Exodus 17:1-7
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tried the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
1 Corinthians 10:1-4
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud, and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.
John 4:3-15, 19-21
He left Judea and returned to Galilee. Now He had to pass through Samaria. Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I see that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Believe Me, Lady,” Jesus replied, “a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
Jesus, of the tribe of Judah and therefore a Jew by descent, was not himself a resident of the land of his tribal namesake, Judea. Though he was born there in Bethlehem, he was raised and lived far away in the north country. Jesus was a man of Nazareth, a town in Galilee of the Gentiles, viewed in Jerusalem with suspicion because of his birthplace: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (Jn. 1:46). Galilee, after all, was even further north of Judea than Samaria, whose inhabitants were frowned upon by the Second Temple establishment for their insistence upon worshipping on Mt. Gerizim in Shechem rather than at the southern temple in Jerusalem. Together, the territories of Samaria and Galilee had once comprised the Northern Kingdom, which broke away from the royal cult at Jerusalem before falling to the Assyrians. Nonetheless, both the Jews and the Samaritans hoped to one day be reunited, though they differed in their expectations: the Jews expected to subjugate Samaria and draw them into Jerusalem’s temple worship, while the Samaritans believed the Jews should repent and worship at Gerizim as Moses had prescribed, according to their scriptures (see Deut. 27:4 in the Samaritan Pentateuch).
One day, as he is passing through Samaria on the way Galilee, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. He asks for a drink, and she is rather antagonistic toward him, seeing as he was northbound from Judea, and wearing Jewish garb (Lk. 8:44) — the telltale signs of a Jew. In spite of her apparent invitation to conflict, Jesus doesn’t lapse into sectarian debate. He preaches the Gospel: “You should be asking me for living water,” he says. It goes over her head, and she assumes she’s hearing Jewish arrogance. “Where’s your bucket?” she asks, and makes another dig: “Who do you think you are, better than Jacob, who dug this well?” In other words, “You, a son of Judah, who was one of the sons of Jacob — are you better than even the father of your tribe’s patriarch?” On the other hand, the Samaritans considered themselves the true Jacob, that is, Israel, and viewed Jews as a schismatic sect.
Jesus yet again sidesteps debate, but hits her point on the nose: “Jacob’s well will leave you thirsty. Mine won’t. It’ll give you eternal life.” In other words, yes, he is greater than Jacob, and his well of water is superior too.
Okay, she’ll bite — or rather, she’ll sip: “Sir, give me this water.” Or maybe this is sarcasm. It seems she can’t help herself. She pivots back to sectarian polemic: “Our fathers said to worship here: your fathers say to worship there.”
Once again, Jesus has no will to weigh in on this debate. “The time is coming, and now is,” he says, “when you yourself will worship the Father —“ whom Jesus was fond of saying nobody knew but him (Mt. 11:27; Jn. 6:46, 8:19) — “neither here, nor there.” He doesn’t appeal to tradition, justifying one point of view or another; he appeals to the eschaton, the promised time when these differences would be nullified by truth — and that promised time had come.
How I wish sectarian debates among Christians could be so quickly put in their place! For the water of eternal life here is the Spirit poured out by Christ, and all the faithful drink of him. In 1 Cor. 10, St. Paul likens Christ to the rock struck by Moses’ rod in the wilderness, which poured out living water for the thirsty and rebellious Hebrews — for their descendants in Judea likewise “quarreled [with] and tried the Lord” (Ex. 17:7), bringing him before the court of the Sanhedrin under the cover of night, and they used the rod (that is, the Law) of Moses to strike Jesus down.
But by these means, the Father opened his everlasting fountain (Zech. 13:1) for all who thirst after the Spirit.
While the fountain of grace makes holy all who drink from it, nonetheless, it would have never opened if not for our enmity with God. For Christ, our Rock, was struck down as a propitiation for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn. 2:2). And this is good news. This means that we, no matter how virtuous or licentious — it makes no difference to our Father, who is impartial (Mt. 5:45; Acts 10:34-35; Rom. 2:11) — may at any time taste of this gift, free of cost, and be reconciled to our Father who loves us: “Let the one who is thirsty come, and the one who desires the water of life drink freely.” (Rev. 22:17).
