"THE DRAWER OF WATER"
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to
her, "Will you give Me a drink?" John 4:7
In the previous chapter we contemplated the Divine
Pilgrim, wearied from His journey, seated by the well of Jacob. Let us turn
for a little to the other visitant, at that consecrated spot, who divides
with Him the interest of the narrative: "A Samaritan woman came to draw
water."
The first question which naturally suggests itself is,
What brought her there? And the question is all the more pertinent to
those who are familiar with the locality. The well of Jacob, as has been
previously noted, is at a considerable distance from the modern Nablous.
Indeed, if the ancient Sychar be identical with the present Shechem, it
cannot be less than a mile and a half. At all events, much nearer her home
were two copious fountains, Ain Defileh and Ain Balata, which must have been
as old as the days of the Canaanites, besides innumerable springs within and
around the city; and whatever else may have been the changes which eighteen
centuries have produced, we may feel assured that the number of the wells
and streams of ancient times can have undergone no diminution. There must
have been, therefore, some special reason to induce this female of Sychar,
in the heat of noontide, to take an otherwise superfluous and unnecessary
journey to a well that is specially designated as "deep" and the
drawing from which must have been accompanied with considerable manual
labor. The very hour, too, was unusual and peculiar. Of old, and to this
day, evening was the time at which the wells and cisterns of Palestine were
surrounded with living throngs. It is only the chance wayfarer or passing
caravan that are found pausing at noon for refreshment. Moreover, as has
been observed by Dr. Robinson, "that is was not the public well of the city
is probable from the circumstance, noted in verse 11, that there was here no
public accommodation for drawing water."
The answer which we think is, on the whole, most
satisfactory, is the one suggested by the same learned writer and followed
by others, that it was more than likely a peculiar value set on the
water—a superstitious virtue supposed to attach to the old patriarch's
well—which induced this woman to protract her journey and brave the midday
heat. In various parts of Europe, superstition has reared its
convent, monastery or shrine around reputed sacred fountains which
have borne for ages the name of their founder or patron saint, and been
credited with an inherent charm for the cure of diseases alike physical and
spiritual. What must have been the sanctity which, in the Jewish age,
gathered round these holy relics of Israel's Pilgrim fathers at Beersheba
and Sychar! no mythical saints of a mythical calendar, but the veritable
spots where the tent and altar of the Friend of God and of His children's
children were pitched, where the smoke of their offering ascended, and the
rites of patriarchal hospitality were dispensed.
An objection, however, to this surmise may reasonably
occur. We can quite imagine such a motive (we could not denounce it as
superstitious, we would, to a certain extent, rather commend it as hallowed)
actuating a true child of Abraham and Jacob—a partaker of their faith; but
we can scarcely imagine a profligate and degenerate descendant of these holy
patriarchs making any such nice discriminating distinction between the
distant ancestral well and one of the gushing fountains that sang its way in
the valley close by her own home.
This objection would be tenable, were it not for a
strange peculiarity, in this composite fallen nature of ours, by which
cringing superstition is not infrequently found allied with
licentiousness. It has been well observed, "There is a kind of
'religious' feeling (often possessed by people of a susceptible and
emotional temperament) which, where moral principle is lacking, gives birth
at once to a sensuous superstition and a sensuous life." In the most
abandoned heart there is always something to utter a protest against its
sin; and along with this, some false refuge or expedient to shake off
the uneasy feeling of guilt and of abused and violated responsibility. As,
at times, amid the wrecks of the old ruin tangled and matted with rank weed
and nettle—crumbling in decay, may be discovered the piece of now marred,
but once delicate sculpture, indicating and memorializing its vanished
glory—so even in the soul which is a moral wreck, there is found, now
and then, in the midst of its fallen capitals and moldering walls, some
strange indices, so to speak, of the tracery of a diviner than human finger
"on the plaster of the wall" of that once kingly palace.
In the case of some, this manifests itself in a groping
after higher life and truer verities. With others, as with the Samaritan
woman, it is no more than a dim recognition of that moral responsibility of
which we have just spoken, coupled with an undefined mysterious dread of
divine retribution; but taking the counterfeit form of seeking
to atone for inner heart impurity by the performance of some outer act of
religiousness. In one word, counterbalancing the life of guilt,
and quieting the stings and rebukes of conscience by the penance and the
pilgrimage—giving the fruit of the body, or the toil of the body, for the
sin of the soul.
