Sermon: Mother Laura Burgess, Lent 3 2008
The Woman at the Well
John 4.5-15, 19-26, 39-42
A group of friends and I have decided to try to go and see every play the National Theatre puts on – on the basis that you can buy a ticket for about the same price as a couple of gin and tonics and the theatre is much better for you. It’s a false economy of course because we usually go to the pub afterwards… But it does mean we get to see productions we wouldn’t otherwise come across.
That’s how we got to see the rather extraordinary play on at the moment. ‘The hour we knew nothing of each other’ is advertised as ’27 actors, 450 characters, no dialogue’. The audience become people watchers as on stage the actors fill the stage with the drama of an everyday street – there’s no dialogue, no thread, no story, no beginning, no middle, and no end. I’d like to say that I agreed with the reviewer who talked about ‘the juxtaposition of the mythic and the diurnal’, but to be honest, for most of the time I really had no idea what was going on. But then that’s about the same as anytime you’re sitting watching the world go by.
The playwright was inspired to write this play as he was sitting in a square in Trieste for an afternoon people watching. In an interview he said this “None of the people milling on the square knew anything of each other - hence the title. But we, the onlookers see them as sculptures who sculpt each other through what goes on before and after. Only through what comes after does that which has gone on before gain contours; and what went on before sculpts what is to come.”
We watch other people and imagine their lives, of which we know nothing, we encounter people daily in the shop, or on the bus, on the tube, with whom we’ll only have very fleeting encounters. People who walk on and off the stage of our lives – as we do theirs. In an idle moment we might pause and ponder about who they are based on their clothes, the way they wear their hair, their posture, and all the other cultural reference points we’ve built up through our lives. Sometimes we may have positive reactions to them, sometimes very negative to those who don’t fit into what we perceive as our cultural norms. We make judgements on people in just a few seconds of seeing them and these judgements usually say more about us than them.
It’s easy to imagine the people in today’s gospel passage. It’s written in stylised form, and is full of the wonderful language of storytelling. Jesus – hot and tired is sitting down, hungry, waiting for his disciples to return from getting some food, and thirsty, when the woman approaches him. The woman, surprised to be spoken to, is just trying to get on with the daily task of life and is confronted by a man speaking riddles. She would have assumed that he, a Jew, would not talk to her, a Samaritan and not only a Samaritan, but female, making her permanently unclean – all her assumptions about him were overturned when he says to her ‘Give me a drink’.
As always when reading the Bible it is important to delve through the layers of meaning in this story. Without the cultural reference points the first readers of the Johannine Community would have picked up on immediately, it appears on a basic level to be Jesus revealing himself as the Christ and bringing outsiders, in this case, Samaritans, to faith in him but the Well, the Woman and the Water are all parts of rich traditions of faith, law and expectation of the community for which this gospel was written.
The well is a place in the Old Testament where marriages were made – we read in Genesis 29 that Jacob and Rachel met at the well. The specific mention of Jesus meeting the woman at this well Jacob’s well, from whom the Samaritans believed themselves to be descended would have underlined the understanding that Jesus was transgressing the acceptable boundaries of race and culture and was calling the Samaritans to follow him, to forge a ‘marriage’ a fruitful relationship between God and humanity.
Although the woman at the well is often painted as sinful, of loose morals in order to make her transformation by Jesus even more remarkable, this woman with five husbands (we hear about them in some of the verses omitted from the gospel reading this morning) is thought to represent the Samaritans as a whole – the five nations of Samaria each had a god of their own, so in Jesus’ word is an invitation to all Samaritans to turn from their Gods and turn to him.
The Samaritans were looking for a messiah, but the messiah they were looking for was someone who would be their true teacher. They were very strong on the Wisdom tradition and the third aspect of the passage the first readers of John’s gospel would have understood is the concept of the living water. Living water was equated with divine wisdom, therefore Jesus words are highlighted in this passage as divine insight. This is what Jesus is offering; real water nourishes, refreshes and sustains the body, living water nourishes, refreshes and sustains the soul.
In this passage we encounter the past, the present and the future. John’s gospel points its readers back to Jacob, around to the call of Christ to all people, and forward to Jesus’ act of redemption on the cross. Jesus is revealed as wisdom, knowledge and understanding, as our redeemer.
If someone said to you ‘I know everything you have ever done’, how would you feel? Would your mind go to all your achievements? Or would it list your failures, your faults, your flaws? I certainly know that if someone were to say that to me I’d probably be completely mortified. What is extraordinary about the reaction of the woman at the well is that the woman did not feel burdened by Jesus’ knowledge of her, but instead felt freedom, freedom to tell her community about this teacher she’d met at the well, and freedom to follow Christ in her own affirmation of him as messiah.
In talking to people I often feel that people have litanies of failure or regret, where there is an internal almost ritual recounting to themselves of their own faults. These litanies are recounted each day, becoming more and more ingrained. I’m not good enough, I’m not attractive enough, I’m not intelligent enough, I’m not confident enough – whatever the particular concern is.
Christ offers us freedom and calls us to fullness of life. The play at the National is called ‘The hour we knew nothing of each other’. We often know very little of others, and, to be frank, precious little of ourselves. If we strive for honest self-acceptance, and Lent, the season of self examination is a very appropriate time to do this, and are clear of how we might change our own damaging behaviours, a great burden is lifted from us.
If we acknowledge that the way we see others is framed by our own sensitivities we will feel a greater acceptance of ourselves, see the depth in other people and engage with world with sensitivity.
If we break out from negative cycles of thought about ourselves and others and rejoice in freedom offered by God through Christ, we will know and feel the acceptance to say that God knows everything we have ever done, and for that not to be burdensome but freeing; to enable us to drink deep of the living water offered to us in abundance.
Mother Laura Burgess is a Minor Canon of St Paul's Cathdral