The “Living Water” Well at the Center of Everything
O Lover,
The gospel reading for the third Sunday of Lent (Jn 4:3-43) describes the encounter of Jesus with a Samaritan just outside the city of Sychar (now Nablus). The case can be made that none of the interlocutors with Jesus in the gospels evidences the integration of marginality, self-knowledge, and profound spiritual depth as does this curiously unnamed one. That this person is female, a loathed Samaritan, and morally scandalous only elevates the improbability of this account unfolding on a parcel once purchased by the patriarch Jacob (Gen 33:18-20). It is not entirely surprising that the scholar Sandra Schneiders in her Written That You Might Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth gospel hypothesizes a major role for this woman in the redactive authorship of this gospel.
The palaver in the heat of high noon begins with Jesus’ request for water. The Samaritan counters by pressing him as to how such an exchange could even be happening given their historical enmity. Jesus shows his hand by moving beyond the literal by offering her “living water” (10), but she, missing this shift, queries how he could manage this since the well is deep and he has no vessel. Jesus replies that unlike ordinary water which slakes but briefly, that which he is offering “leaps up to eternal life” from within and requires no replenishment (13-14). Later in the exchange Jesus emphasizes that a time is coming when worship of You, the Living Water springing up, will be in “spirit and truth” untethered by mounts Gerizim or Zion (20-24). When she, the Pentateuch her sole holy writ, declares that the coming Messiah will clarify all of this, Jesus tells her “I who speak to you am he” (26). Upon returning to her city’s denizens she ponders aloud “This is not the Messiah, is it?” (29)
In addition to this text being astonishing, there is a volatility, an explosiveness, in it. You, the leaping up Living Water, are shown to be moving revolutionarily beyond the strictures of two primeval enemies and their respective bastioned religiosities. And at the center of this expanding vision of the Euangélion (“Good News”) is neither this nor that, but You. Indeed, at the center of everything, everyone, every time and every place is the Abyss, the Depth, of You ever “springing up into eternal life” (14). You can no more be confined by “sacred” space and time than by religious cultus or ethnicity. Your Self-diffusion, ubiquity and immanence are ever pressing into strata presumed to be profane, beyond the pale, and thus forbidden. Can there be any doubt but that that same concussive shaking of the foundations has been, continues to be, and will for the duration be operative in the ongoing tradition of Jesus as well?
For me, O Lover, especially in this 2024 liturgical year, the John 4 text’s principal thrust is Your perpetual critique of the human tendency to calcify You, the leaping up Living Water, in form and dogma. This tension, both perennial and intrinsic, is the paradox characterizing religiosity and You. We mortals are invited to cleave to You, the ever-new Wine, even while relinquishing old wineskins unable to contain You (Lk 5:37-39). This is not an easy tension for us to navigate. You are Aquifer, Whirlwind, Tsunami; in contrast, we finites tend to stand at the ready bearing our reductionist boxes. My petition this day, however, is that more than lamenting our finite limitations we might open ourselves more widely still in wonder to Your ineffable and transformative largesse.
