A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
30th January 2022
John 4.1-42
Last week, for the week of prayer for Christian unity,
I went on a pilgrimage.
Not to Lourdes, or even to Canterbury,
but to the Temple Church not far from here,
with a group from King’s College London.
We had actually hoped to get as far as Westminster Abbey,
but as is often the way with journeys,
things took a bit longer than we had anticipated!
We began in the chapel of Sir Thomas Guy:
the Baptist founder of Guy’s Hospital,
who made his money through the unusual combination
of selling Bibles and investing in the slave trade.
Then, via Southwark Cathedral, we made our way over London Bridge,
and stopped to pray and reflect in a variety of city churches,
before making our way to St Paul’s Cathedral,
and then finishing in the astonishing Temple Church.
Many of the churches we visited I’d been to before,
but one discovery that has stayed with me
was the ruined church of St Dunstan in the East.
Originally established by the Saxons,
it was rebuilt in 950 by St Dunstan,
who became Archbishop of Canterbury;
but then Dunstan’s church was destroyed by the great fire of London,
only to be rebuilt 30 years later by none other than Christopher Wren.
Tragically, Wren’s church was destroyed in the blitz, in 1941,
and after several decades as a derelict ruin
the church was transformed into a picturesque public space in 1967.
I tell you this story of our truncated pilgrimage,
and the history of St Dunstan in the East,
because in many ways, they a metaphor for the point of my sermon this morning:
Which is that things don’t always work out as you intend them to.
Sometimes, you don’t make your intended destination on the pilgrimage of life;
sometimes you build things, only for them to come crashing down around you;
sometimes things don’t work out as you intend them to.
But, and here’s the good news,
within the love of God, such things are not the end of the story.
Let me share a photo with you
that I took when we were at St Dunstan in the East.
This is a fountain in the ruined church,
placed where the altar would have been.
And as we stood around it, on our pilgrimage,
one of the women in the group quoted from John’s gospel.
Those who drink of the water that I will give them
will never be thirsty.
The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water
gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
There was a moment of silence,
and then she said,
‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
And as I thought back over the history of that site,
with its history of rebuilding, ruination, and restoration,
and as I looked at the beauty of its current state,
with the fountain bubbling gently,
with seats for office workers and tourists to rest,
I thought of the woman of Samaria,
to whom Jesus said those words of blessing,
promising the gift of the water of eternal life.
She was certainly someone who knew what it was
for things not to turn out as she had hoped and planned.
The story of her encounter with Jesus beside the well of Jacob,
includes a conversation about her marriages.
It seems that she has been, as they say, ‘unlucky in love’,
having had five marriages,
and now living with someone who is not her husband.
We need to pause here, just for a moment,
and reflect on the way in which preachers have often handled this story.
In the earlier traditions of the church,
the Samaritan woman was celebrated as a witness to Christ;
but in the years following the post-reformation rise of evangelicalism,
with its emphasis on sin and forgiveness,
preachers have tended to cast her as a scarlet woman:
a sexual sinner in need of repentance.
As such she becomes an example
of Jesus associating with prostitutes,
showing that no-one is too sinful, too depraved,
too ‘other’ for Jesus.
And whilst I applaud the sentiment
of Jesus going to the margins and the marginalised,
there is a problem here,
which is that the text offers us no indication at all
that this woman is a sinner.
There is no act of repentance on her part,
and no offering of forgiveness from Jesus.
It seems she has been demonised where no demons reside,
scapegoated for a sin she hasn’t committed,
all in the interest of the proclamation
of a gospel based on sin and repentance.
And I wonder if there are some of us here today
who have been similarly demonised and scapegoated.
Told that we’re sinful, shameful, and marginalised,
because aspects of our personal story or identity
don’t match the dominant conception
of who or what a good Christian looks like.
From ethnicity, to gender, to sexuality;
from economic status, to mental health, to disability;
many people today find themselves cast into the same space
as the Samaritan woman in some interpretations of this story
Those who would perpetuate a gospel of sin and repentance
all too often require others to deny who they are, to change who they are,
in order to fit a narrative that without repentance there is no salvation.
But I don’t think this matches the story
as we encounter it in the gospel of John.
This woman is not sinful, she has no need of repentance,
and those who have made her so
have asked her to carry a shame that is not hers to bear.
In fact, in John’s gospel, sin has nothing to do
with past actions or present indiscretions;
rather, sin is always an indicator of a broken relationship with God,
which the presence of Christ is always seeking to restore.
But there is another side to this too,
which is the desire of some preachers to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman,
to cast her as a hapless but virtuous victim.
And the problem with this, as my friend Meredith Warren puts it,
is that ‘attempting to rehabilitate the Samaritan woman
reinforces normative feminine sexuality’[1]
Just as it is unacceptable to demonise the Samaritan woman,
so it is also unacceptable to try and rescue her
to some imposed definition of ‘normality’.
The truth is, we don’t know why she has been married five times,
although a plausible scenario
is a combination of divorce and widowhood.
It may be that she was unable to have children,
and so was divorced by a series of men, each seeking to secure an heir;
and it may be that her living arrangement with the man who is not her husband,
is the result of the complex arrangements
demanded by Levirate marriage law
following the death of her final husband.
