What is your favorite romantic movie? Mine, because I like subverting well-known conventions, is The Princess Bride: an adventure story full of (as Peter Falk tells his grandson): “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles....” Necessary elements to any love story, right? Not to mention masked pirates, princesses, fire swamps, logic contests, Billy Crystal, and rodents of unusual size. (Here’s an assignment: if you’ve seen the movie and you love it, on the way out, you can tell me your favorite quote.) The hero Westley is disguised as the dread Pirate Roberts, which causes all kinds of problems as his true love, Buttercup, doesn’t recognize him, leading to mishaps and adventures as his identity is revealed and his love is proved.
When you watch a romantic movie, you know from the beginning where it’s going to end up, right? Cinderella and all the fairy tales end up with “And they lived happily ever after”. The Princess Bride ends up with “Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.” Most modern romantic movies end up with some version of a wedding, a kiss, or a happy couple riding off into the sunset.
We watch one of these movies, and we’re not sure what route the journey is going to take us on (they don’t ALL involve rodents of unusual size), but we’re pretty sure that it will involve misunderstandings, lost opportunities, disguises, discoveries of underlying truths, revelations of who people are under the masks they wear, and realizations of love that was there all the time unrecognized. And we know that the formula will end up with “happily ever after.”
The people hearing today’s gospel story for the first time would have the same feeling about the story they were hearing – because this starts out with well-known conventions in Old Testament tradition. A man and a woman meet at a well – it’s a perfect setup for a love story. In the Hebrew scriptures, romances regularly begin that way. Isaac’s servant met Rebekah at a well; Moses and his wife met at a well; and most famous of all, Jacob met his wife Rachel at a well. If there’s anyone in Jewish tradition who qualifies as the Jewish version of a fairy princess, it would be Rachel. Just to make sure we’ve gotten the point, John tells us that today’s gospel story happens not just at any well, but at Jacob’s well. The whole thing seems to be set up as a love story.
But John gets us all set up for a formula love story, then subverts our expectations. For one thing, the woman at the well is no Buttercup, no charming princess. This is a woman who has been ill-used by life and has failed in love, the victim of heartbreak after heartbreak; married 5 times, now living with a boyfriend. She might have been widowed a time or two, divorced the other times, who knows? But before we judge her too harshly, remember that women in those days had no control over divorce – it was entirely the man’s choice, by simply saying “I divorce you” three times. Perhaps she was just a woman who always found disappointment in love, perhaps she was unable to bear children so men used her and cast her aside. And in a society where women without a man had no way of supporting themselves, perhaps she has now simply settled for whatever man would support her and feed her, even if he wouldn’t marry her. Whatever the reason, love has failed her over and over. Until today: at high noon, she goes down to the well to get water.
And there, at the well, is a man, who asks for water to quench his thirst. In a society where unrelated men and women didn’t speak in public, and where Jews and Samaritans didn’t have anything to do with each other, and where honorable people didn’t associate with people who had failed in their personal lives the way this woman had (or the way the world had failed her), Jesus subverts all the conventions by speaking to this woman.
And Jesus shocks her by promising her something to quench her thirst in return for the water she gives him: living water that will well up to eternal life. It turns out that both Jesus and the woman are thirsty, and what they are thirsty for is a relationship with each other; not a romantic relationship, but a life-changing relationship of love and revelation and new life.
In a pattern that we saw in last week’s gospel about Nicodemus, and will see frequently in John, the woman starts by taking Jesus’ promise of water literally, and moves progressively toward more and more revelation, light dawning, disguises being shed, true identities being revealed. Jesus reveals that her mask is not really disguising her – he knows her past and he knows her identity, and he accepts her for who she is.
And in return, he reveals his own identity: he is the Messiah, and not just the Messiah, but the Word of God who was with God from the beginning. Jesus says in our paltry English translation, “I am he” – but in the original, it is simply “I AM”– the same words Moses had heard from burning bush – Jesus speaks the name of God, the name Yahweh. And she begins to understand that God himself is promising her not literal and tangible water from a well, but something to quench a much deeper thirst, a spiritual thirst, so that she will worship God in Spirit and in truth. This is such good news that she cannot resist running back into town and telling all the people of the town about the Messiah she had met. And as we watch her joy as a new life begins for her, we come to understand that this whole time, it has been a love story after all.
As well it should be, because just a few verses before, in last week’s gospel, John had told us some of Jesus’ most famous words: “for God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that all who believe in him should have everlasting life.” God’s love story begins with thirst: like Jesus’ thirst at this beginning of today’s gospel, it’s God’s thirst for us, his longing for relationship with us. God so loved us, says John, that God’s thirst for us welled up into a gift of God’s Son to us, beginning of a love story that will continue, as love stories do, with revelations of identity, falling of disguises, light shining in darkness, and will end up not just with “happily ever after”, but with everlasting life, life abundant, life that begins now, the moment we understand what we are being offered, and the moment we allow Jesus to see through our disguises and defenses and show him our true selves, life that wells up to eternity.
And we here in 21st century America, a country so different from 1st century Judea and Samaria that we have to interpret not just language, but social customs, to understand what Jesus did and meant, yet so similar to that time and place that we know we are still thirsty, we still thirst for meaning, truth, love. Yet like the woman at the well, we find ourselves trying to quench our thirst with things that are not true water. We try to base our identity on things like false relationships, money, job titles, possessions, houses; we use these things as the masks through which we show ourselves to the world; we pour our time into endless work and mindless entertainment; yet we thirst to know that when our masks are off, we will still be loved.
As the prophet Isaiah says: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” And isn’t that a fine description of so many lives in our community? Spending money on expensive things but never being satisfied; pouring life and labor into activities that bring us abundant possessions, but not abundant life? No matter how much time and energy we pour into these things, we are still thirsty, still dry in our spirits, still wanting to find a well that will never run dry.
Jesus offers us this well. Jesus gives us living water. Jesus lets us drop our masks, recognizes us for who we are, accepts and loves us, quenches our thirst. Because the love story that started so long ago at Jacob’s Well in Samaria continues still today: Jesus is still thirsty. God still longs for us. Spirit is still ready to be poured into our hearts, overflowing to touch all those around us. And all we need to do to receive this gift of living water is to let down our disguises and our defenses and allow God’s love story to be told through us.
And as God begins a new story in us, God also gives us the power, like this woman, to share that story with others. The woman runs back into town to tell everyone about this Jesus, this Messiah. She’s not thinking about things like church growth or evangelism, she’s simply telling the good news about an encounter she has had with the living Christ who has given her living water to quench her thirst.
And as we talk in this church about evangelism, which is simply a word that means telling the good news, it’s the same for us as for her. It’s not about church growth – it’s about encounters with the living Christ. What have we found in our relationship with Christ that has changed our lives? How have we found that he allows us to drop our disguises, our mistaken identities, the masks we wear? What encounters with him are quenching our thirst for the living God?
That’s what we have to share with others. That’s what we cannot, not share. That’s the gift that it would be a shame to keep to ourselves. Because it’s a gift that is desperately needed by our dry and unsatisfied world. It is the gift of living water that quenches our thirst for God, and God’s thirst for us. It is the gift of a love story with the living Christ who dismantles our disguises and loves us for who we truly are. It is the gift of love that leads to eternal life. That eternal life begins right now, and it wells up to … happily ever after.
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