“Is the Lord among us or not?”
This is the question that ends our passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, and it’s a question that relates to our Gospel passage as well. Is God among us?
Our Gospel story today begins by introducing the setting – Jacob’s well. There is a famous story about this Jacob, a Hebrew patriarch. After running away from home because he was afraid for his life, he lays down in the desert to sleep with a stone for a pillow. While he was sleeping, he dreams that there was a ladder with angels going up and down from earth to heaven. In his dream, God speaks to him, promising to be with him wherever he went, and that not only would God bless him, but through him all on earth would be blessed, the same promise God gave to his grandfather Abraham. Jacob wakes up from his dream and exclaims, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”
Notice that he doesn’t say that God suddenly appeared to him. Rather, he realizes that God was always there, that earth and heaven are more intimately connected than he knew, and that he simply has not been aware.
Like Jacob, and like the Israelites, I know I often find it hard to know if God is among us or not – and yet, in all of our stories, God becomes known in the most basic things of life – in hunger and thirst and food and water. These needs that we have are constant, and I have to say, they’ve become a pressing awareness in the past few days in a way they never have been before in my life.
I’ve stocked up for hurricanes before, but those pass in a few days or a couple weeks at most. The idea that we may have months where we don’t know what will come, or what needs we will have that will need to be filled, is terrifying. And I know that am lucky that don’t fear to be able to eat, or to have a roof over my head, or to be able to feed my child. I know that others around us do, and the truth of terrible realities in our society have come to a crashing head in an incredible ways in a few sudden days, and it seems that incredible suffering is imminent in all sorts of ways that we cannot exactly predict from both a new virus and also the most basic and oldest of needs. For me, the anxiety from these basic bodily needs is overwhelming, so the idea that Jesus meets people and talks about the most basic of needs in this passage is somehow comforting today.
Here in this passage, we meet this woman, this incredible woman. She doesn’t even get the dignity of a name. She is simply known as the Samaritan woman. She meets Jesus by the well at noon – a time when no one else would have come to the well. Perhaps you could call it social distancing of the oldest fashion. For some reason that we don’t know, she came at a time when no one else did. Jesus had every reason not to talk to her – she was a woman that was not related to him. Even more, she was a Samaritan. In that day, the Jews would have considered Samaritans ‘half-breeds’. They descended from Jews who married people who moved into their lands during the exile, and they were hated more than anyone. Because they weren’t welcome in any traditional Jewish spaces, they had developed their own worship practices, as becomes clear in the passage. In fact, Samaritans still exist to this day, on their own mountain in the land of Israel, living apart from the rest of Israeli and Palestinian societies.
But here on this day, Jesus talks to the woman, which surprises even her. He asks her for a drink of water. And then he offers her ‘living water’. His phrase ‘living water’ has multiple meanings – we generally jump to reading it as a metaphorical life-giving water, but to her it meant naturally-flowing water. The necessity of a well in this town lets us know that no such water is nearby, and she is naturally curious why on earth he is asking her to lower and raise her bucket in a deep well when he knows of a fresh spring. He goes on to say that his water will even become a spring, a source of water within her – which she understands as a possibility that will allow her to stop the daily drudgery of returning to the well to provide water to sustain her and her household.
But what Jesus promises her is much different. He promises that he will fill her needs, fill the thirst that she has for truth, for God, a thirst to be known and loved and cared for. He promises water from a source that is far different from any well or river that this earth has to offer.
And the woman leaves her jar to go back to the city to tell people about this man she has met who has offered her something greater than anything she has ever known.
Did you hear that? She leaves her jar.
She leaves the thing that is the only way she knows to get water, to continue to fill her needs in the way she has always done every day. She leaves it by Jesus, trusting that somehow, some way, her thirst will be filled, and that when she comes back, eventually, it will be okay.
Over the last few days, we have suddenly walked away from so many of our normal ways of doing things in so many areas of our life. Here, our church has ceased to gather for worship in person for the foreseeable future, and our normal rhythms and ways of feeding ourselves spiritually have suddenly changed drastically. And we are having to leave our jars at the well and walk away, trusting that we will return someday, and that in the meantime, we will somehow be filled.
And friends, we will be filled.
I don’t know how, the truth is,and I don’t even know all of the needs we will face in the days to come – which is scary and creates a deep well of anxiety within me.
But what I do know is what Jacob learned in the place that his descendants met hundreds of years later, and what the Israelites learned in the desert as they wandered without sources of food and water.
What they all learned over and over, what they had to be reminded of through every new difficult season, through every new fear, through every new time when they did not know how they would make it through, what they learned was that God was with them.
They all learned that God was in this place – wherever they were – even when they did not know it. God was among them.
And God is among us.
And what we will face in the days to come will likely not look like anything any of us have ever seen before, so we may have trouble recognizing God’s presence among us. But we must be open, and we must look, because more than ever, we surely will need to know that God is among us.
And surely God will be.
Is the Lord among us or not?
Yes, the Lord is here.
God is in this place. And God will be with us as we go from this place today and tomorrow and for ever. Amen.