Good Friday {poetry for lent}

Yesterday in the lectionary we read this story, where the Israelites are grumbling in the wilderness with no water, and God tells Moses to strike a rock.  Water pours out for them to drink.  

In the Gospel reading, we heard the story of Jesus asking a woman for water.  You know he was breaking all kinds of social convention in doing so, talking to a woman and a Samaritan, not something a Jewish man should do.  He didn't take his message to the town elders, setting up a council for Jewish-Samaritan reconciliation, holding forth in public debate on the topic.  Jesus reveals himself in an unexpected way, in a quiet desert place, where a forgotten person, not a person of power and influence, is thirsty. He doesn't hand out water bottles with a tract-printed label, but asks for a drink, presenting himself as human, and in need; and only then as divine, and offering living water.

What does it mean to ask God for living water?

In this poem, Rossetti laments her own hardness of heart as she meditates upon Christ's suffering.  At the beginning, she contrasts stone and sheep.  But by the end, she recognizes that every stone is a sheep, too. Living water flows in our hearts only after God has struck them open.


Good Friday
by Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
     That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood's slow loss,
     And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
     Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
     Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
     Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon--
     I, only I.
Yet give not o'er,
     But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
     And smite a rock.