Commentary on Lectionary for March 27, 2011

Lent 3A

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

The subject is water. We can go a lot of days without food, but very few without water. The Israelites in the desert were thirsty. They were probably dying of thirst. They complained, and both God and Moses took exception to their cries. God took care of them and made water flow from a rock, but Moses still called the place Massah and Meribah because of their rebellion, and the Psalmist still remembers that and cautioned his readers against a similar complaint. “Do not harden your hearts,” the Psalmist sings, “as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, 9when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.“ It appears that being desperately thirsty is no reason to doubt the protection of God. This is a God who loathed a whole generation for forty years and swore they would never enter into His rest. (Psalm 95:8-11).

Then there’s the episode at Jacob’s well with Jesus and the Samaritan women. So many taboos were broken there (a man talking to a woman; a Jew talking to a Samaritan; a single man talking to a divorced woman) that the apostles didn’t even ask what was going on. And He stayed there for two days! Jesus told the Samaritan woman that water was not the reason he came to the well, and water was not the thing that would quench her real thirst. That is, not physical water, H2O, the kind that washes away dirt. Was he talking about the kind of water that washes away sin? That’s baptismal water.

You have to wonder what kind of thirst prompted the espousal of five husbands. I doubt it was lust. I could imagine it was a thirst for intimacy and the union of hearts and spirits. When intimacy happens, it becomes easier to envision what heaven might be like.

What is Jesus implying? --The good news is that adultery and non-Jewishness and what else(?) are NOT impediments to achieving intimacy with God? As usual, it is Paul in his letter to the Romans who throws a wrench into the works. Paul writes that perhaps you might find someone who would give his life for a really good person. But Jesus died for the ungodly! He reconciled us while we were enemies! This certainly turns our image of God on its head. We start having to think of God as “Christ-like!”

All that loathing over people who were demanding water after they had been freed from captivity now seems anthropomorphic , like talking about God’s hands or eyes or eagle’s wings. And so back to water. Water is essential for life. Water is important for cleansing. It is a great symbol for rebirth into the way of Jesus. First be born, then be sustained by the bread and wine that are symbols of what He did to show his love for us. Baptism, says Scripture scholar Dr. Walter Brueggemann, means that we are willing to walk in His way. “Don’t only wash my feet,” Peter ends up saying at the Last Supper, “wash all of me.” In other words, I need to be transformed into someone I am not yet. Spit on some dust and wash my eyes with it, because I am not yet seeing things correctly.

Lent is full of hope that the God who can produce water in a desert, call it out of a rock, can also soften and change hearts. As the woman from Samaria found out at the well, He wants to. Give him any excuse to stay in your life, and he will.