You Have No Bucket and the Well is Deep (Lent 3A)

 

You have no Bucket and the Well is Deep
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
23 March 2014; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I have learned from experience that when my wife Elena brings an issue to me, I need to listen to not just her words.   Like many, as a younger man I tended to be quite literal in how I understood what others said to me, and this got me into trouble time and again.   Tell me I had done something wrong, I’d ask exactly what and when, and start trying to explain why I did it, how I didn’t intend harm, and why it wasn’t important.  If her words bore a lot of emotion, my default position was to avoid that particular minefield at all cost.  I learned that I needed to listen both to what she was saying and to the feelings with which she spoke, and the depths beneath the surface meaning of the words. 

Instead of replying back to the surface language, I now find it better to try to plumb the depths of the expression right out.  I don’t always get this right, but I try to correct course as soon as I realize what’s up.  

The Gospel of John has several scenes that reveal Jesus’ true identity where people misunderstand him because they understand only the surface meaning of what he says.  In chapter 3, Nicodemus asks “How can a person enter back into the womb and be born again?” as he is standing before Jesus, the one who brings birth from on high. In chapter 5, the invalid at the Pool of Bethzatha complains, “I have no hope of being healed since have no one to put me in the water when the water is stirred up…,” while Jesus, the one who will heal him and make him whole, stands before him. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers to quench the thirst of a Samaritan woman. She replies pointedly, “And just how are your going to do that?  This well is deep and you, sir, you have no bucket or rope.” 

With Nicodemus, Jesus is talking about spiritual birth and the new life it brings.  With the invalid by the pool, Jesus is talking about the healing that he brings, not therapeutic magic from a spring’s sporadic bubbling attributed to angels.  With the woman at the well, Jesus is talking about spiritual sustenance, not a simple thirst quencher.

Jesus meets her at about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  This suggests that the woman is a social outcast even within her community, the Samaritans.  The reason for this becomes clearer later in the story, when we discover that she has lived a remarkably immoral life, at least by the standards of her community. 

And her community, the Samaritans, are themselves as a group treated as social outcasts by Jesus’s community.  Most Galilean Jews felt compelled to go miles out of the way to travel to Jerusalem simply to avoid entering into Samaritan territory.   Many taught that Samaritan women were perpetually unclean, unlike Jewish women.
In Tyler Perry’s magnificent film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the protagonist encounters a cousin she knew in her youth but has not seen for many years.  The cousin is in rough shape, strung out on heroin.  The woman asks her grandmother “What happened to her?” The reply? “Life happened to her! That’s what!”
Life has happened to the Samaritan Woman.  She is scarred by all this rejection and the hardness of her life, and is somewhat rough:  Jesus asks for some water and she immediately replies,  “You, a Jew, are asking me, a woman and a Samaritan for a drink?  Don’t you know that I am one of the unclean ones you shouldn’t speak to?”   This whole story is rife with group talk:  we Samaritans vs. you Jews, and we Jews vs. you Samaritans.  "Our ancestor Jacob gave us this well, you know!"  "Jerusalem vs. Samaria as worship centers."  Life has happened to this woman. 



No way she’s going to give this chummy stranger a drink. 

Jesus answers, “If you knew who I truly am, you would be asking me for a drink.” 
And this is where she misunderstands him.  “You have no bucket, and the well is deep. How are you going to draw water for me?”  She has heard Jesus’ words, but not their meaning.   Like Nicodemus and the invalid, she misses who Jesus is by being too literal. 

Literalism!  Some people today boast that they are good Christians because they, as opposed to others, “read the Bible “literally.”  I find this odd, given the fact that for the first 14 centuries of the Church, our best theologians and teachers consistently taught that the “literal meaning” of the Bible was its least important sense.   
Literalism!  Taking things ‘by the letter.’  Remember St. Paul said, “the letters kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:7).

There are many ways we let literalism get in the way of our faith and in the way of our love. 

How often do we use the words, “but you said,” trying to hold someone to a meaning of their words we had heard but they had not intended? 

How often do we let our literalism bring us to unreal expectations and disappointment in our faith?  “It says here that God will answer our prayers and give us what we ask in faith.  I prayed in good faith, and my loved one still died.”  “I prayed for healing and just got sicker.”  I prayed for protection for my family and my child killed himself.” 
And, on the other hand, how often do we let the literalism of our previous experience tell us that God cannot help us?  “The well is deep and you have no bucket.”  After all, miracles on occasion are known to occur, and prayers to be answered as we had hoped, though when and why is a mystery. 

When Jesus surprises the woman and tells her things he otherwise could not have known, she begins to see that perhaps there is mystery here, another meaning deep beneath the words Jesus has used.   As the spiritual sings it, “this man, this man, must be a prophet.” 
 
The living water he offers is not just a metaphor drawn from literal flowing water. Rather, it is the other way around:  the water he offers is the source of real, deep, and meaningful life and is what gives meaning to well water.  As he notes, “Drink from this well, and you will thirst again.  But the water I offer will become a spring welling up to unending life.  You will never be thirsty again.”   You don’t need a bucket for this living water.  He offers it whenever we stand at a deep well beyond our reach with no bucket.  He offers healing when no one is able to put us in the healing waters of the pool (physicians, counselors, care givers).  He offers new birth just when we seem most dead.  

The psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966 famously described how the instruments we use affect how we see problems:  “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”   Much of our damaging literalism comes from a fearful desire for maintaining the illusion of control.  It prevents us from looking at things in a new light, and admitting mystery.

To be sure, we must not overlook literal meanings.  In conversations with loved ones, we ignore what they actually say at our peril, just as when we ignore the subtexts and feelings.  In scripture study, finding out what the author probably meant in writing a text is an important step in finding out what it means for us.  But we must not be slaves to the letter. 

Even though Jesus says we'll never be thirsty again, we do, in fact, experience “dry times.”   After the initial incandescent moment where we stand before the frightening and alluring mystery, where the veil between this world and the unseen one is transparently thin, where we see the meaning behind all and recognize it as the face of Jesus, we do come, from time to time, to a “thick place” instead of a thin one.

Such dry spots usually occur when we start worrying about not having a bucket for a deep well, when all our problems start looking like nails since we only have a hammer.   C.S. Lewis in his  ‘Screwtape Letters’  has the main character, the demon Screwtape, instruct his apprentice Wormwood as to why God sends us  “dry times.”  It is so that we learn to walk as free and equal partners with God.  It is to let us grow in our right practice of the will.  It is to help us actually deepen our relationship with God when the wellspring within us once again bubbles forth.

This week, I invite us each to try a spiritual practice intended to help us develop our imagination, be less literal, and overcome dryness.  Upon waking each morning, instead of hopping out of the sheets immediately, stay there.  Thank God for the new day, and then lying still take five minutes.  Imagine what the coming day will be like if God is present and fully in charge.  Let your imagination run wild through your day, and then bring it back to focus on a concrete task you must do this day to help God’s gracious Reign arrive.  

The fact is, Jesus meant it when he said we’d never go thirsty again.  The dry times, needed as they are, come to an end.  The spring indeed wells forth again with living water.  We see that our literalness was shallow and blind, and that we didn’t really need the bucket or the rope.  Once again we walk in the glorious light of a thin, thin place.  

Thanks be to God.