Today’s gospel reading comes from St John’s Gospel, chapter 4. Last week’s was from chapter 3. There, as Michelle drew out for us, Jesus met with the Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a leader, and a teacher. He is perplexed that he has to be reborn by water and the Spirit. Is he hovering on the edge of belief? His learning and his cleverness and his existing commitments have all been challenged. But he makes no confession of faith. He fades out of the narrative.
Chapter 4 takes us deeper into the need to be born of water and the Spirit, by way of a very different encounter. Not a man, this time but a woman. Not a Jew, but a Samaritan. Not a leader of the people, but a person whose life is bounded by the home, a person doing the daily chore of coming to the well to get the water for the day.
There she meets Jesus. Jesus says to her, Give me a drink. The woman is surprised and replies, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ She is rightly surprised. Jesus has broken through three barriers all at once. He is talking to a woman, talking to a Samaritan and asking to be given a drink from a vessel touched by this heretic.
Jesus breaks through into people’s lives. According to John’s Gospel, Jesus is the Word of God, the one through whom all things were made, the light of the world, the one who comes into the world in flesh and blood and makes known the Father. Is there any wonder that Jesus breaks through into lives offering them the chance to be reborn? To be born, not of the will of the flesh, but of God. to become children of God.
But we can put up the barriers. We can prefer the darkness to the light and often do. As the famous WW1 Anglican chaplain, Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, also known as Woodbine Willie, wrote, ‘The brutality of war is literally unutterable. Yet I would remind you that this indescribably filthy thing is the commonest thing in history’. Ukraine, Yemen, Syria. This is where this goes on today. And elsewhere of course. As John has Jesus say to Nicodemus and to us, ‘ … people love darkness rather than light so that their deeds are not seen’.(John 3.19)
The maker of all things confronts the hardness of the human heart. How hard are our hearts going to be this Lent?
Back to the well. To the woman’s bemused question Jesus replies, ‘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.’
The living water is a gift of God. Water in the Old Testament is a common image of the presence of God, an image of the Spirit.
Psalm 36
All people … feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life.
Water, abundance, delight: the presence of God in the human heart.
And then, also from the Psalms, there is the mysterious
Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your waterfalls;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
It’s from Psalm 42. Water, depth, thunder, waves, immersion: the Spirit in flood.
The prophets too employ the image. From Isaiah 12
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
A deep resourceful well, saving grace, joy in the Spirit.
Zechariah 14,
On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea and half of them to the western sea; it shall continue in summer as in winter.
Living, alive, life-giving waters, spreading far and wide, never failing. This is the Spirit.
And with the same idea of a great river flowing from the holy place we have, from Ezekiel 47,
… on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.
Sanctified water, holy water, fruit producing, nourishing, abundant beyond expectation. This is the gift of God, the gift that is the Holy Spirit.
This what Jesus gives to those who come to him. And there is more. He says,
The water that I will give will become in <you> a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.
The big lie that Western culture has bought into, is that God is distant, remote, and uninterested in each of us. This is not the Christian vision of God. We believe in the living God, the God whose Spirit floods our hearts with joy, delight, fruitful living, pressing on the door of our hearts with a passionate longing for us to open our hearts this Lent.
God is not even close. God is present. Each of us is the place, as has been said, where God happens. In each of us the Spirit wells up. That’s why it’s agony to resist, as we do. Why it is joy to embrace. As we can.
Life circumstances and life choices often make us put up the barricades. But Jesus, the Word of God, is no respecter of such barriers. Of the Father’s heart begotten, he promises each of us, the river of delights, the Spirit of God. the gift of eternal life.
As Jesus says to Martha later in this Gospel, Do you believe this? (John 11.26)
Service: Canon Bill Croft, 12th March 2023. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Readings: Exodus 17.1-7, Romans 5.1-11, John 4.5-26