testimonials when we really need both testimonials and facts for redemption and righteousness. The Samaritan woman’s redemption was from being a Samaritan (a fact) and from her multiple marriages (testimonial). Together, they provide a more complete picture of why she was redeemed by Jesus. The Hebrew people’s redemption by God from thirst (the fact) was in the context of separating themselves from God (the testimonial). By extension, we have done something wrong (fact), and we confess, ask for forgiveness, and are absolved of our sins (testimonial). Redemption of sin carries much more significance and meaning for us when we have context provided by what we did, and the story behind it.
The message of the Ancient Mariner is in the last lines of the poem, that God created and loves all, and that sums up what Jesus brought to the world: that the adulterers, tax collectors, the disabled, the Samaritans, anyone who we see that embodies sin is loved. We, with our own weaknesses and imperfections, are included in that love. That can be hard for us to reconcile with when the focus of Lent is on sin and confession. That love was not obvious to Moses and the Israelites, yet God’s presence is shown by the water from a rock. That love and presence was clearer to the Samaritans who first found Jesus at Jacob’s Well, but they still have work to do on understanding his redemptive and reconciling words. Their reconciliation is like ours, that self-perception, how we see ourselves, or how others see us and tell us who we “really” are, does not dictate how God sees us. Whether raising God’s ire or being hated by others claiming righteousness, God’s love is testimony that we will never be abandoned, no matter what the facts of our lives are. We do not need to fear God’s wrath from the facts of our sins, but we should be concerned when we become complacent in our testimony of righteousness, or take God’s love for granted. We will always have water to drink, but what kind of water and why we need it is what we should ask ourselves. We will always have water to drink, but the context around when we drink it determines what we look for from God. Think about this the next time you take a drink of water. What would it look like to you to drink Jesus’ living water? Would it be a fact and a testimony to your life?
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