16 From there they continued on to Beer, the well where the Lord said to Moses, “Gather the people together and I will give them water.”
17 Then Israel sang this song:
“Spring up, O well!
Sing about it,
18 about the well that the princes dug,
that the nobles of the people sank—
the nobles with scepters and staffs.”
Numbers 21: 16-18
Like the homeless Israelites of the wilderness years, we are prone to grumble as we wander through life. Despite our many struggles, we are provided with what is needed when it is needed, day to day, to live. In Numbers, ancient Israel sang of the wellspring of water that seemed to appear in the desert, no matter where they were, in answer to their desperate pleading. The wells of the ancients provided for their bodily needs, through God’s provision of water to the parched.
So too we are surrounded in the desert of modern society, desperately thirsty and needy for something, anything that will sustain us. Our groanings and grumblings are answered, overflowing:
“The poor and needy search for water,
but there is none;
their tongues are parched with thirst.
But I the Lord will answer them;
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
18 I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys.
I will turn the desert into pools of water,
and the parched ground into springs.
Isaiah 41: 17-18
The deepest well of all was born that night in Bethlehem, producing an endless stream of life flowing through the dry and dying landscape of human suffering and sin. It was as if he had sprung up from the desert, miraculously appearing when desperately needed by the people.
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
John 4: 10-15
Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for a drink at the well although he was the deep wellspring himself. He dwells with us and like us, needing the basics of water that can never truly satisfy. He knows our body’s thirst as he feels just as we do. Yet in responding to his bodily thirst, we are engaged as never before, finding in him the quenching of our spiritual thirst.
Though Jesus needed nurturing and provision while on earth–as a helpless and hungry infant dependent on his parents, as a wandering teacher in the desert thirsty from the long hot miles, and hanging from the cross suffering from thirst and asking from relief–he is the deepest well from which we can possibly draw.
Let us sing of it this Advent.
Barnstorming 