Running Water

I heard a marvelous story the other day... One day a wise man was out walking when it started to rain. He began to run, to try to stay ahead of the drops. An onlooker asked him, after the wise man had gotten to shelter, why he had run, it didn’t look wise to the observer. And the answer came, “I don’t want to step on the mercy.” Huh? What? I don’t get it.

The problem was, you see, that the original story had been in Turkish. And in Turkish, the words for “rain” and “mercy” are almost the same. So the wise man wasn’t trying to keep from getting wet, he was making a pun. And that got me to thinking about rain, and language, and mercy, and misunderstandings.

First of all, if any of you were thinking that Jesus was talking about physical water that would quench a physical thirst, John explains that the living water that Jesus was talking about was the Holy Spirit. So that’s one potential misunderstanding cleared up. You can’t drink the Holy Spirit out of a glass any more than you can step on mercy.

But there are a lot more misunderstandings about the Holy Spirit than just being confused by the metaphor Jesus is using. We get a glimpse of how confusing it can be when we examine the story of the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well in John 4.

This woman’s life was a mess. It wasn’t just that she was a Samaritan, although that was bad enough from the point of view of a good Jew. You may remember that Jews wouldn’t even speak to Samaritan men, much less women; most Jews traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem and back again would take the long way around rather than go through Samaria. The very dust of the roads might contaminate them! And here is Jesus talking to her! Something important must be afoot...

As Jesus pointed out during their conversation, she had had five husbands and was living unmarried with yet another man. So even if she had managed to avoid drowning in guilt, she must still have been in a lot of pain over those failed marriages. And to add insult to injury, she was also ostracized by her community. We know this because she was up at the well at noon, the hottest part of the day, a good time for taking a nap. Women never went for water at noon, they went at dusk or at dawn, when it was cool. And that is why this woman chose that time to go to the well. Because it was the office water cooler of her day. The village women gathered there to dish the dirt as much as for getting water, and she was probably one of their favorite topics. It was better to endure the heat of the sun than the sidelong glances or even open comments.

So clearly this was someone with some serious needs. And then Jesus shows up, strikes up a conversation, and says, "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." [v.10]

But she didn’t understand. She offered objection after objection. And many of the objections were exactly the same sort that we might hear when we try to explain Jesus to a non-believer.

First, she has that misunderstanding we tried to clear up right at the beginning. She thinks that Jesus was talking about natural physical water. “Sir,” she said, “you have no bucket, and the well is deep.” Now, if Jesus had been offering something like the goose that laid the golden egg, maybe a bucket that was always full no matter how many times she dipped water out for cooking or washing, she would never have to come up to the well again. This would be VERY convenient. It would make her life a lot easier. And she would never accidentally run into one of the village women.

Now, mind you, everything else in her life would still be the same. Even if she got running water right there in her kitchen, she would still be carrying around the pain and shame of her past, and the insecurity of her present. She just wouldn’t have to have her nose rubbed in it. But like most people, the Samaritan woman didn’t expect any relief for her deepest problems. How many people try to medicate their restless discontent, their lack of satisfaction with life, with physical remedies - anything from shopping to hypochondria? Not to mention drugs and alcohol.

Another problem that we run into when we try to medicate a spiritual problem with a physical solution is that the solution we’re focused on may look impossible. The woman was quite right when she pointed out that Jesus didn’t have a rope or bucket. Now of course we know that Jesus could have said “Come” to the water, and it would have flowed up out of the well into his hands. But that’s beside the point.