March 7

The poor woman.  If we had been there, we might have warned her; we could have stopped her (even saved her?).  Conversations with this man--this strange Jew--never stay simple, never settle on the surface, never yield their unrelenting focus.  Talking with him, well, it’s almost not fair.   

Moses might have warned her.  Replace her stone well with his fiery shrub, and it’s déjà vu all over again.  One on one.  Mysterious stranger.  The strange voice leads, asks a favor.  Enter banter--the pitiable banter--of the one approached by God--the “LOOK, a BEAR!” attempts of God’s chosen, in this case Moses, scrambling for relief: “What’s your name?”  “They don’t believe me!”  “But I’m not good with words...”  And finally (at least it’s honest), “O Lord, won’t you bother someone else?”   

Why me, O Lord?   

So now the fire is water, but the gaze--the altogether unflinching gaze--is all too familiar: “Give me a drink,” Jesus says.   

To her credit, the woman’s banter is less frantic than (if as real as) old Moses’.  “But you’re Jewish.”  “Are you greater than Jacob?”  “Give me that water.”  “Uh, I don’t have a husband.”  “Say, I read this theological article somewhere on what religion proper looks like...”  “You know, I like you, but...well, let’s leave the God-talk for another day and let the Messiah sort it out.” 

But then, like fire, he says it: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” 

A stillness, but the old question hasn’t quite gone away: Why?  Why is he speaking--with her??  Is it  (as it appears it might be) that Jesus, at the very beginning, anticipates her need for him and so sets up this elaborately stilted conversation, whose endgame is a relief she doesn’t even--at the outset--know she wants?  And isn’t that presumptuous?  Misleading?  Conniving, even?  What, in God’s Name, is he up to? 

But what if...what if he’s not anticipating her need so much as honestly expressing his own?  That is, what if his thirst, when he asks for a drink, is sincere? 

The 15th century mystic Dame Julian Norwich writes in her Revelations of Divine Love that “...as truly as there is a property of compassion and pity in God, so there is as truly a property of thirst and longing in God.”  She goes on, “And because of the strength of this longing in Christ it is for us in turn to long for him...” 

“I thirst,” Jesus says. 

Have you known the banter--the deflections--of the one sought out and beleaguered by God?  Have you been honest enough to resent the intrusion and wondered out loud why he wouldn’t just leave you alone?  But the thirst is his own; and somewhere in the tangle of our competing understandings of our selves, our lives, this thirst persists--insists, really: the thirst and love of the Triune God, longing, completely, for you.  

The Rev. Jonathan R. Melton

St. Helena’s Episcopal Church

Boerne, Texas