We see it in the case of the Mohammedan, reveling
in all that is morally debasing, yet saving the pittances of a lifetime and
braving weeks and months of perilous endurance to accomplish his pilgrimage
to Mecca. We see it in the case of the Roman Catholic: for in what
but this consists one of the fatal charms of Romanism and of the
semi-Romanism of the day, whose essence is contained in what is called
'sacramental efficacy;' and where the mere external act of worship,
is made a counterbalance for the worldly or abandoned life. Such is frail,
inconsistent, fallen human nature; and this too, we may add, not alone in
the case of the gentle Hindu, or the sensual Mussulman, or the superstitious
Romanist, or the mediaeval Ritualist; but under every phase of religion, not
excepting the nominal Protestant and Puritan, where that religion is a
mere form, not a regenerating power.
The woman of Samaria is thus the type and representative
of a by no means limited class, among whom depravity of character is found
associated either with silly superstition or with hollow
sanctimoniousness; a degraded citizen of Sychar, yet going at times with
meditative step, and in the pride of sect and of religious ancestry, to the
"Holy Well," and thereby, in spite of a life of unblushing sin, thinking she
was doing the God of Jacob service! Oh, the human heart, like that well of
Jacob, is "deep"—deep in its corruptions, deep in its self-deceptions. "The
heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know
it?"
But to pass to one other more practical reflection—the
Guiding hand which brought the woman of Samaria at that particular time
to draw water. We shall afterwards come to read in her brief biography a
wondrous chapter in the volume of Grace: but we have here to mark a
preliminary page in the book of Providence.
Nothing, in the earthly sense of the word, was more
purely accidental, than the going of this citizen of Sychar that day to the
well at sultry noontide. She left her home with no thought but to bring in
her pitcher a draught from the well-known fountain. Never dreamt she for a
moment of an undesigned meeting that was to shape, and mold, and recast her
whole future. Had she come there a day sooner, or at the usual evening time
for the drawing of water, amid the hum of voices and the bleating of flocks,
she would have missed that "still hour" of divine musing and heavenly
communion: she would have returned the heathen and reprobate she had gone.
But there is a directing, controlling, superintending Power guiding all
human plans and purposes, "rough hew them as we will."
Who can doubt that, all unknown and unforeseen by her,
it was one of those ordinary everyday providences of God, included in
the supervision "of all His creatures and all their actions," which we are
compelled implicitly to believe, if we would unriddle and understand the
mystery of the world. Make that journey to the well a mere happy accident—a
curious and singular coincidence in which there was no divine foreknowledge
and decree, and as a matter of course we write "chance" on the momentous
results to which the meeting led—the founding and extension of that Church
which sprang from the woman of Samaria as its nursing mother. If we stop
short of the only true solution of that journey, as being one of the eternal
purposes of the Most High—prearranged and predetermined by Him—we virtually
dissever God from history. Accident! Chance! No; the name of that woman was
written in the Book of life. The same "needs be" of the divine 'determinate
counsel' which brought the Redeemer there, brought also her, who, before
that noontide sun sank behind Gerizim, was to He made a trophy of His grace.
Indeed we cannot speak of such apparently trivial
occurrences as "accidents" without virtually dethroning Deity, wresting the
sovereignty of His own world from the hands of the Supreme. The
peradventures and contingencies of men are the interpreters of His will, the
executioners of His purposes, heralds sent forth to fulfill His high
behests. If we deny particular providences, we must deny more special ones.
If we deny God's hand in the minute events of daily life, we must, to be
consistent, eliminate His overruling power in the rise and fall of empires.
Minute occurrences, apparently the most trifling, have not infrequently
involved the destinies of nations, and the blessing or curse of generations
unborn.
Every schoolboy knows the authenticated fact in our own
early Scottish history, how the fate of this kingdom hung, so to speak, on a
spider's web; how the success of that tiny insect nerved the arm of her
chieftain kin—as like himself, six times baffled, it reached on a seventh
effort the rafters above his head—roused him from his couch of despondency
and led to the victory which secured his country's independence. By refusing
to recognize God's direct overruling providence in an incident so trifling,
we must, as a matter of course, sever from His cognizance and supervision
every subsequent historic event in our nation's annals to which that
apparently trivial accident gave birth.
