A spring of living water welling up to eternal life
At the heart of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, there stands a well. Not just any well, but Jacob’s Well, the well believed to have been created by the Old Testament patriarch himself. The well (which still exists today in what we now know as the West Bank), is exceptionally deep.
In these biblical lands, the well is both the source of life itself, and also an imporant meeting place. And both of these aspects of wells tell us something about who Jesus is: Jesus is both a wellspring of life and a meeting place. A place of encounter, where we meet with God.
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Living as we do in a corner of northern Europe accustomed to plentiful rainfall, it can be hard to imagine just how significant wells are in the arid lands of the Middle East. We are blessed with surface water, in rivers, streams and lakes. In desert regions, water lies hidden beneath the surface in deep underground aquifers. In these concealed channels, sheltered from the merciless heat of the sun, water flows. And this is part of the desert’s magic: that out of what appears to be a barren landscape, there can spring surprising abundance.
I encountered this desert miracle last summer on a family trip to the arid plains of central Turkey. We were staying in a small village overlooking the sun-scorched landscape, visiting the early Christians rock churches with their astounding frescos. Early one morning, we decided to head down a dusty winding path towards a thin ribbon of green. Approaching the valley floor, the path entered a narrow tunnel of trees, alive with the sound of calling birds and crickets. Somewhere beneath the surface, water flowed. We stood there, speechless. And that’s when it happened. This moment I will never forget. A nightingale sang. A stream of crystal clear sound, poured into the desert. I wonder if those early Christians heard this same song and were also touched by its grace. So as I read the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, I remember this desert miracle. I imagine the possibility of this stream of life welling up also within me.
Now I have to confess to a particular fascination with the symbolism of the well. By profession I’m a psychotherapist, so you could say my field of experience is ‘well-being’. And this turns out to be more significant to our story than mere wordplay. In my Southfields practice the question which underlies all my work is this: ‘what is the source of true and lasting wellbeing?’ I’m not interested in quick fixes, or ready-made solutions. I’m someone who searches for root causes. I’m interested in the source of our pain and struggles. And I’m also interested in locating the source of what makes each of us feel most fully alive and aligned with our own personal truth.
Over many years of my practice, I’ve come to understand that the answer to this question of ‘true and lasting wellbeing’ rarely lies in plain sight on the surface of our lives. It usually requires us to dig a little deeper, to ask (and to stay with) the big questions:
Who am I in my most authentic self?
What makes me feel most fully alive?
What does my heart most dearly long for?
Now I’m under no illusion that finding the answers to these questions may take a lifetime, but I do believe that we need to stay close to them, to live these questions – to love them even. For a question is like an opened channel. It allows truth to flow into our lives. Where we allow ourselves to be diverted or distracted from these deeper questions, the channel – the shaft of the well if you like – becomes clogged, and we stand little chance of drawing up the fresh water of truth.
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So here in John chapter 4, we find Jesus arriving at the well, tired and thirsty, where he encounters a woman drawing water. It is a real meeting of opposites – of a Jew with a Samaritan, a man with a woman, the ‘chosen one’ and the ‘outcast’. If a bridge of trust and understanding can be found between these two, it can be found with anyone, anywhere. And this really touches me. Because in truth I have struggled to find an authentic connection – a meeting point – with the personhood of Jesus. I, an English woman living in the twenty first century, he a man of Jewish descent living in the middle east some two thousand years ago. So I’m curious to follow the conversation that transpires between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.
Given their many differences and the historical enmity between their peoples, not to mention the social mores forbidding unsupervised contact between a man and a woman, it comes as no surprise that the woman rebukes Jesus saying ‘How is it that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’, to which Jesus replies that if she but knew who it was that was asking her, she would have asked and he would have given her living water. Jesus goes on to say that the water he can give would become in her ‘a spring of living water welling up to eternal life’.
So what are we to make of the notion of Jesus as ‘a spring of living water welling up to eternal life’ within us?
At the heart of Jesus’ promise lies the implied contrast between the water of the well and the living water which is the gift of Jesus as the son of God. In the original Greek of John’s gospel, the word ‘living’ implies something that is moving, flowing, streaming – fresh. The fundamental quality of living water is that it remains close to the source and is continuously refreshed and replenished by the source. Living water exists in a permanent state of emergence and renewal.
Jesus is living water because he remains close to the source – to God. In fact, Jesus is so close to the source, that he is ‘at one’ with the source. So, to encounter Jesus, is to be nourished and replenished directly from the font of life itself – from God.
Now this spring of living water, Jesus tells the woman, is forever welling up (the Greek word for welling actually implies a ‘gushing’ of water, such is its abundance). This theme of abundance has been explored earlier in John’s Gospel with the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana. Still, God as source, does not give himself to us ‘all at once’. He gives us just the exact amount of living water – the degree of truth, of challenge, and of love – that we can carry, that we (in the limitations of our humanity) can bear. In the Lord’s Prayer we say, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. At communion, we sip from the cup. God – the source of all grace and truth – knows what we need, and what we can bear.
We can be assured that we will have ‘enough’ day by day. Enough love, enough hope, enough strength to endure difficult times, because the source of living water is never far away. In speaking of the living water welling up within us, John wants us to know that the outpouring of God takes place in us, and through us, and between us. What the life of Jesus shows us is that the living God is close by, right here in the wellspring of our lived experience and our encounters with each other.
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So what is it that our hearts most dearly long for? For what do we thirst? The answer to this will be as personal to you and to me as it’s possible to imagine.
In his conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus suggests that what we thirst for most deeply is ‘eternal life’. Now we tend to interpret this word ‘eternal’ as something that endures beyond death, something everlasting, but in its original conception, the Greek word for ‘eternal’ (menein) signals two other vital meanings, which relate not only to life after death, but to the quality and fullness of the life we are living right now.
- Firstly, the Greek word ‘eternal’ denotes something abiding’, a word which holds the sense of a place (or a relationship) in which we ‘abide’ – in which we rest, remain, or dwell, confident that here we will find the belonging, the truth and the love our hearts thirst for. Later in John’s gospel, we learn that this relationship with God’s abiding loveis mutual. In chapter 17, as Jesus is about to enter the Garden of Gethsemane, he says to his disciples, ‘Abide in me as I in you’. Could it be that God thirsts for us as deeply as we thirst for God?
- The second meaning of the original Greek word ‘eternal’ denotes something thatis sustained and sustaining. ‘Eternal life’ is life that nourishes us with food from heaven, with what we most need to find true, deep, and lasting wellbeing.
So what this story of Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman suggests to me, is that the gift of ‘living water’ is to be found in an abiding, sustaining relationship of closeness and trust with the living source of the whole of creation – with God. And that the life and words of Jesus, conveyed in the Gospels, offer us an immediate and ever-present point of access to the wellspring itself. There are other points of access (other wells), which lead us deep into the mystery of God: prayer, contemplation and communion; beauty and wonder; conversation and community; creativity and imagination; movement, laughter and play. Each person’s God-centred relationship is incomparable. Unique.
Through his encounter at the well, Jesus wants us to understand that eternal life is a living thing. If we are to dwell in its abiding grace, and be sustained by it, we need to tend it – to protect it, care for it, return to it often, learn from it, and cherish it. This responsibility to tend the wellspring within us, is beautifully articulated by the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, when she writes:
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
And this perhaps is our primary responsibility – ‘to keep the channel open’ – to keep showing up at the meeting place with God (within us and between us); to rest and abide there; and so strengthen our faith that the living source is never far away, and will always give us what we need as we need it, and no more than we can bear.
Sue Chin
