About 18 months ago I was teaching 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?’ ‘Cold water’ was her answer. ‘Before I came to Europe, I had never drunk a glass of cold water.’
I mention this incident for two reasons: firstly, because like the two stories we have just heard – Jesus asking 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 occur to us that anyone would find anything unusual about a glass of water.
There is also a great deal bafflement in the conversation between Our Lord 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 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 baffles 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 flabbergasted: 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. 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 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, 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, some 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, if you’re really there, then I’m sure you can haul me back.’ The other side was grasping after everything the world seemed to offer, and it wanted no restrictions: money, travel, the bright lights, and a self-serving career. I was a prodigal son in the making.
Two things happened in September 2009. First of all, I was house sitting for a friend of mine on Lake Orta, as I had done for several years at about that time. Lake Orta is one of the smaller, and prettier of the Italian lakes: in the middle of it is an island dominated by a convent and a basilica. Along the waterfront there are a score of houses, but only three are inhabited all the year round: my friends was one of these and I used to look after her nine cats and two dogs while she went off to the Venice film festival. So one night I took my own dog for a walk and was sitting by the landing stage, on what, in effect, is the island’s only open space. Suddenly, through the archway that leads to the convent, there appeared the figure of the Mother Superior. There was I, sitting under the stars with my yappy little dog, and I thought I would have some explaining to do. However, when she approached me, instead of asking what I was doing on what in effect was her island, she simply smiled at me: such a beautiful radiant smile that I went away afterwards thinking that there might be something in this Christianity business after all.
That was the first experience, and it served to soften me up. The real experience came about ten days later.
I was pottering around in my flat and was passing my bookshelves when I got an urge to pick up a book I don’t think I’d ever opened before. It was a book written by 17th or 18th century French 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.’Actually it was a bit more complicated than that, because it defined duty in three ways, in terms firstly of Christian duty, then of your social duty, and finally the duties imposed by one’s own inclinations.
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. So I began to concentrate on doing what I understood to do my duty – for example, I began to prepare my lessons far more conscientiously – and within a month I came in through the doors of this church, and have been coming here ever since.
The experience was a very personal one, and I don’t 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.
Incidentally, in the Western church we don’t hear anything more of the Samaritan woman at the well. However, the Orthodox tradition has much more to say about her. At Pentecost she was filled with the Holy Spirit and received the name Photini, the enlightened one. As Saint Photini she travelled, with her five daughter and two sons to Carthage, where she preached the gospel so effectively that she came to the attention of Emperor Nero. He had her brought to Rome, where she was imprisoned, tortured and eventually martyred by being thrown down a dry well – but not before she had managed to convert Nero’s daughter, Domnina. Her feast is commemorated on March 20th, which of course is tomorrow… 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 life itself. Jesus is that living water and he is offering it to each one of us. But notice that He begins by His asking the Samaritan woman 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 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 be something more demanding (like volunteering to preach a sermon for the first time in your life!). Jesus has everything to give us – Living water. First, though, He asks that we draw Him a cup of water from our own well.