fesity bloody women!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5^th) 2023

 

 READINGS:

 

           

Exodus 17: 1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5: 1-5, 11

John 4: 5-42

 

 

Firstly let it be said that I think it is ambitious at the best of times to expect listeners to get their heads around John’s tightly packed, tightly constructed biblical passages. Each scene is a deep lesson in faith and in life, and some of the longer scenes, like that of our gospel reading today, could sustain several weeks’ unpacking in a university lecture format. I have six minutes. Or so. So for a start let’s park the other readings. They too are worthy of deep digging, but not today.

What is John telling us? To use the interpretive keys favoured by the diocese at the moment, what is weird, what is wonderful, what is a third W that I can’t recall but I’ll call it what is what? 

Or maybe just what is going on, what is Jesus even doing?  John flags this clearly: “Jews do not share things in common with a Samaritan.” No contact, see? Nada. 

This is a pretty fearsome woman – we’ll come back to that in a moment – and she knows that by customary law this is pretty much her well. A self-respecting Jewish man would back off. Not ask for a drink from her billy can out of her territorial well. Certainly a holy man, who may or may not be claiming to be some sort of messiah. Actually a decent self-respecting Messiah should get out of here 

… or she should, maybe? Something has to give. 

But she’s nothing if not stubborn. “Mate,” she would say, if she were Australian; “Bro,” perhaps, if  kiwi. Though that’s a bit more of a bloke thing. “Get your own water. From your own well.”

Irresistible force: meet unstoppable object. In moments Jesus is treating her with the deepest respect. She is worthy of theological argument. They engage, parry, seemingly enjoy. As we think of Afghan women being denied an education, or American women being denied life choices around their own bodies, we find Jesus inviting this woman to present a case on equal terms. And she does.

I suggested she is pretty fearsome. There’s a funny thing, here. Alone, I think, amongst the co-conversationalists of Jesus, this woman hears the claim “I am he.” I am God. 

It’s a reverberating moment though complacency makes us miss it. When this to us nameless woman starts to refer to the expected Messiah he cuts across her dialogue with unstoppable words: “I am he.” And, more than that, in echoing the great self-referencing of the God of the Hebrews, he effectively says, in Yoda terms, “God I am … I am God.” 

There are according to scholars, seven “I am” sayings in John’s gospel account, whereby Jesus of Nazareth claims to be an aspect of God. Bread of Life, Light of the World, Resurrection and Life, and so on. Yet here, in a risqué conversation, alone with, effectively, an enemy woman, he makes the first and forgotten “I Am” claim: “I am Messiah.”

Alone with a stroppy woman. No wonder Christianity majored in silencing women for the best part of twenty-one centuries. We silenced this nameless woman by portraying her as a loose woman, a whore, and a whole heap of other derogatory allusions. Forget that: she is a strong woman, an intellectual, and absolutely nowhere is it suggested she is somehow morally vapid. Married many times in a society where a woman was property like a cattle dog or a used car, this woman has been handed from husband to husband as, basically, breeding stock. And amidst all that she has nurtured a fierce intellect, and dares to challenge on equal grounds a male stranger at a well.

I have a fantasy. We know from the end of Mark that it was women who first dared to tell out the terrifying good news that the tomb was empty, the clutch of death mysteriously defeated. I don’t even know what that means. They did. We know they had stayed with Jesus when the men had fled. Mary, mother of Jesus, a Mary or two more, the woman with the sensuous hair, perhaps that wonderful feisty Syrophoenician woman who dared to argue with Jesus about the crumbs of salvation – perhaps this woman too – were those who gathered silently at the tomb, then fled, terrified, then overjoyed at the resurrection news. And blurted it out against all odds.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think women are perfect. Nor do I think this woman is more important than the Christ. Sorry. But women – most of you are women in case we hadn’t noticed – are no more imperfect than men, and on this day a woman dares to argue with God, as Abram once had, and prevails. 

Weird, wonderful – and the what? The what is a what are we going to do about following in her footsteps, telling out the mysteries of the God who enters every human soul and redeems us with irresistible – (in a good way) – irresistible love?