Jesus responds in kind.
“Whoever drinks the water from this well,” he says, “in time will be
thirsty again.” John 4:13 EFP
Jesus could have responded in any number of ways. He could have addressed the whole
Jew-Samaritan estrangement issue. He
could have listed the myriad of ways he is able to access water; or how, for
that matter, he invented it! He could
even have discussed the merits of Jacob compared to his own divine credentials. Any of these could have made for some
stimulating conversation.
But Jesus had not come for some interesting afternoon chit-chat
by Father Jacob’s well. He had come to
this place, at this specific time, to introduce hope back into the life a woman
who had given up on it. She is just
going through the motions; alive, but not really. So he cuts to the chase again and states a
truth that even she can’t argue with. It
doesn’t matter if Moses himself had dug the well and blessed the water, the
results are the same: drink and get thirsty again. The fact that it was Jacob—Israel himself who
provided this water source, does not change anything. 8-14 days seems to be the length of time a
person can live without water. So you have to keep drinking more and more and
more and more.
It’s not the substance, but the Source that makes the
difference. As long as the source is
human, tangible, material, earth-bound, the end is similar: it does not
endure. Water is a good thing. Jacob is a legend. Moses, Abraham, David, go down the list, all
A-list type people. They are all good
men—fallible, but good men. But just as
they faced their mortality, so everyone and anything that comes from them will
also face a similar fate. It’s
inescapable. It’s inevitable. It’s
unavoidable. Whatever you attain or gain
from any human source will fall short of satisfying permanently. There is a shelf life on most everything
humanity values under the sun. There is
no answer to that. All I can do now is
what the woman of Samaria did—she kept her silence and listened. I do well to do likewise.
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