One afternoon towards the end of my teaching career, I was taking an English class in Pavia and – because we’d finished the work we had to do – I tried to start a conversation. Now, if you are an English teacher, and I know that there are several in the congregation, you’ll know that ‘having a conversation’ can be one of the most challenging things you have to do, especially with a dozen full-time students at the end of a long afternoon. But this being Italy, you can usually get a response if you start talking about food. So after a few minutes, I found myself asking ‘What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to eat or drink?
Immediately one hand went up, that of a Chinese girl – so I turned to her and asked, ‘So Juan, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to eat or drink?’ And her answer: ‘Cold water. Before I came to Europe, I had never drunk a glass of cold water.’
I mention this incident for two reasons: firstly, obviously, because like the two stories we have just heard – Jesus announcing to the Samaritan woman that He himself is the Living Water, and Moses striking water from a rock on Mount Horeb – it’s about water; and secondly because everyone in that classroom was totally baffled: it just would never occurred to any of us Europeans that anyone would find anything unusual about a glass of water.
And secondly, because there is also a great deal bafflement in the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. It baffles us when we read it, and it seems to have baffled the Samaritan woman.
First, he asks for water. This surprises her. In New Testament times, men were not supposed to talk to women, at least not unless they were members of same family. Jews were not supposed to talk to Samaritans. So, surprised, she replies, ‘But I’m a woman, and I’m a Samaritan’ – how come you deign to ask someone like me? In other words, I’m not just a nobody, I’m the sort of person that people like you are supposed to despise. Then Jesus replies with a statement that not just must have baffled her, but can still baffle us: “if you knew who it was who is asking you for water, you would have asked me for a drink and I would have given you Living Water.”
And what does she say? “How can you give me water, when you haven’t got a bucket, and this is a very deep well?” It sounds to me that at this stage she doesn’t know what this conversation is about either. Yet at the same time something must have clicked, because whatever she has seen in this man, she wants it. “Give me this Living water”, she says to him.
Then comes the amazing part: Jesus says OK, but first go and get your husband.
Well, actually I’m not married.
I know that, says Jesus: you’re just living this man but you’ve had five husbands already.
And she’s flabberghasted: Jesus knows all about her! At that point the disciples turn up and she scuttles back to the village. And what do you think she says? I’ve met this wonderful man and he says he is the Living Water? No, not at all. She says, I’ve met this amazing man – and he knows everything about me!
Just as it wasn’t Jesus’s claims about Himself that caught the Samaritan woman’s attention in the first place, so it isn’t catechism or instruction or theological propositions which are going to bring any of us to faith. Instead, it all begins with a meeting; something happens that brings us into a relationship with the very depths, the very rock of life, out of that rock Living Water flows, and thereafter we are forced to take our own existence seriously.
My own meeting with the Living Water occurred in September 2009. I had turned my back on a Christian upbringing in my early twenties, almost thirty years before. And I’d done it for a mixture of reasons, good and bad. One side of me was saying ‘I don’t know what you want from me, Father, but I think it is a lot, and I’m not prepared to do it. So rather than be a hypocrite, I’m leaving. I’m out of here, and if you want me back, and if you’re really there, then I’m sure you can haul me back.’ That was my better side. The other side was grasping after everything the world seemed to offer – money, travel, the bright lights, and a self-serving career – and I wanted no restrictions:. I was a prodigal son in the making.
Then something happened in September 2009. I was pottering around in my flat one morning and as I was passing my bookshelves I got a got a sudden urge to pick up a book I don’t think I’d ever opened before. It was a book written in the 1730s by a French Jesuit priest, Jean Pierre de Caussade, and I must have bought it when I was at university and wishing I’d had the courage to study theology. Anyway, I picked it up and it opened at a paragraph that said ‘All God asks of you is that you do whatever duty has been put before you, and that you remain open to the Holy Spirit.’ But what really struck me was that this came as a direct answer to the question I had left God with almost thirty years before. ‘God,’ I’d said, ‘I don’t know what you want from me’ – and here He was telling me. I felt in that moment, and for several weeks afterwards, that God was in the room with me and that He was speaking in the depths of my heart. So I began to concentrate on doing what I understood to be my duty – for example, I began to prepare my lessons far more conscientiously – and within a month I went back to church, and have continued ever since.
The experience was a very personal one, and I don’t know if I can convey the force of it. I felt it as such a direct reply to the question I had left with God 30 years before that I was astounded. There was something out there, or perhaps something in there, at the centre of my life, that knew me intimately. In that moment, I too felt that God was telling me everything I had ever done.
And here is one final thought about the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Jesus has everything to give her: Living Water, the water that Jesus has to offer, is flowing water – gurgling, lapping, splashing water. And of course Jesus as Living Water is not only clean and pure and life-giving water, it is also metaphorical water, spiritual water, symbolic water. It is ‘eternal life’ itself. Jesus is offering it to each one of us. But notice this: He begins the conversation with the Samaritan woman not with a direct offer of his Living Water, but by asking her to draw up water from her own well.
Jesus always begins by asking us to do something for him. So every day, when you pray, make sure you are listening for what it is that Jesus is asking you to do that day. It might be something quite small: to make a phone call, to give away something you no longer need, to finally do that thing you’ve been procrastinating over; or it might occasionally be something much more demanding. In my case the initial call was to tidy up my own life and to become more responsible, to take my teaching duties seriously.
Jesus has everything to give us – Living Water. First, though, He asks that we draw Him a cup of water from our own well.