The Wind, the Fountain and the Fire by Mark Barrett

Author:Mark Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

3

The Well: The Third Week of Lent

Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. (John 4:6)

Whenever I read John’s story of Jesus, weary and footsore, sitting down beside Jacob’s well in search of shade and refreshment (Jn 4.1-42), I am reminded of one of the most effective lessons in how to read the Bible that I ever received. I was a newcomer to monastic life, and with others at that same novice stage was attending a lesson in scripture study with an experienced senior of our monastery. He spoke that day about a central fact of life in the Bible lands: the overpowering force of dry heat. The relentless sun of the Middle East determines activity for those who live there to an extent that we softer natives of the temperate regions of the world can find genuinely hard to grasp. The difference between life and death can lie in the discovery of shade, and above all in access to a water source that is clean and fresh.

The lovely biblical expression ‘living water’, which refers in its literal usage simply to water that is flowing, a moving stream as opposed to a still pool, exactly expresses what running water and the abundant foliage that generally surrounds it mean for those who inhabit the fierce landscape of the eastern Mediterranean: life rather than death. Cool, shade and growing things, certainly; above all, water in the Bible represents life, and does so with an urgency those of us who live among green fields do not intuitively feel in our bones. Much of the narrative of scripture, both in the Old Testament and the New, has this crucial fact of life as one of its key assumptions.

The psalmist opens Psalm 42, a lyrical prayer of longing for the opportunity to experience God’s presence in the Temple on Mount Zion, with the image of the deer thirsting for water:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,

so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

for the living God.

(Ps. 42.1-2)

The psalm captures perfectly the perspective my novitiate Bible class on dry heat and life-giving water sought to establish: in scripture, we are never far from the question of how and where to find shade and the next drink of water. Because that issue is ubiquitous, water becomes one of the Bible’s central and most natural metaphors for the relationship of humanity with God. To be human is to need water, constantly to crave that moistening without which our clay will crumble back into the dust from which it was called into life; and in an exactly parallel way, to be human is to ‘thirst for God’, without whose spirit, which is the breath of life inspired into the clay taken from the dusty ground, a death yet more terrible will befall the one who was made from the earth.

Like the psalms, the prophetic books delight in the use of the image of water to speak of the life and salvation that come from God.

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