Third Sunday in Lent

 

Ex 17:1-7; Ps 95; Rom 5:1-11; Jn 4:5-42 

On average, the human body is about 60% water. When we are thirsty, then, we experience a uniquely existential kind of discomfort. We do not have enough of what we already are. 

With this in mind, I felt rather sorry for the Israelites in my first few readings of today’s passage from Exodus 17. There they are, wandering in circles, 60% of their bodies evaporating in the dry desert air, until God finally helps Moses to give everybody a drink. Sure, they could work on their attitudes—“Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” (v. 3) isn’t the greatest thing to say to someone who parted an entire sea to get you out of slavery—but they had been through a lot and probably weren’t sleeping well.

And yet they get a lot of flak for their grumpiness! These Israelites are name-checked in Psalm 95, which has God say: 

For forty years I loathed that generation

    and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,

    and they do not regard my ways.’

Therefore in my anger I swore,

    ‘They shall not enter my rest.’

Well, I thought, the first time I read that, that seems a bit harsh.

But after a few subsequent readings Scripture broke through even my blind spots, and I realized what the passage was missing. These grumpy dehydrated Israelites never, in this whole passage, ask God for water. They quarrel with Moses. They demand he supply them with water. They complain that he brought them from Egypt.

They never ask God to help them. They have seen God bring twelve plagues on a nation, follow them as a pillar of fire and cloud to protect them from an army, open up a sea for them to cross and then use it to drown said army. In the chapter directly before this one, so presumably a short time before this story takes place, He literally sends them bread from the sky. 

But they don’t ask God to help them. They don’t ask God for water—they don’t even demand it. They seem to forget all about Him.

Contrast this with the Gospel reading of the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus’s first words to her are "Give me a drink." No polite request, here, which I think may be part of the point. Jesus needed water. She had what he needed—a bucket. He told her what he needed, direct, assured in His thirst and in her ability to quench it.

And then the tables turn. He tells her about the living water He can provide, water that you don’t have to keep on drinking, and she says to Him: "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." They aren’t talking about the water that makes up 60% of their bodies. They are talking about the water that makes up 100% of who we are, yet water that we cannot access on our own.

This woman, unlike the Israelites, has access to a well and a bucket. Yet she lives in times of violence and division. She is from an ethnic group in conflict with the Jewish people nearby. She has had multiple husbands, and now lives with a man who is not her husband. Who knows what depths of abuse, loss, and vulnerability these husbands span. She is thirsty. Like the Israelites, she knows she is thirsty. But unlike the Israelites, she is willing to ask God for help. In fact, she takes it a few steps further—she puts her faith in a stranger, from whom she has not witnessed a single miraculous deed, and asks for the solution.

So what are we to take from this? That if we just simply ask God for what we are thirsty for, He will grant it to us immediately and we will be comfortable and hydrated? Well, no. As Paul helpfully reminds us in the New Testament reading of the day, "suffering produces…." And as Lent helpfully reminds us, Jesus, the source of this living water, followed a path that took him to a cross. One of his very final actions was to request water: "I am thirsty." And even as he was dying, his followers lifted up something for him to drink. Psalm 21, which he cries out on the cross, includes the line, "I am poured out like water." 

The song I chose, Lazarus Man, depicts a Lazarus who’s a little bewildered by this second life, who was raised from the dead so thoroughly he can’t go back to sleep. I love the song because it imagines a person in the aftermath of a miracle, where life is arguably even more confusing than before. God’s life does not equal ease.

But these passages suggest that there is dignity in being thirsty for something only God can provide, and there is something waiting for us that is wilder and stranger and more beautiful than we can imagine when we quench this thirst. The Israelites had no water because they had left their captors. I wonder what I should be thirsty for if I only left what I should leave. This Lent, I plan to spend some time pondering that question. Join me, if you’d like, in the exercise. Once I figure that out, I plan to ask God for His help, and keep my eyes open for water from places as unexpected as a stone.

 

Rachel Robinson 

Lazarus Man  Terry Callier