With the nameless woman

Sermon on the Third Sunday of Lent

St Michael’s Church, Camden Town

Exodus 17:1–7; Romans 5:1–11; John 4:5–42

God is might and weakness. God is the cough and the soap. God is here, and God is not here.

+In nomine…

If you find yourself with some time on your hands later this Lent, as well we all might, let me recommend a use for your self-isolating afternoons. After lunch, why not mix a medicinal hot toddy (hot water, whisky, the darkest brown sugar you have, and a generous squeeze of lemon juice; always, I was taught by one of my university tutors, adding the whisky last because by that stage you can’t quite see how much you’re pouring), and then lie back on the sofa to read the Gospel according to St John.

The Gospel of Mark is probably a bit too fevered for our troubled times; the Gospels of Matthew and Luke a little too sweet. The Gospel of John is the gospel for afternoons at home, the gospel for reflection, the gospel for quarantine. Whereas in the other gospels, the scenes can tumble over you, in the Gospel of John, there is space and time. Jesus, the Word of God, is there, loquacious, mystical, candid, exposed. And other people, companions on the way, people like you and me, are there, too — grown-up, fully-formed partakers in this local, universal story of salvation.

The Gospel we heard today is a gleaming example of the Evangelist’s craft. Last week, we heard the previous story in John’s Gospel, when Nicodemus meets Jesus in the dark. Today, we’re in the noon-day sun. Jesus, on his way from Judea to Galilee is passing through Samaria, and he meets a woman by a well. She flirts with him, she heckles him, they trade in some tribal banter, the disciples are suspicious and then jealous of her; and yet, gloriously, amid all of this mess of human emotion, Jesus helps her to see herself clearly, and him clearly; and, in the noonday sun, this woman, this rather loose woman, sees very clearly what cautious, learned Nicodemus struggled to see in the starlight — that here is what salvation means.

And the question, when the whisky kicks in, when the incense wafts over us — the question any time we read, listen to and hear the Gospel is our hearts is — how is God speaking to me here? As the story of my life (as I am now, with all that is happening to me and to my world) slaps against the story I’m hearing about Jesus, what is God telling me here?

Here are three things I heard.

I heard that God is both might and weakness.

“I know that Messiah is coming,” says the woman. “I am he,” says this passing man to her in return. Jesus is not shy here about his identity, about who he is, about his power. He’s not shy about making it clear that, this well is, for this moment, the focal point for the history of salvation, that around this well, for this moment, the whole world turns. “The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” Jesus says. To his disciples: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” Jesus is not coy about proclaiming himself, revealing himself to be, in John’s majestic language at the very beginning of his Gospel, the Word become flesh, the Word that was in the beginning with God, now here among us, at this well, with this woman, full of grace and truth.

But notice also, alongside the might and confidence of Christ, the weakness of the man. There he sits, in the heat of the day, tired out by his journey, hungry, thirsty. “Give me a drink,” he says to her — God’s opening words a request for help, and expression of need. Our God, the Word become flesh, a helpless child in a manger, an abandoned body on a cross, here exhausted and thirsty and needy.

In the weeks that lie ahead of us, we need to be ready to see Christ in weakness, and exhaustion, and in one another’s need. God is mighty; the power of life is deep and enduring; but we encounter God when we help another in their weakness, and when we face up to (and into) our own weakness, our frailty, and our mortality.

God is the cough and God is the soap.

Or, in more theological language, God is prophet and God is priest. These two figures at the well would have been familiar with a religious architecture that required both prophets (the cough) and priests (the soap) — the prophet as the voice of conscience, the voice that points out the error of our ways, the voice that discomforts with its candour; and the priest as the hand of blessing and forgiveness, the hand of comfort and assurance, the hand outstretched to lift us up. Jesus is both of these to the woman — he pricks her conscience about her weaknesses, about the failures of her life, perhaps about her decadence or her carelessness — in her own words, he “tells her everything she has ever done” — and how many of us could cope with that exposure, with that much honesty, without blushing; and yet he also shows her a vision of life restored and reconciled, of sins forgiven, of a soul made whole again, washed cleaned again with living water.

As we reflect on life this Lent, in the light of the seriousness that surrounds us, let us make space for the voice of the prophet who pricks our conscience, asking us to reflect on all in our lives that shames us and breaks us apart, though we try to hide it; and let us be ready to be touched by the forgiveness of God that always yearns to be close to us, and hold us, and makes us whole.

God is here, and God is not here.

The moment of transformation is the Gospel we heard is when Jesus says to the woman, “Believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

The moment of transformation comes when the Word of God made flesh shows her that God is not held captive in this place or that, by these people or those people, by that history or this claim. “God is not even confined to me,” the Word made flesh seems to say.

God in Christ is in Camden as much as he was ever in Samaria, by that well. The Gospel was not hidden in a tomb in Jerusalem or a body in Palestine, but appears to us today in Bread and Wine. And God is not with us today in Bread and Wine, or in this holy place, alone; because God gives water to the thirsty, wherever they are, to all who worship in spirit and in truth — water that wells up to eternal life.

In these coming weeks, when our use of space is likely going to change, when familiar places will become estranged from us, when our patterns of finding God and one another in accustomed ways may well fall apart, we do well to learn, with that nameless woman, one of the first of the apostles, that God and goodness live in the quickened conscience, the honest mind, the opened heart, the surrendered will, and in that selfless adoration [cf William Temple] that we all experienced once, and must now find again.