Turns out this isn’t just any old well. This is Jacob’s well, passed down to his son Joseph and cared for over a long time by the descendants of the one who wrestled with God. Just about this time, after the disciples had left to find lunch, a woman comes to the well to draw water. Jesus speaks to her. I imagine she’s startled by this. Jews don’t speak to Samaritans. Men don’t speak to women in such public places. And here Jesus sits giving orders to her like she’s one of his students.

Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.”

That she answered him at all is a bit surprising, but this bold woman asks the question everyone would have been thinking all along. She says, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Jesus looks at her like it’s a stupid question. He’s tired. He’s thirsty. She’s the one with a bucket. Jesus is not amused by the social customs of this particular town. She has the water, he needs a drink. For him, it’s a reasonable request, but he entertains her stupid question nonetheless.

In fact, he says, “If you knew the truth about the living God, rather than me asking you for a drink, you’d be saying to me, “Give me a drink” and I would give you living water.”

Again, she’s drawn to the obvious. “Sir, begging your pardon, you don’t have a bucket. Where are you going to get this living water?”

OK. Here we have a man, a Jew, with talking to a woman, a Samaritan and offering her water when she’s the one with the bucket. It doesn’t make much sense. If this weren’t such a familiar story, we might be tempted to think that Jesus was suffering from heat exposure and needed that drink more than we thought.

But this woman who knows a little of the story of wrestling with God from dear old great, great, great grandfather Jacob is a worthy opponent for this exchange with Jesus. She comes back again, asking then if he’s somehow greater than her beloved ancestor for whom the well is named.

Jesus lets her know that he’s not a magician. He’s not talking about the kind of water that comes from the well, the kind you drink and then are thirsty again. He’s talking about an internal spring that God has placed in each of us, a well that will not run dry, a constant flowing stream that keeps us connected to our maker.

Well, this was an unexpected conversation indeed. Come to the well for today’s water and get a theological lecture. He might as well have said to her, “Do you want to know if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?”

Jesus has these cryptic speeches from time to time. John seems to be the most faithful recorder of those types of speeches in his gospel. The Gnostic gospels which have been either lost to us or counted as heresy contain more of the same. Jesus tells us, in as much as words can say, about what it’s like to be intimately connected to that which is holy. We’ve wondered about that intimacy as long as there has been a human history. To tell you the truth, even seasoned theologians and biblical scholars, don’t know exactly what to do with it. It scares us. It scares us to connect directly to the divine. It reminds me of the home inspection we had done before we moved into our house on Willow Lane. We were told by the electrician that one of the former owners had done his own wiring, and when he did, he connected the outside power source as a direct current with no safeguards whatsoever. As he put it, “You all have the full power of the TVA running into your basement. You might want to have that fixed.” We did – immediately.

The woman at the well was a bit suspicious of Jesus’ wiring. Direct connection to God? We get a little nervous around people who claim a hotline to heaven these days, and we probably should. But he spent a little more time convincing her. We know the part of the story where she has the “aha” moment. Jesus is able to accurately describe some rather personal details of her current marital situation when they had never met before. She is amazed and runs to tell her friends. In fact, she does so with such passion that this becomes a SAMARITAN city where Jesus’ deeds are remembered and ever after he is known there as the Messiah, the Son of God. Don’t let that little detail get lost. It is supposed to be jarring that Jesus, a rabbi, can be remembered here of all places. Today it would be like saying that Jesus was remembered as the Son of God forever after in a Muslim town.

Meanwhile, the disciples come back with lunch. I love this story. They come back, not having been part of the conversation, and offer their beloved teacher a sandwich. He says to them, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”

Again – Jewish man, Samaritan city, who would give him food? From whom would he take food if it were offered? The disciples were as convinced as the woman that he’d lost his mind. They turn and ask one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?”

Another stupid question! Jesus isn’t talking about FOOD food. He’s talking about heavenly food. I wonder what it was like to be around Jesus long term. Did his talking in metaphors become oppressive? Could you ever talk to him about simply being hungry or thirsty without feeling like you’d been to Sunday School? These simple every day actions become windows looking into to the Father’s house for him. The disciples just want to have lunch. Jesus wants to talk about God sowing all these seeds and how the harvest is just about to ripen. Can’t they see it?

But who could easily understand Jesus? Of course our questions are just as stupid as the questions asked of Jesus in this story. They’re human. We are forever thinking about human functions and human needs. We get stuck on the details. We want to know how you can give someone water without a bucket or receive a gift of food when there are no free lunches. We are not so unlike the people who lived 2000 years ago who worshipped God on that mountain in Samaria or at the temple in Jerusalem. We put our God in boxes of our own making. God is found at church, or God is found in Christianity. We limit God by the physical properties of water and the tangibility of food. We cannot see what Jesus asks us to see when he says, “Believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem… the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

It’s no wonder that the Gnostics denied the body and used statements like these to uphold spiritual truth as far superior to mere knowledge about the world. They were enamored with Jesus’ promises about what was eternal and beyond corruptibility. We tend to thumb through the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke for the stories that tell us something that we have a better hold on. We can understand healing and compassion. We can see teaching by example more than we can by parable or metaphor. We scoff at those who have unexplainable connections to God as either having hallucinations or fabrications of their own thinking.

But what if, what if the spiritual realm is the reality? What if we’re living “Matrix-like” in an unreal world of thirst and hunger that can be eternally satiated by our participation in the holy? What if this sacred quest is at least on parallel with the more practical aspects of what Jesus taught us – things like “feed my sheep” and “love your enemies?” Jesus taught the importance of two things. We remember one of them – love your neighbors as you love yourself. That has hooks we can hang on to. We can picture what that looks like. But there’s another part. We are to love God with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our strength. We are to immerse ourselves in God, so that water becomes living water, so that food becomes ingested as the Christ within each of us.

“Eat. Drink. Remember.” Jesus tells us. Our hearts and minds and strength stray all over the place. We are far more loyal to far less things than God. Is this secret knowledge? Not really. Some outcroppings of Christianity thought it was. It is however, hard to understand. It challenges who we are as human beings when the things we take for granted as “true” are turned sideways by the man with some unusual questions. Following Jesus alters our reality and certainly changes our deeply held understandings of our world. The woman at the well couldn’t stop talking about what she had seen and heard. It is reported that many, many in that town believed, and they said to her, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church, p.47

…I saw someone who was always feeding people, healing people, teaching people, helping people. When he tried to withdraw from these people, they followed him. When they tried to eat him up, he did not resist. “Take, eat, this is my body, given for you,” he said, holding out a loaf of challah to them. Like a single mother, he fed his spiritual offspring from his own flesh and blood until all his reserves were gone. Then he died, and though he rose from the dead three days later, this was quite an act to follow.”