3rd Sunday of Lent, Year A.
One of the aims of the Lectionary, alongside making sure that we cover as much of the bible as possible rather than just always listening to our favourite bits, is to show the links between the Old and New Testaments, to show that Jesus, while being the ultimate divine revelation, is a revelation in the context of the Old Testament history of Israel and God.
Jesus’ incarnation is not something that just happens out of nowhere. It is something that God has been preparing humanity for, through successive covenants with Noah, Abraham and Moses.
Our Old Testament reading takes place at a liminal point in the story of one of these covenants. Moses, through the power of God, has freed the Hebrews (and many other foreigners) from a lifetime of slavery in Egypt and led them out into the wilderness of Sinai. Soon they will reach the holy mountain, and God will unfold to them the details of the covenant that he has already made with them, although they are as yet unaware of it. He will unfold to them the Torah, the Law of Moses, the commandments that they should keep in faithfulness to the covenant that God has made with them. But already they are showing that they lack the faith that is necessary for them to live out this covenant. They are thirsty, and they doubt that God will provide for them. Moses strikes the rock with his staff, and living water – clean fresh water pours forth from the rock, to quench their thirst.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus is similarly thirsty. He is in Samaria, and it is midday, the hottest part of the day, when sensible folk find shade and cover from the harsh sun. Whereas at Sinai, the people of God’s covenant doubted that God would save them from thirst, here Jesus, God incarnate, places his faith in a lone woman at the well to provide him with water to slake his thirst.
The interaction is unusual in several ways.
Firstly, and most obviously, Jews in those days shunned Samaritans and were shunned in return. The Samaritans practiced a form of Judaism, but rather than worshipping at the temple in Jerusalem, they had their own temple on Mount Gerizim. As so often the case, the two peoples, rather than being brough together by the similarity of their religions, were actually driven apart by it. She is regarded by the Jews as being part of a people that are outside the covenant that God gave to Moses at Sinai.
Secondly, it is not just that she is a Samaritan, but also that she is a woman, and he is a man. For a man, especially one on his own, to address an unrelated woman, especially one on her own, is crossing a number of deep social taboos. It is a degree of forwardness and familiarity that would have probably have been quite scandalous.
Thirdly, she is obviously someone of low status, otherwise she wouldn’t be going to fetch water from the well at midday, the hottest part of the day. If she was able, she would have fetched it early in the morning when it was cooler. If she had a family, she would probably have sent a child to fetch the water. But here she is, on her own, unprotected and unaccompanied, having to fetch her own water at the hottest part of the day.
Despite all of this, she responds to Jesus, and he obviously discerns something in her which leads him to reverse the entire interaction. Rather than asking her for water from the well, he now offers her living water, water of eternal life.
In a parallel with the passage in a few chapters time, where he declares himself the bread of life, which he contrasts with the manna in the desert which sustained, but did not give eternal life, he contrasts the water of the well which is drunk but only quenches thirst for a while, like the water that Moses brought forth from the rock at Sinai, with the water of eternal life that only He can give.
In both cases Jesus makes the explicit contrast. The old covenants satisfied for a while. They were gifts of God, but they were never intended to be the final gift of God’s grace. They were always limited in their scope and effect. Not that God was punishing or withholding from the people that he gave these covenants to. The covenants served a purpose. They are part of the God’s invitation to work with him in the restoration of the fallen world. This is not an easy task. It is a task which God needed to prepare people for, to open their hearts. It is a task which God invited and continues to invite us into, but which ultimately required God himself, in the person of Jesus, to adopt human form, and to suffer and die alongside us, to become like us, so that we might in turn become like Him.
Because what actually links these three passages together isn’t water, living or otherwise.
What actually links these passages together is grace and faith.
God’s grace in giving the covenant to the Israelites in the wilderness, and the new covenant of Christ’s blood when he died for us. Not covenants that we earned or deserved – as Paul says, while we were still weak, ungodly sinners, Christ died for us. The Israelites were similarly undeserving of God’s grace, as they grumbled their way through the wilderness to Sinai, and even more so when the worshipped the Golden Calf even as Moses received the Law from God. No, none of us earn or receive God’s salvation by our own efforts, we are all given it through God’s unconditional love and grace.
Despite the phrasing that so many translations of Paul use, it is not even our faith that achieves our salvation. Our passages show this – the Israelites have little faith in God or Moses, and yet God has already included them in his Covenant because it is his gracious gift to forgive and redeem us, not something we have to earn. The Samaritan woman believes in Jesus, even though it seems like she doesn’t really know what she is believing in.
We have been reconciled with God by faith, not our own faith, but through the faithfulness of God in the person of Jesus Christ. God is eternally faithful to his covenants.
Which is not to say our faith is not important. Our faith is the proper response to God’s grace, but it is a response, not a condition. God’s gracious gift is not conditional on our faith. The bible is full of examples of faith. Faith found in the strangest places, like the Samaritan woman at the well – part of a long line of women in the bible like Rahab or Ruth who show that faith is found in unexpected places. Faith that is a response to God’s unconditional gift.
We live in troubled times, and it sometimes feels that despite all our prayers things are getting more and more unsettled. We see more and more innocent people suffering daily, because of the vanity, greed or fanaticism of their leaders. We hear the world groaning in pain as climate patterns shift and sea levels rise because of our selfishness and carelessness.
In these circumstances it can be hard to maintain our faith. These are testing times, the time of trial, the sort of times that we pray in the Lord’s prayer not to be led into. But as the Israelites discovered in Sinai, being faithful to God requires us to remain faithful during the time of trial, knowing that even if we fail, God’s faithfulness to his promises of salvation always endures.
Amen