Monday, April 7, 2025  

Today's Scripture
John 4:5–15

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (NRSV)

Reflection

The story of Jesus with the Samaritan women is an intriguing one. Contemplative and spiritual writer Beatrice Bruteau’s interpretation of this passage is that through their dialogue, Jesus and the Samaritan woman arrive at their deeper identity in God (rather than the local identities of Jew and Samaritan).

The Gospel of John is adamant that we participate in the divine life, most notably through love. A deepened sense of our identity as children of our Divine Parent is an important development in the life of a Christian. Our Lenten practices of repentance are designed to wake us up to this deeper identity and the “living waters” that give rise to it. Sin obscures that identity, and so our Lenten practices are there to “carry us home” to our deepest authentic self and identity in Christ.

In times of political and societal turmoil, faith in the living waters and experience of the living waters are essential to ground us and balance us to be, as John says, “light for the world” and poured forth for others. The living waters are more powerful than anything in this world. Living water is in the world but not of it and is not something even the wealthiest oligarch can buy.

Genuine love for God, oneself, and one another is the portal through which we access it. Since the waters are divine, they not only bring us life in this world, but life eternal. During these challenging times, potent love for those whom Jesus loved (the ostracized, the stranger, the poor, and brokenhearted) demands that we drink regularly from those living waters to nourish our souls, claim our authentic identity as God’s beloved, and forge ahead with the divine work God has asked of us for the life of the world.

Prayer
Gracious God, heal within us all that limits the expanded sense of our life in you. Help restore us to have reverence for ourselves as offspring of divine love, that are conduits of your abundant life, forgiveness, and loving generosity. May your living waters give us confidence and hope and quench the thirst of those who need it most in our world. Amen.

Written by John Moulder, Replogle Center for Counseling and Well-Being

Reflection and Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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