That this precious and holy water is free was a scandal to those invested in the competition between Judea & Samaria; Jerusalem & Shechem; Zion & Gerizim. Theirs was a costly worship, requiring a lengthy journey here or there, to one altar or the other, for the sacrifice of their first-fruits; the best of their harvest; the purest-bred of their livestock; etc, by which they each believed they could purchase the favor of their own god (whoever that god was — because of course, they accused one another of serving different and even false gods in their critique of eachothers’ cults; and Jesus, as well as his apostles later, made it plain that the object of such religion was not his Father, whom they had never known). This is not to say that their religious hope wasn’t in pursuit of Jesus’ Heavenly Father — it almost certainly was, as is the case for most religious people. The Hebrews who followed Moses, after all, drank of Christ in the wilderness in spite of themselves, as St. Paul taught. In other words, their hope was in him — but sometimes hope latches onto other, shiny and distracting, objects for lack of vision. And those with, and under the rod of, Moses, whether in the wilderness or throughout Israel’s history before the advent of Christ, apparently did lack vision: “a veil covers their hearts” because “the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4, 3:15). St. Stephen taught that, because of this, God turned away from his rebellious children in the wilderness, giving them over to the religion of the host of heaven, a law of angels (Acts 7:42f, Col. 2:18), rather than the true worship of the Father.
This story is not at all unique to the Hebrew people or their descendants in Judea and Samaria. This is a universal tale, a true story with much evidence, for there were many such religions around the world at the time of Christ, and many not only remain, but continue to be birthed, down to our day. Secular, and even atheistic, ideologies are religions unto themselves, with their own explicit and implicit mores & taboos, laws & punishments. There is nothing new under the sun.
In the face of this, the story of Jesus and the woman at the well shows us that we have a choice: we may enter into the acrimonious conflicts welcomed by such ideological diversity, or we may, like Jesus, cut to the chase and offer living water to our brothers and sisters, fellow children of God: the grace and Spirit of our Heavenly Father. We can debate ideas & ideals all day and argue ourselves deep into the dark night; or we can give the gift of God himself, that is, love. After all, “God is love.” (1 Jn. 4:16).
With the softly-spoken sword of truth, Jesus cut away the division between Judea and Samaria, Zion and Gerizim; how much more may we tear down the veil of hateful blindness between all peoples whom, through Christ, God has made one: “For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Cor. 12:13).
May we all drink deeply. Amen
 | Eden, by Seán McMahon Seán McMahon from the album The Lamb & The Wolf |
If indeed you are listening, why don’t you raise your hand? Show me what you’re feeling. Show me how you feel. I’m drowning in this country trying to get to the Promised Land. For I am offering water as we stand on this scorching sand. And I wanna find my brothers, and gather all my sisters. For we were dead on arrival, awaiting a calling voice or a hand. Well, if you would be the living, then you would let go your life. And listen to its voice. Pass along its song. I ain’t alone in this aching darkness. I’m staying warm in your light. If indeed you are listening, why don’t you raise your hand? Show me what you’re feeling. Show me how you feel. I’m drowning in this country trying to get to the Promised Land. I am waiting in a station for the train to take me home. And my friends, you’re all beside me. And I want to take you with me. The engine’s getting louder, so it must be time for us to go. So let us head home back to Eden. Forward is the way. And if we carry all the wounded, and stay pure as little children, then we will get through this night of darkness and be home by the break of day.
I invite you to download and listen to my album, out today: “Hymns & Homilies” — an eclectic collection of songs for worship and musical sermons. This is not your grandaddy’s Christian music. Name your price — your support for my work of music ministry is a blessing!
 | Hymns and Homilies, by Seán McMahon Seán McMahon 9 track album |
