Sermon preached 24 February 2008 at St Mary’s Welwyn and at Ayot St Peter

‘There came a woman of Samaria’ (John 4:7)

In my secular work, I practise as a commercial mediator. Imagine two companies, or two people, locked in conflict. Their dispute is on its way to court, if it hasn’t already gone there; and my role is to help them negotiate their way to a settlement. What I am really doing is helping them to have productive conversations – whether with each other or with me. During a mediation day – and usually mediations last a day – you will get a feel for the ebb and flow of the conversations. Are the parties getting close to settlement or not? Are they understanding or misunderstanding each other? And what words will make settlement more likely or less likely? Well most mediations settle – and some settle very significantly. A couple of weeks ago I mediated between two parties who were having a very bitter family dispute about a will. There had been a lot of bad feeling. But the parties eventually settled, and their relief was obvious. The day after I got an email. ‘Two years of torment are over – we can now live our lives again’. Yes, conversations really can make a difference. I expect you can point in your own experience to conversations that have made a real difference to you.

Today’s gospel reading contains one of the most memorable conversations in the whole of the New Testament – the conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well. Why does John include this story in his gospel? Why does he take an outsider like this Samaritan woman and show her being brought into the circle of faith, the community of believers?

John writes his gospel for one overriding reason. It is so that you and I, the readers, may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that by believing we may have life in his name. The gospel’s purpose is to bring us to faith in Jesus, so that we have life eternal, that is, the life lived with God forever. Here, says St John, is one person who came to faith in Jesus through an encounter with him. An outsider who built a life-enhancing relationship with him. How about you? But there is this too. John assembled a community around himself which had many Samaritans in it. So choosing to include Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan, and showing how sympathetically and respectfully Jesus treats her, would have been a very powerful way of justifying and maintaining their inclusion. So John wants to bring us to faith, he wants to validate the Samaritans within his own community, and I daresay he wants to get Jesus’s teaching across to the synagogue Jews to whom his community is in opposition.

The first readers of the gospel would have taken for granted what you and I may need explaining to us. Here is a woman talking to a man in a public space. Not done in those days. She is a Samaritan and he is a Jew. They do not talk to each other. And a woman would go to the well with other women in the early morning or early evening, not at midday. So the fact that a woman goes alone to the well at midday alerts us to the fact that something is wrong – that here is a woman who is shunned and avoided by her own Samaritan community. None of this seems to deter our Lord. He’s hot and tired from travelling. He’s really thirsty and he wants a drink. She’s got a jar and she’s willing to give him a drink from the well. From the outset she’s shown as a feisty and independent woman – a genuine conversation partner. (Forgive me if I do not spend time on the issues that many women have with this passage, and particularly with the anti-woman bias which many women see in this and indeed other texts. The five husbands and the current irregular relationship are not my primary focus this morning, nor in fact do I think they were the primary focus of our Lord).

The conversation she has with Jesus is a conversation of quite remarkable engagement and depth. She asks him questions – should you a Jew be asking me a Samaritan for a drink? Are you greater than our Father Jacob? Are you a prophet that you know so much about me? And she had a good grip on Samaritan religion – she knows about its worship, and she expects the Messiah. There is a real theological encounter going on here, Jesus speaking to her with gentleness, and engaging her with respect.And as the conversation develops, her questions and her openness bring her an ever greater disclosure of who Jesus is. He passes from stranger, to prophet to Messiah, and with this progression comes understanding on her part, an acknowledgment by her of his status.

The contrast with the earlier dialogue with Nicodemus could hardly be sharper. He, the man form the heart of the Jewish establishment, an insider if ever there was one, simply doesn’t get it. He fails to understand that true life involves a spiritual change of heart and spiritual rebirth. Unlike Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman came with no questions. I imagine she was astounded at the sequence of events that turned a request for a drink of water into the revelation of the Messiah – and turned her into a willing and committed missionary for Jesus. She simply engaged, and her questions were not of the self-justifying, let’s put him on the spot variety. She just let herself be open to the person who seemed to know her through and through, whose authority carried conviction. At moments of encounter like this we may imagine that the holy spirit is powerfully at work, whenever hearts and minds are open to the possibility of the divine life operating within them.

The good news told by this story is that God knows us and accepts us as we are. He welcomes us into his kingdom without exception, without distinction and without reservation. But when he accepts us as we are, we cannot stay as we are. So we will pray that a spirit of penitence will cleanse us and renew us as we develop our relationship with him. What could be more suitable for our Lenten reflections?

‘If anyone thirsts, let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, out of their heart will flow rivers of living water’.

Amen