But the truth is that we just don’t know,
and we cannot impose upon her a normality
that her abnormal and unusual situation resists.
Because it wasn’t normal for a woman to find herself in this situation;
which means this is a situation that resists normalising,
every bit as much as it resists condemnation.
And again, there will be those here, and those known to us,
who have been subjected to normalising pressure,
to cast themselves in roles that alleviate the shame
that society would otherwise heap upon them.
There will be those whose personal story defies convention,
who find themselves being ‘rescued’ or ‘rehabilitated’
by the imposition of normalisation narratives that are not theirs to own.
And this can be every bit as damaging
as the tendency to demonization.
What if some people need neither rescuing nor demonising,
neither rehabilitation nor repentance?
What if the Samaritan woman is one of them?
So what’s going on with her?
And why does Jesus raise the subject of her marital status in the first place?
I think the clue is in how she responds.
When she goes out at the end of the story,
into the Samaritan city, to tell what has happened to her,
she simply says to her countrymen,
‘He told me everything I have ever done.’
What convinces her, and her fellow Samaritans, that Jesus is a prophet,
is not that he forgives her, or rescues her:
she doesn’t need forgiving or rescuing.
Rather, he sees her, he knows her.
What she meets in Jesus is someone who meets her as a fellow human, as an equal,
in full knowledge of all the complexity of her story,.
Jesus neither judges nor normalises,
he places no expectations upon her in terms of change or status.
Rather, he offers her a gift,
a new experience of being human,
which he says will well up in her like a stream of living water.
This isn’t Jesus exercising some creepy telepathy, to read her darkest secrets,
a prospect that many today find deeply terrifying;
rather it’s Jesus knowing her fully, seeing her completely - with all that that involves -
and welcoming her, as she is, to be part of his new family of followers.
And this, surely, is the message of good news,
that is symbolised by the metaphor of the water
bubbling up to eternal life.
We’ve already seen water transformed into wine at the wedding of Cana,
and we’ve already heard Nicodemus challenged at night
to be born of both water and the Spirit.
So we already know that water is symbolic in John’s gospel,
that it points to something beyond itself.
And this is what we meet here,
not in the darkness of night,
but in the brightness of the noonday sun.
Water from Jacob’s well might quench a person’s thirst for a while,
but the water of life that Jesus offers,
the gift that fills a person to overflowing,
is a new relationship with God
which fulfils our deepest needs,
not once, not just today, but in an ongoing, life-supplying way.
Samaritans and Jews had been arguing for centuries
about which mountain God dwelt on,
about which high place you should go to, to encounter God.
But the proclamation that Jesus, the Jew, gave to the Samaritan woman,
was that God is no longer to be found on either mountain.
The prologue to John’s gospel
has already proclaimed that the Word has become flesh.
The creative and wise word of God,
is no longer found through words of wisdom, or edicts of the law,
but in the person of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.
God in Jesus is the one who can tell us everything we have ever done,
because in the noonday light of his presence,
all shadows and secrets, all shame insecurity,
are vanished and banished,
to be replaced with the light of life,
the water of eternal life.
And this means that wherever Jesus is, God is.
God is at large in the world, beyond boundaries and borders,
outside of temples and sanctuaries;
taking residence in the hearts and lives
of those who follow the invitation of Jesus,
drawing all humanity into a new relationship with God,
where people are fully known, fully seen, and fully loved.
And so the Samaritan woman tells her friends,
and they too recognise the good news of a new relationship with God.
They come to believe in Jesus
not because they have concurred with statements about him,
but because they have experienced relationship with him.
The point of God becoming human,
the good news of the incarnation,
is that it reveals the deep relationship
that God desires to have with each of us.
Salvation is never about abstract assertion, nor dogmatic declaration,
and it isn’t about some future hope for a better life to come.
Rather, it is about entering into life eternal in the present,
it is about drinking deeply from the water of life today,
it is about experiencing the abundance of life in the here and now.
And so as we conclude our thoughts on this story,
and there is much more that could have been said,
I want to leave us with the words of the unnamed Samaritan woman,
and I want us to hear her challenge to us,
as it was heard by those in the city in Samaria.
Her witness to Jesus is framed as an invitation and a question.
‘Come and see…’, she says.
‘Surely, this cannot be the Christ, can it?’, she asks.
God is not encountered in the certainty of faith,
but in the mystery of a question.
Witnessing is not about offering people statements of certainty,
it is an invitation to a relationship.
Life is complex, life does not always work out as we planned,
but in the complexity and uncertainty of life,
the offer of a new relationship with God,
and the summons to a new way of being,
these are the gifts of the living Christ,
that well up in our lives like a spring of water
gushing up to eternal life. (4.14
And as my friend put it in the church of St Dunstan in the East,
‘Well, who wouldn’t want that for their life?’
[1] Meredith J. C. Warren, Five Husbands: Slut-Shaming the Samaritan Woman, THE BIBLE & CRITICAL THEORY, 2022. https://www.bibleandcriticaltheory.com/issues/vol-17-no-2-fall-winter-2021/vol-17-no-2-2021-five-husbands-slut-shaming-the-samaritan-woman-meredith-j-c-warren/
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