Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
Last week’s gospel passage involved Jesus’s conversations with a Samaritan woman by a well. It is a rich story with a ton of different ways into it. And it, like the other gospels we read during the season of Lent (and into Easter, shhh! we’re not there yet, though!) offer some themes that run through all of these readings like a through line. The first one is obvious in this week’s gospel: seeing. Jesus definitely has a double-intention for that word! Watch for how that one plays out throughout. Especially the last verses from the gospel, when the Samaritans declare that it is no longer just that they believed because of the testimony of the woman at the well, but that they heard it themselves. Remember this idea when we get to Thomas in a number of weeks . . .
Another theme I like to follow like an underground current are the references to living water. They connect his baptism in the Jordan to the wedding feast at Cana to this moment, when he promises the Samaritan woman water that is better than the water in Jacob’s well, because it isn’t just water.
Living water isn’t branding for spring water bottled for suburban soccer moms or the hocus pocus magic handwaving over the well, but something true, perhaps even the realized eschaton of Jesus’s love in a fixed moment in time that cannot be parsed or separated into physical or spiritual, but is real and always and now and forever and internal and spiritual and external and universal and everything everywhere and all at once. And, as we’ll see, living water that can bring sight to the blind . . . and blind the sighted.
With love,
Drew+