The reader of "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" may
remember a similar story with a lesson: the passage wherein the skeptic
writer, in the pomp of stately history, tells of the little bird of the
desert which rose from the mouth of the cave, where Mahomet, the false
prophet, had taken refuge from his pursuers, and by which occurrence he
evaded certain death. He records, with a covert skeptic's sneer, (what the
Christian may read as a great truth) that "the flight of that bird changed
the destinies of the world." Yes! this is true, 'but not as the infidel
would represent it—as if that winged tenant of the wilderness had usurped
the place of the Great Supreme. We accept his saying, but it is with the
interpretation that the almighty Ruler, the God of providence, had set that
tiny warder by the cave's mouth, prepared its perch by the rugged entrance,
and gave the summons to fly.
Deny God's providence as extending to so minute and
trifling an occurrence, and you wrest from Him the cognizance and
foreknowledge of the vast influence which that impostor was yet to exercise
on the world's history. In other words, you admit the 'heathen deity of
chance' into your Parthenon; you fling the reins on the coursers' necks and
surrender all idea of Divine control—resolving all history into a fortuitous
concurrence of chances, just as the infidel world-maker would resolve all
this fair creation, with its harmonious movements and nicely adjusted
machinery, into the old fortuitous concurrence of atoms. No, no; man
proposes, but God disposes. He who wheels the planets in their courses,
marks the sparrow's fall. He who swept Babylon with the broom of
destruction, or overthrew Pharaoh in the Red Sea, or raised up the princely
Cyrus to be the deliverer of His people, conducted that female's steps that
day, at the noontide hour, to Sychar's well. He who brought (in similar
circumstances) Rebekah, Rachel, and Zipporah to other eastern fountains to
be wedded to the princely fathers of the Hebrew people, brought their
descendant to nobler and more glorious spiritual espousals—to pledge her
troth to the Divine Redeemer, who was soon to ratify these espousals by the
outpouring of His precious blood, and proclaim to a whole outcast world,
"Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is His name."
We see every day the same truth illustrated in our own
individual histories. Events, often apparently trivial and
unimportant—what the world calls accidents, form really and truly the mighty
levers of life, altering and revolutionizing our whole future. The
relationships of earth, the spheres of our labor, the connections of
business, the bounds of our habitation, are all in one sense accidental. The
merest trifles have touched the springs of action; a twig or stone has
altered the direction of life's footpath; the jutting rock in the stream has
altered its course in the valley; the casual meeting of a friend on the
street may have led to the most important crisis in our history: the youth
on the verge of sin and ruin by stumbling accidentally into some house of
God, has been led to hear the word, which to him now is like the memory of
that well of Sychar to the saved penitent of Samaria—associated with living
streams and everlasting life.
Let us rejoice in the simple but sublime assurance that
all that happens is ordered for us—that the vessel in which we sail is not
like the abandoned ship of the great painter—a deserted log in the wild
waters, without helm or mast or compass, driven here and there by the
capricious breath of the tempest—but that rather, like the gigantic wheels
in Ezekiel's vision, the wheel within wheel is propelled by Omnipotence.
Better still, as in the same vision the prophet of Chebar saw "above the
firmament the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone,
and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a
man above upon it;" so it is for us to know, and to rejoice in the
knowledge, that every event is in the hands of the Savior who died for us,
and who has given us this mightiest proof and pledge of dying love, that all
things (even the most mysterious) are working together for our good.
Oh, even over our bitterest trials let us write the
gleaming words, "He had to go." Blessed for us if that "had to"
result—as it did in the case of the Lord of pilgrims and the repentant
sinner, in bringing us to the well's mouth, to hold close converse on the
all-momentous question of our salvation, and in the thirst of the
world's sultry noon to get our parched souls filled with the water of
salvation. Meanwhile be this our prayer, "Show me Your ways, O Lord, teach
me Your paths;" "Lead me in Your truth and teach me;" "Lead me in the way
everlasting!" Whether it be amid the groves and singing streams and sunshine
of Gerizim, or amid the "blackness and darkness and tempest" of Ebal, I will
hear the guiding voice saying, "Follow Me. This is the way, walk in it."
"Lead, kindly Light; amid the encircling gloom
Lead me on:
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead me on.
Keep my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
"I was not ever thus, nor prayed that You
Should lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead me on.
I loved the glare of day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
"So long Your power has blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
Over valley and hill, through stream and torrent, until
The night is gone;
And, with the morn, those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."