Living water
Readings: John 4. 1-42, Exodus 17. 1-7
Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’
We join Jesus in the second of his encounters in as many chapters. We heard of his encounter with Nicodemus in chapter 3 last week, and this week his encounter with the Samaritan woman.
Now there is so much we could focus on in this passage, it’s another wonderfully rich part of John’s Gospel with much we could look at, but what I want to focus on is the central point of discussion between Jesus and this unnamed woman: water.
There’s something wonderful about water, particularly on a hot day, it refreshes, quenches thirst, satisfies the body. There’s something about drinking it which goes beyond simple mechanics of needing water to survive, when you’re thirsty and you drink, you feel the change in yourself. Your mouth feels fresher, you’ve got more energy, your brain switches up a gear. Water enlivens us.
But, whilst I breezed past it, there’s no getting away from it, water is essential for life. If you don’t drink you die, and pretty quickly. We see that complaint don’t we in that passage from Exodus, the people complain that there is no water and that they are going to die, along with their children and their animals. How easily they fail to trust God, they’ve seen the amazing way that God has saved them, the miracles he has done to free them from slavery in Egypt, but they don’t trust him to care for them in their freedom, provide for them something as simple as water.
But they have a basic point don’t they, without water they will die, and so God provides water, water from the rock. In another miracle God provides for their needs.
And now this same God stands before the Samaritan woman at the well, offering once again water, water to meet her need. And the water he offers her is living water. It seems a strange phrase to us, mysterious perhaps, but in the Greek this simply means what we would call running water. Living water is running water, and that’s where the confusion begins, it’s not that she doesn’t understand a mysterious phrase, rather she fails to see its spiritual meaning.
Because Jesus is speaking of how he will bring life, true life. Just as how she cannot live physically without coming to this well to draw water, so she will die spiritually without the spiritual water that only Jesus can bring. And just as water for our bodies quenches, satisfies and refreshes, so the life Jesus brings meets our thirst and our deepest needs.
But in this double meaning of ‘living water’ meaning both water that enlivens the spirit and water that flows, we have a wonderfully rich picture. Perhaps it should be no surprise that Jesus, the very Word of God himself, is good with words. Running water has qualities that are reflected in the living water that Jesus gives.
Think about running water for a second. Perhaps a river or stream, or even something as mundane as turning on the tap at home. Running water is different to stagnant or standing water, and we’re going to look at two of those differences.
Firstly its source is beyond itself. When you turn on the tap in your kitchen the water is coming from the tap, but that’s not the source, the tap is not producing the water. Rather if you trace the pipes in your house you’ll eventually come to where the main pipe comes into the house. If you follow that back you’ll find yourself following bigger and bigger pipes, via a water filtration facility, back to either a river or a reservoir. That’s where the water has come from, not the tap, but a huge source beyond itself. Or if you look at a river, it may get bigger as it goes downstream, drawing in water from the streams and hills that feed it, but follow it back far enough and you’ll come to the source, the origin of that water. The river is filled with water, but it’s all coming from somewhere else. And this means that when the dry days come, as they are starting to now, this water doesn’t run out so easily. If you’re drinking from a pond in your garden eventually that pond will dry up, whether through evaporation or simply because you’ve drunk it all.
This living water that Jesus gives, this life and satisfaction that he brings, comes not from within ourselves, but flows down from the Father. This life and contentment come from the source of all life and satisfaction, God himself. He is the source, and so when the dry days come, he continues to provide. As the very source of all life and joy and contentment, he is a never ending stream of those things, and so we will never run out. Whilst the world around us offers water, gathered into puddles or ponds or even pools, they will never truly satisfy, but what Jesus gives will never run dry.
That isn’t to say we won’t go through dry seasons or hard times, times when perhaps God feels distant and his provision lacking, but much like God’s people in the Exodus, we should be able to look back to the God who has saved us and brought us this far, and be able to trust him to bring us to the home he has promised us. It is water welling up to eternal life.
The second difference between running and stagnant water is that running water purifies itself. Part of this was testing for Legionella, and adjusting the hot water to the right levels. You’ll likely know that if you haven’t used the taps in a building for some time you can get a build up of Legionella, it thrives in stagnant water. So what are you meant to do if you haven’t been home for a few weeks? Run the taps for 5 minutes, to flush the system through, preferably at a high temperature. You run the water, and flush away the infected water, replacing it with new clean water.
It was similar in rivers, before industrialisation, we could empty our sewage into them because the flowing water would carry the impurities away, leaving clean water behind. These days there’s too many of us and too much waste for that to work. But the point still stands, empty a bottle of Coke into a river, within a few minutes there will be little trace of that drink in the part of the river you are stood over.
None of the above is health advice I’ll just quickly add, check with experts and trusted organisations. But running water purifies and cleans itself, flushing away what is bad, whereas stagnant water will very soon start growing all sorts of nasties.
This living water that Jesus gives us, it cleanses us from all our sins, whilst the satisfaction and life the world tries to give may leave us feeling sick, will multiply the bad in us, what Jesus gives is clean and fresh, even washing away what is not right in us. We see that again and again, Jesus goes to those whose lives are infected with sin, and he both calls them out of it, and cleanses them from it.
But all of that leaves us with a question, we know what this living water does, but we still haven’t nailed down what it is. Is it a metaphor for something Jesus does, or a picture of life with him? Sort of but not completely. To answer that we need to skip ahead a few chapters in John’s Gospel to chapter 7, verses 37-39: “On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive”.
This living water that Jesus gives is the very Spirit of God himself, through Jesus we are given God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us, to restore us to spiritual life and health. It is the Spirit who satisfies us, quenches our thirst and revives us, applying the finished work of Jesus to our lives. It is the Spirit who connects us into the stream of life and goodness flowing down from the Father. And so the words of St Augustine of Hippo are proven true ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You’. The world cannot satisfy, and yet God has given us himself, Jesus to redeem us, and the Spirit to enliven and transform us.
Do you want life and hope and healing? Do you want true life and satisfaction and contentment? The world provides merely puddles and pools, but Jesus has given us the Spirit who is an ever flowing river. So how do we receive these things? How do we receive him? It’s remarkably simple. As Jesus tells this woman, this woman whose past and sins and failures he knows, ‘if you had asked, I would have given’. Ask, seek, knock. Come to Jesus and ask him, for he freely gives to all, to all who, knowing their lack, ask of him. Ask, and that living water of the Spirit will well up within you, cleansing and satisfying, welling up to everlasting life.
Amen.