Lenten Journey 2011

Merciful God, with the fountain of living water, you quench our thirst and wash away our sin. Give us this water always. Bring us to drink from the well that flows with the beauty of your truth through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

John 4:5-42
5 Jesus came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
The Disciples Rejoin Jesus
27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
31 Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
33 Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
Many Samaritans Believe
39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.
42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

This Gospel is a long story with several highlights. The first is that the meeting between Jesus and the water-wanting woman is at “noon”. In John’s literary way, very good things happen in the day and bad things happen at night.
The gospel starts with Jesus is sitting at the well in a district where Jews are not welcomed. A woman comes for water at noon. Respectable women of the town do this early in the morning. This woman has a well-known past which she assumes that Jesus does not know. Jesus greets her with a simple, but leading question. Jesus is going to reverse things. Shame is transformed into honor. Jesus reveals Himself as the Living Water, the One Who is to come. He not only speaks directly to her, but honors her with a personal invitation to believe. She responds with the awareness that He knows her past and does not hold it against her. She experiences something inside, drops her bucket and returns to town telling everybody that she feels differently about herself, because of this “man” who might be the Christ. The town’s folks go out to see for themselves after believing in her word. Jesus stays with them, now no longer a stranger and a foreigner. They believe and make a great statement, “This truly is the savior of the world.
We too have made such affirmations even in the dark times of personal shame. We have our buckets and we long for a something to bring light and self-acceptance with gratitude, into our lives. We come to this true well, as did this woman, and we have found and continue finding a Well of something differently new. She had been drinking “shame-water” and was thirsting for “Honor-Water” which would take away her need for anything else. Jesus told His followers that His life’s work was to complete creation, the work of revelation. Our basic thirst is for completion, union.
Our shame is that we have tried to find that central thirst’s satisfaction in various wells which offered invitations which lead only to other dissatisfying wells. This woman had tried five wells and was digging a sixth. Now we must drop our buckets of shame to be blessed and honored to drink of the Living Water.

“Whoever drinks the water that I will give him, says the Lord, will have a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life.” Jn. 4, 13-14

God of all compassion, Father of all goodness, heal the wounds our sins and selfishness bring upon us.
We acknowledge our sinfulness, our guilt is ever before us. When our weakness causes discouragement,
let your compassion fill us with hope and lead us through a lent of repentance to the beauty of Easter joy.