Ministries Blog

Well, Well, Well

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An exploration of John 4

By Rev. John W. Nupp

This article originally appeared in Fragment 2: Overflow of the 2017 Annual Conference Devotional, MOSAICS.

Where does your water come from? It depends on who you ask, I suppose. Ask a Kindergartner and they might point to a water fountain. Older kids might tell you about the water cycle, about streams and rivers, clouds and rain. Still older students can explain about aquifers and water treatment facilities and the more complex problems facing our planet in terms of water shortage. 

Maybe you’ve heard the statistics: one in 10 people on the planet lack safe water, more people have access to cell phones than a toilet, and one in 3 lack basic sanitation (see water.org). With these challenges, it would be great to find a simple solution, wouldn’t it? 

When Jesus encounters the woman at the well, the simple truth is that he comes tired and thirsty. She has the means which Jesus lacks to draw the physical water from the well. He is thirsty. He asks for a drink from the well. Before we rush ahead into sermonizing the conversation which follows, in which Jesus challenges the observed boundaries in his society between men and women, Jews and Samaritans, the good people and the bad, I want to know if he ever gets anything to drink. 

At one point, the woman even points out the obvious problem to Jesus – “You have no bucket and the well is deep!” Does this sound like helpful information to a thirsty man sitting in the sun at high noon? They talk about religion, politics, history, relationships, and more religion, but does Jesus ever get anything to drink? I guess he does. But the point is, he cannot get it for himself – he must rely on someone else.

One of the first lessons we learn at the font is that we cannot baptize ourselves. Try as we might to earn God’s love, it can never be anything other than a response to God’s grace. We may be nurtured in a loving family or a loving church family until we take on those vows, those promises, for ourselves, but at the core of our baptism lies this profound reliance on grace. 

I remember hearing about some traveling companions of Lawrence of Arabia who tried to solve their water problems by taking back to their arid country some of the technology they had picked up in Paris, literally! Lawrence found bathroom fixtures and pieces of pipe stowed away in the luggage. 

Whether this story is true or not, it does reveal a basic human flaw. The prophet Jeremiah addresses this early in his critique of the nation’s turning from God: “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13). We try so hard on our own to solve our problems, but disconnect from the source of our salvation. After all, God seems so far away and inaccessible to us sometimes – like a deep well for a thirsty soul with no bucket!

Enter Jesus, Savior to the hurt and the hurting and even to those hurt others.  For those who have settled for something less than the abundant life God intends for us, for those who are just barely making it through the day, and even for those who seem intent on stealing joy from others, Jesus comes with a real solution. But we cannot take his solution and run away with it any more than we can unscrew faucets from France and expect to take a shower in the Sahara. We must stay connected!

As we prepare for our time together at Annual Conference, we have been considering signs of life. Not just those marks that show we are alive as human beings, but those parallels in our spiritual lives that show God is at work. What is the sign that God is at work in the life of this Samaritan woman and in her town? What miracle takes place there that day, which might happen again in our lives, here today?

It is the miracle that she is filled with living water, but not just filled herself – she is filled to overflowing! The entire town comes to know that she has met Jesus that day, that she has found in him the source of living water.

 

 

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