Sunday 24th February 2008LENT III

Mr Jennifer Locke, Head of Religious Studies, Francis Holland School, Clarence Gate

Exodus  17  :  1 – 7 ;  Romans  5  :  1 – 11 ;  John  4  :  4 - 26 ; 28 - 29 ; 39 - 42   

The Samaritan woman at the well: maligned over centuries, mainly by men. And it is certainly true that some of her behaviour was more than a little inappropriate for her day.

  •     What was she doing at the well, on her own at midday?
  •     Even worse, alone at midday and conversing with a strange man.

 ...here is a woman who knows what the living water is, and who allows it to refresh her innermost parts...

She was certainly no stranger to men: as we hear, she’d got through 5 husbands and was in some kind of relationship with a 6th man.  Fred Craddock comments: evangelists over the ages have given her brighter and brighter nails, darker and darker mascara and shorter and shorter skirts in order to better stress the power behind her conversion.

John Calvin even thought he knew why she had had such an excess of marital breakdown:
“The reason of this probably was that being a forward and disobedient wife, she constrained her husbands to divorce her.”

So, on the face of it, we seem to have a woman very much on the outer fringes of respectable society. A woman behaving indiscreetly, a man-eater even, and as if all that wasn’t enough, a Samaritan to boot.

And yet:

  • She is the first character in John’s Gospel to engage Jesus in a serious theological conversation
  • She is the most effective evangelist in the whole Gospel: a model for Christian faith and witness.
  •  She engages with Christ, really engages. She stands in direct contrast with Nicodemus in the previous chapter: the respectable Pharisee who came at night and slunk away again at night.
  • She isn’t afraid to stand in the light of the midday sun with Jesus – and then go off and do what we are all called to do – but what we Anglicans are sometimes a little embarrassed about doing – to take that light of Christ into the lives of others.
  • She is the first to hear those famous “I am” words – “I am he”


And let me strike a further blow for women’s lib: look at the water pot in verse 28. What does she do with it when she goes off to evanglise? She leaves it behind.

  •     Leaves behind her symbol of women’s work
  •     her symbol of subservience
  •     Leaves behind her symbol of her place in the world


And then she goes off to do much more important work: the work of bringing people to Christ. She no longer has any need of the water pot.

But the pot has even greater symbolism. Before, she had needed to collect water from the well – but she doesn’t need water from the well any more. As she realises just who Jesus is, and goes off to share that knowledge with others, she has received the living water, the water which will be “a well of water springing up into everlasting life”.

In Christ she had found the living water. Not water like the water she collected daily from the well, nor even water like the water God helped Moses to provide at Rephidim in today’s Old Testament reading, but water that will spring up into everlasting life – true, life giving, living water.  She no longer needs the water pot, no longer needs to seek to have her thirst quenched by the physical, the worldly.

And like her, we too, surely, have left our water pots behind. We too, surely, have found the living water in Christ. We no longer need our water pots; no longer seek to have our thirst quenched by the physical: the materialistic desires, the power struggles, the need to be well regarded; the search for society’s feel-good factors. As professing Christians, we’ve left them all behind.

Or have we? How grounded are we in Christ?

We know in our hearts that the living water that Christ offers us can refresh the parts other waters can’t reach. But how much of it do we drink? A couple of sips?  “Just a small glass for me, thank you?”

Maybe we want to drink more deeply of it, but are not quite sure how to do so. Maybe we’ve got out of the way of drinking deeply from it.

Whether or not she was a bit of a scarlet woman - and the husbands may be symbolic of Samaria’s intermarriage with foreign peoples and their acceptance of false gods – but however we chose to interpret her apparent sexual history, the Samaritan woman has something to teach us.

Here is a woman, who according to some commentators, started off just flirting with Christ.  And then she allowed herself to be drawn in deeper, and got serious. So what did she do and what might it have to say to us this morning to help us drink a little more deeply of the living water?

Firstly, she gave Jesus the space to allow him to draw her in. She properly engaged with him, at a profound level. She didn’t rush off about her business, desperate to get the water back to her home and get on with the chores. She sat with him, allowed him to speak, and she listened to him. She set this time aside for him, and him alone.

Do we take time to drink in the living water that is Christ – perhaps even to soak ourselves in it? Giving God space in our lives is so important.  The Samaritan woman spoke with Jesus, but it was in her active listening that the drinking in of the living water happened. Are we good listeners – do we make space in our prayer lives to listen, to sit quietly before the Lord and just open ourselves to him? “Be still and know that I am God” the Psalmist writes. (Ps 42)

Secondly, the Samaritan woman demonstrates her need for theological enquiry. She knew she needed to know more. Look at her questioning about worship, for instance.  

How good are we on theological enquiry? Unlike her we do not have the Master to learn from first hand. But we can learn from each other. We can discuss, we can read. There’s a wealth of Christian literature, something to suit everyone’s tastes: from the deeply academic writings of our own Archbishop Rowan, to the gently spiritual books of people like the Jesuit Gerry Hughes or the Bishop of Oxford, John Prichard.  I guess if she were around now, the Samaritan woman would have a spiritual book at bedtime on the go.

And thirdly, she allowed herself to be called to do God’s work, to make her own individual contribution to the work of God’s kingdom.  She rushed off to evangelise the neighbours.  That may not be quite our scene. But we all have our God-given gifts which we can use in God’s service.

Our calling may be within the church environment, or it may be at home, or at work or even on the streets. We may be following our calling already, consciously or unconsciously. Or we may not have stopped to think about where it is our calling lies. But having drunk of the living water the Samaritan woman left her water pot to go off and do what she felt called to do.

So… in active listening to Christ, in theological enquiry, in following her calling: here is a woman who knows what the living water is, and who allows it to refresh her innermost parts.
What happened to her subsequently? We don’t know. But she is much more than a woman with an interesting love life or an exemplar of sinfulness. She is a woman who left her water pot behind; she is a model of Christian response. Someone who is worthy of emulation when we are tempted to go back and pick up our own worldly water pots.

Amen.