The gospel reading for tomorrow (Sunday morning) is one of my all-time favourite stories – from John 4, where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.  There are so many themes in here to explore.  You can see how Jesus is both faithful to, and yet not bound by, his own religous tradition; how he keeps his focus on the life-affirming, grand scale vision of God to make people fully human, and doesn’t allow faith to become a reduction of religious rules that fence people in.  You see a Jesus who is willing (or even keen?) to flout the laws of culture and etiquette, maybe to make an important point, or maybe because that’s simply what life demands. Maybe he deliberately sat at the well (where the women go) in order to engage with women; but maybe he just sat down there because he was too tired to walk to town.  You see a Jesus who will talk to a woman who, by rights, he at least should have avoided in order to satisfy cultural norms; but maybe he should even have been afraid of her?  It was always women who went to the well, and this was a well in Samaria.  Jesus was crossing so many cultural boundaries here.  Jews didn’t talk to Samaritans – they were in that hinterland, not quite an "other" faith, but by the estimation of the first-century Palestinian Jew, a corruption of the true faith. It’s not hard to find examples of Christians who can be entirely relaxed and civil in the presence of a completely different faith but let someone cross their path who they find to be a subversive Christian, and their blood begins to boil.  They could chat happily on a plane to a Buddhist, but a Gene Robinson supporter? They’d be anxious that the seats were too narrow and too close to avoid bodily contact.

And not only a Samaritan, but a woman! OMG. Women. Those troublesome creatures who even now create so much bother that the powers that be cannot allow them to take their full place in the human race. (Whatever would happen if we allowed women full emancipation? The sky might fall in, chicken licken. So let’s put off having women in the House of Bishops for another five years or so…) But for Jesus, there was a taboo even engaging in solitary conversation with a woman.

Not only a Samaritan and a woman… but a rather socially dodgy woman. Why on earth was she all on her own at the well at midday? The time for fetching water was in the morning or the evening, when it was cool enough to tolerate the walk. But all the women of the town would be there. This woman, with her colourful domestic arrangements, was not socially acceptable. She went on her own – either because she was pushed out, or because she preferred to avoid the sidelong glances, the defensiveness of other men’s wives, the taunts, the cold stares.

The extent of SHOCK in the way Jesus encountered this woman is partly lost on us because our culture doesn’t find it shocking that a cross-cultural conversation between a man and a woman might take place in the wide open spaces. To catch the shock, we need to climb into their shoes, imagine our way into quite how startling this encounter would have seemed at the time. RagaRambler wrote a praphrase of the whole story, set in modern-day Chicago – I think it’s brilliant. I hope you think he’s taken liberties. I hope it shocks you. It’s supposed to. That’s the whole point of St John’s story. If it doesn’t startle you into a whole new way of seeing things, the point is not coming through.

There’s so much other stuff in John 4 too, on a completely different tack. Where do we worship God? What’s our theology of place – do we need sacred spaces or not? The answer Jesus gives seems to be both yes and no.  And the life that Jesus describes, the life that is fully human, is described in metaphors of spirit and water and food. No separation of physical and spiritual here – the life of God is not about giving up water to drink, but it’s as vital as that.  There’s something here of the kingdom in the sense of the here-and-now of the life of God within us. But there are breaths of eschatology too, the promise of things to come.

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The end of the story sees Jesus sending this outcast, distrusted woman off to be an evangelist. The disciples had gone to town to find food which, in the event, he ended up not eating. But the woman ran there and back in half the time it took them, and brought others back with her to meet Jesus. He never went to the town; he met the outcast, and she did the rest. 

It’s central to the Christian way of life that ministry is not about doing it all yourself, not about carving out a career or getting a writing contract or a preaching circuit.  It’s about developing and releasing the gifts of the whole community, so that we function in interdependent ministry, not in competition.  In my role at the College, I have two people who are in formal ministry training under my supervision, one training for ordination and the other learning the ropes for lay ministry. I give them opportunities to take the lead in prayers, reading, preaching, community events, and so on. It only seems fair while they are cutting their teeth NOT to give them the really complicated stuff to preach on, the Trinity Sunday sermon, or the obscure passages from Revelation or Daniel . So mostly I cover the obscure stuff and give them the real gifts like this one. Can’t say I don’t miss these though…