Look For The Thirst-Quencher
John 4:7-14
I think it can be tempting to look at the passage in John where Jesus asks the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well for a drink of water to be inconsequential or easy to interpret.
Jesus makes this profound but opaque statement that can mean everything or nothing to us as Christians: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
A cursory and nominally Christian interpretation might sound like this: accepting Jesus as savior—as God who let himself die for us—would be the water that, once drank would allow us never to be thirsty. The “spring of water” within us that Jesus offers would be that boundless source of God’s grace. Eternal life would be the transformed soul that has been saved.
Now all we have to figure out is where to go and eat lunch after church, right?
It’s not that this is wrong. But I do wonder if it is meaningful for us. I wonder if the language given to us as Christians about a "relationship with Jesus" and "living a life of discipleship" and "taking up our cross" actually means anything to us in the epoch of cynicism, doubt, and sectarianism we face as Christians these days?
This talk about water that makes us perpetually thirsty for more not holding up to the water Jesus offers us has me thinking about really big "why" questions as a Christian. Because what if our faith life is drinking from the kind of water that never truly quenches us?
I think it is really healthy to take stock of who we are and ask why. Friends, for those of you who profess it--why are you a Christian? A lot of us might answer this question by mentioning how we were raised as Christians. We are Christians because our family is Christian. We grew up in the church. That is certainly part of my answer...
What if this water Jesus mentions to the Samaritan woman is about both of their shared faith? Samaritans and Jews in scripture, it is important to note, worship the same God. Their practice has some different flavors, and their history differs, but both Jews and Samaritans trace their history to the tribes of Jacob's sons. Jews and Samaritans in Jesus time also had deep enmity for one another--it would not be a bad analogy to compare that enmity to the enmity that exists between native Palestinians and the state of Isreal today.
For Jesus to have this conversation at all was counter cultural. I wonder if Jesus might have been raising an important point in his talk of water about both of their faiths. For the Samaritan woman and Jesus likely had the faith they had because they were born into it.
I think a big point Jesus might have been saying in many of his teachings in his life had to do with naming the importance of intention. Is the faith we have a faith we practice because we intend to? Or is it a faith we practice our of habit, or even familial obligation?
And so I find myself thinking today--why be Christian? Why choose these beliefs? Why worship every week? Because if we are being Christian from a sense of habit and obligation, I wonder if that could be compared to drinking stagnant water that never really quenches the thirst I believe every human being has--that is to be in connection with the divine.
What if we could connect to a sense of our faith that animates us? A faith that gets us out of bed each morning ready to live the kind of life we feel we are called to live--rather than going through the motions? I don't know about you, but I think that kind of faith can get us through a lot of cynicism, and doubt. I think that kind of faith can eat away at the fear that causes us to distrust new ideas or different kinds of people.
I think that kind of faith can bring what is dying back to life. Perhaps that is the eternal life Jesus is talking about. Not a life that lasts for ever, but a life that is engaged with eternal things: transformation, purpose, and love.
Perhaps drinking from the living water Jesus offers is simply the choice to wake up to the choice we actually have to BE Christians, rather than live a life of rote practices, obligatory belief, inherited identity and a faith that doesn't quite quench our thirst.
