In this week's Gospel reading, Jesus stops at a well in a Samaritan village. He is tired and thirsty from his travels. The road is dusty and there are no cars or buses, no rolling up the windows to keep the dirt at bay, no pressing the gas pedal to get from point A to point B. Traveling miles and miles on his own two feet.
A local woman comes to draw water from the well, and Jesus asks for a drink. What follows is an interesting theological back and forth covering orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and salvation. All because Jesus got thirsty as he traveled through Samaria.
Just to set the stage, Samaria was once part of Israel. Following centuries of disagreement between the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom and an invasion or two, Samaritans were considered outsiders by Jews. This is what makes the so-called story of the "Good Samaritan" that so many are familiar with so intriguing. Jesus places the positive action on an outsider, a foreigner, one considered beneath the Jews.
And now we have Jesus engaging in dialogue with a Samaritan on the nature of God, worship, and salvation. And not just any Samaritan, but a woman. Oh, the scandal. In a society that strives to keep unrelated women and men from conversing alone together, it is no surprise the Gospel writer felt the need to point out the fact that the Disciples did not react as expected.
The other important thing of note to help set the stage is Jesus' play on words here. The woman seems surprised by Jesus' mention of living water. She refers to the well as the only source of water around, so where would Jesus find this living water? This is important because the words here translated as living water can also be translated as running water. We find this same phrase in other early Christian documents. For example, the Didache instructs leaders to baptize "in living water. But if you have no living water, baptize into other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, do so in warm" (Didache 7).
So what makes water "living water"?
I imagine in a world where water can be scarce one must quickly learn to judge what water will give life and what water might pose a threat to life. Water that is running or active is more likely to be fresh and therefore safe to drink. Stagnant water may be safe or not. If the water is cold, that indicates it is deep and, again, more likely to be safe. But warm water indicates shallow water, water that has evaporated in the sun, concentrating potentially dangerous particulates in the water that remains.
Looking back it is more amazing than it should be to consider that these people were potentially using the same well that had been around for hundreds of year. According to their tradition, Jacob and his sons had dug the well to provide water for their families and livestock. And now this same well serves an entire village and probably much of the surrounding countryside as well. For those of us in more privileged parts of the world, it is difficult to imagine such a life or such infrastructure. We go to our kitchens or bathrooms, turn on our faucets, and, as long as our local governments have done what they are supposed to do, we get nice clean water in return.
But what happens when we don't? In some parts of the world, just like ancient Samaria, the community cares for their water supplies.While people might have to walk miles to safe drinking water, they care for the sources as a community. If anything happens to a well, it affects them all. They recognize the consequences.
And yet in our privileged world, we have a tendency to put profit or expedience ahead of care for our communities. The people of Flint, MI, are dealing with a poisoned water supply still, years after it was first reported. People who rely on well water in areas where fracking is used to pull more resources out of the ground have had their wells poisoned by the toxins injected into the ground water. Oil pipelines and refineries are almost constantly spilling oil and petroleum into water ways. The Nestlé Company buys up water rights in small communities for pennies and then ships the water out of the watershed for a profit. Soda companies pull water out of local communities and leave behind the ingredients, many of which can be toxic in large amounts.
Where is this living water?
In the end, just as the Samaritan woman recognizes the need for living water, we also need living water. As the Water Protectors remind us, water is life. There are many things we as humans can survive without. We inhabit multiple environments around the globe and even inhabit a station in space. But in each of these places there are two things we cannot do without - food and water.
Like the Samaritan women, may we never forget the importance of living water. And may we remember the source of Living Water that reminds us that we are all connected and all important.