It’s safe to say that we live in a hedonistic society. Our culture values ease, comfort, and pleasure above all else. What makes this interesting to me is that we may be the first society to actually try this. Most ancient societies rejected hedonism as a viable option, and it wasn’t because they valued discomfort or suffering, or because pleasure wasn’t possible in their contexts. They rejected it because they knew something that apparently many of us today don’t: pleasure is fleeting and doesn’t ultimately satisfy. In fact, it often leaves us increasingly desperate for more.
There’s a sense in which this is a driving concern in today’s Gospel reading, which features a banter-filled conversation between Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a well:
— 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.
— 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?
— 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.
— Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.
We may be tempted to laugh at the woman’s reductive response here, but I like to think she said it with a humourous twinkle in her eye. She seems too sharp to get caught up in literalism. At the same time, we can also underestimate just how much work fetching water was. A bottomless water jug would have been very welcome!
But I think the interaction gets at so much of what ails us. As is so often the case with John’s Gospel, there’s a play on words here. Just as we saw last week with Nicodemus and the confusion about being “born again” and “born from above,” here “living water” straddles meanings of “flowing water” (that is, not stagnant, and so better to drink) and “the water of life.” The water Jesus is offering isn’t just good to drink, but it will satisfy and enliven in ways far beyond her, and our, imagination, “gushing up to the life of the Ages,” that is, the Kingdom of God.
The Collect for today offers a succinct summary of all this. It reads:
Almighty God,
whose Son Jesus Christ gives the water of eternal life,
may we always thirst for you,
the spring of life and source of goodness;
through him who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Lent is traditionally understood to be a time of reflection, reassessment, and realignment (all of which are a big part of what we more traditionally call repentance), a process that is embodied in fasting, a discipline which forces us to confront our relationship with food, drink, and sex. (Yes, sex is just as much a part of fasting traditionally as food is!). And so it’s a perfect season in which to remind ourselves of this interaction from the Gospels and ask ourselves what it is we really want and need, what it is that truly satisfies.
May we always thirst for him, the spring of life and source of goodness. Amen.
Matthew Root 