The Gift Of Living Water

January 12, 2023

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

John 4:5-42

The Gift of Living Water

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

They call it “divining.” When you’re trying to determine where to dig a well, some people have the gift to locate the ideal spot by divining. It typically involves a forked tree branch.

When I was growing up, my father had taken a call to Burlington, Colorado on the High Plains. It was ranch country – sugar beets and cattle. One day, a parishioner, an older rancher, came into town to drop off something for my dad. My dad wasn’t home, so the rancher left it with my mom and my sister and me.

During the course of conversation, he said that he was on his way to help a farmer friend figure out where to drill a new well. His old one was petering out, and he wanted to dig a fresh one.

“How do you do that?” we asked. “How do you figure out where to dig the well?” That’s when he told us about divining. He could tell you how far down the water was located and how much of it there was. “A lot of people will use a willow switch, but me, I like my old set of pliers.”

Then he walked around to the rear of his battered pickup truck, and he pulled out a gargantuan pair of metal pliers. “I hold them like this,” he said. He held one handle in each hand with the working end of the pliers forming a vee in towards his stomach.

“Here, I’ll show you how it works. I’ll look for the water main in the street. When I get to the main, the water will pull down on the pliers.” He slowly paced across the street. When he stood directly over the water main, his hands started shaking violently. The pliers pulled down forcefully and it was all he could do to hang on. It was pretty remarkable to see.

Humans have been digging wells for a very long time. We have a long relationship with wells. In our gospel story, Jesus encounters a foreign woman at a very old, historic well. It’s still a working well to this day. The well had belonged to the patriarch Jacob. It was located in the region of Samaria. The woman at the well was Samaritan.

There was a long history of animosity between the Samaritans and the Jews. They were like oil and water. Both groups traced their ancestry back to Abraham, but their destinies took different courses. The Samaritans had been part of the northern tribes of Israel and were overrun by the Assyrians. Many of the Israelites were forcibly removed and exiled to faraway lands, but not all of them. Then the Assyrians brought in other ethnic peoples to occupy the land of Israel. Some of these foreign people intermarried with the remaining Israelites. Their mixed marriage offspring eventually became the Samaritans.

The Jews saw the Samaritans as compromised. They viewed their religion as corrupted. The Samaritans didn’t worship in Jerusalem. They built their own temple in Shechem.

So there was bad blood. They were feuding cousins. When the Samaritan woman arrived at the well, she spied that Jewish stranger sitting there. He was bold enough to address her, and she was flabbergasted that he asked her for a drink of water. First of all, it was inappropriate for a man to speak to an unfamiliar woman in public. And second of all, no self-respecting, kosher Jew would accept a drink from a Samaritan.

“How is it that you’re asking me for a drink?” she asked. Jesus replied that if she knew who had asked her, SHE would have asked HIM for a drink of living water.

The woman is confused. Jacob’s well is very deep. When it was measured in 1935, the water level was 135 feet in depth. How could this man get water when he didn’t have a bucket?

I just want to take a brief detour to address wells in Third World countries. Fetching water has traditionally been women’s work, and it’s very difficult. All of a household’s water needs – for drinking and cooking and cleaning – need to be hauled and carried from a well. Sometimes a woman will have to walk a very long distance to the water source. They typically carry it on their heads.

As you know, our ‘Noisy Offering” and our Lenten coin offering boxes are going to our synod’s cholera relief in our companion synod in Malawi. The flooding from recent storms has led to the contamination of many wells. Malawi has had 30,000 cases of cholera and 1000 deaths.