The story of living water (yet we care more about the woman)

John 4:1-42

If you want to make people obsess over a person give her no name. I feel like that’s how half of romantic comedies begin: The unknown woman. Add in a subtle implication that she might not be on the up and up and, well, then you have some serious intrigue. It feels like every commentary writer on the Gospel of John falls hook, line, and sinker for this age-old trope. Every one of them is obsessed with the woman at the well. Who is she? What is she doing there? If you read a more conservative commentary it tends to be overly concerned with the woman’s sinfulness, especially her sex life—she had five husbands after all, they say. If you read a more liberal commentary it tends to be overly concerned with the woman’s faithfulness in spite of the obstacles she faced in a patriarchal society. That she would even be at that well in the middle of the day was an act of defiance, they say.

            Friends, this is why Jesus had to come. Everything is not this or that. The lenses we wear color everything we see. Every bit of turf needs to be defended; even this scene from John’s Gospel. The woman must be righteous… or the woman must be sinful. If you want to know why I’m Lutheran in a nutshell, it is because Luther gave us the language to say she is without a doubt 100% both—saint and sinner—and we should be less concerned about her than we are about Jesus and what this story speaks to us as individuals, and yet we will always be more concerned about the woman because it’s easier to slice and dice her character than to actually deal with the hard ramifications of what Jesus has to say.

            Yes, there are real problems in the world. People have messed-up sex lives; patriarchal systems that denigrate women are still commonplace. However, this is about neither of those things. This story does not exist in the Gospel of John to tell us how to act or to point out the systems that oppress. Instead, Jesus is offering the thing that bridges this gulf: Living water. Jesus is offering a way out if only we stop with our own preconceived notions of what is important here, but I suspect this is too much for many of us most of the time. If the commentaries are any indication, it’s too much for the religious experts as well.

            I get nervous preaching like this because when I take shots at the way that people politicize the gospel it’s tempting to hear this as if I’m trying to be a moderate between the personal morality theology of the right and the systems theology of the left, as if I’m trying to have a little bit of both, but I want to be clear: Jesus does not cut a middle road. Instead, he takes the car head-long into the field; he takes the boat on to land; he takes the hovercraft wherever you can’t take a hovercraft. He defies teaching us about the simplicity of life on earth and centers his teachings on the work of God’s kingdom, which is diametrically opposed to the way we do business. Jesus simply does not play our games. Instead, he offers the woman living water.

            This story follows the stories we’ve read from John’s Gospel the last couple weeks. Last week there was Nicodemus, the Pharisee, failing to understand that Jesus was not talking about re-entering the womb but about being born with a birth “from above.” The week before there was the temple leaders failing to understand that when Jesus was talking about tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days he was not talking about the building but his body. Now we have a Samaritan woman who, unlike Nicodemus and the temple authorities, has no status in society—this is very true—but, like the others, she initially makes the same mistake in taking Jesus’ words to mean one thing when they, in fact, mean quite another.

            Yet, in our rush to characterize this woman we may miss the fact that, unlike Nicodemus or the temple leaders, her initial misconceptions end in a surprising twist of faith. Everybody fails to understand Jesus at first, but Jesus meets this woman, who stands before him as a five-times married Samaritan, and she proclaims, “I know the Messiah is coming!” She has the first declaration of faith in the Gospel of John!

            This is remarkable but, like last week with Nicodemus, the story is still not about her. It’s about the water. Where we need liquid water Jesus offers us something that lasts when all the wells run dry. While we fight for what is temporary Jesus provides for what is ultimate. This is so tricky, because it verges on telling us that nothing we do in this life matters very much at all; you might say that life is just drawing water out of wells that will eventually run dry. Our reaction to hearing about the kingdom of God is so often to pout about how little this world matters, like the child who scores a goal in a hockey game and grows to realize that that hockey game was not the Stanley Cup. We come to believe that our lives don’t matter so much because we take our little eyes and imagine God’s kingdom is discerned the way ours is. It isn’t.

            My favorite analogy of this is the ending to the book, Cloud Atlas, which actually uses the same kind of water imagery, and concludes with the line: “My life amounts to no more than a drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” Jesus would have us keep drawing water because, while the kingdom of God is of the utmost importance, this is still the life we have and it is good, or at least it gives us a foretaste of what will be good. Keep drawing water; just know that the water you are drawing is not the end of the story.

            I realize this can be taken a number of ways. It can be seen as a perpetuation of systems—that by not using this text to speak out against oppression I am giving latent approval to those who reap the advantages of the system. It can also be seen as a lapse in moral authority; that by not lifting up the woman’s brokenness I am weakening the strength of the gospel. I must confess I am simply a person and not Jesus—so it is not possible to leave behind the two roads completely and head off-road with Jesus in search of living water. We are all still part of this world and forced to reckon with the realities of sin that manifest themselves in individual actions and unjust systems. This is why we confess the things we do and the things we fail to do, and why even a selfless act, like giving to charity, is sin, because that money could and should have been used for other charities or, better yet, that you would give your life in service and forgo the money altogether. You can’t get away from sin because even our most righteous choices are wrought with it.

            This understanding of sin and the kingdom of God is one of the other reasons I am a Lutheran, because I recognize that there are two paths at work here, and to be a Christian is to be both/and—part of this world but not belonging to it, as Jesus says (John 17:14-15). In his work On Christian Liberty, Martin Luther wrote, “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.” If it were just one or the other; if we were perfectly free lords of all because of our faith, then we would have no need to speak out against oppression or sin or anything of the sort, but if we were only perfectly dutiful servants of all, subject to all, then we would have no promise that what we are doing is worth a cent at the end of the day. We need both. We live in two kingdoms, straddling the line between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, and when Jesus meets the woman at the well those two kingdoms collide as the woman’s need for water is met by Jesus’ provision that she cannot yet understand.

            This is ultimately where we are left: coming to our own wells looking for water. If you need some direction all I can offer is this: Keep coming to the well. If you are passionate about people doing what is right, keep coming to the well. If you are passionate about justice and breaking systemic oppression, keep coming to the well. Because to come to the well is not to declare what the water is—it’s not to tell others they are sinful or to tell others about how privileged they are. Rather, it is to draw water that you did not make and over which you have no control. It is to remember your dependence, as every farmer does, on the water to fall (but not too much!). Then, when you meet others who are coming to the water who have a different worldview from you, your task is to just keep drawing water. Don’t fix their water. Don’t obsess over their righteousness or lack thereof. Instead, come to the well, because that’s where Jesus will meet you, and though he is unlikely to fix people as you might like or break our systems as you might like, still, in spite of our systems and in spite of our behaviors and in spite of our flawed attitudes and delusions of perfect ideologies, he will offer us not the water we ask for but the water we need.

            In Christ there is no conservative or liberal. This is the kingdom of God we’re talking about here! While we bicker over water God offers us a way out. And yes, we remain part of a broken world. The woman goes back to her village to who knows what end. The rest of her life might amount to a drop in the ocean, and we can imagine a better life for her than she was likely to live, but the rest of her life was also changed by a promise that this water she drinks is a foretaste of eternity. And what is the ocean of our lives but a multitude of drops? Living water is a promise of something better. And don’t think that doesn’t matter! Don’t think her life was the end of the story. Yes, we can do better, and it’s no excuse not to, but whether we do or whether we do not Jesus meets us at the well and bids us come and drink. He’s got something better to offer.