Firstly, my thanks for the very warm welcome we have received since we moved here. It was great to see so many people turn out on Tuesday evening and I look forward to getting to know you all better over the coming months. I have to give a warning now. I have an appalling memory for names - so please don’t take offence if I have to keep asking you to tell me who you are - it takes me a long time for this to penetrate my skull! I remember faces and I remember people, but the labels seem to drop off quickly!

When I used to work in an office, I found that the place of meeting was either the photocopier or the kettle. It might easily also be the bus stop or Sainsbury’s checkout. These are the places where everyone passes by at some time of day and we find ourselves talking to people we would otherwise not meet. These are the wells of our own age. This is where we meet and where a Samaritan woman can quite unexpectedly find herself talking to Jesus (John 4:5-42).

The conversation is quite sparky and by no means deferential. This woman is quite clearly not going to be patronised and not going to stand any nonsense. When Jesus starts talking about living water, she pulls him up by telling him he hasn’t got a bucket, so how can he give her anything.

The bigger surprise comes before this when he talks to her at all. The Jews and Samaritans had an unhealthy disregard for one another - a kind of north/south divide with the southern Jews feeling superior to the northern Samaritans. Some things don’t need any translation to convert across cultures and the centuries. There are those who have not understood our move north and perhaps there will be some distrust of a southerner around who can’t talk properly. I picked up a small dictionary of Yorkshire-English in Waterstone’s the other day to help me with the inevitable local phrases and terms that will need some translation for me! What matters most here is that Jesus takes an ordinary encounter at a Burger King on a long journey, at the office photocopier or around the kettle, at the bus stop or supermarket checkout, and turns it into something that changes this woman’s life for ever.

This is to my mind one of the most effective forms of mission. The meeting is natural and the conversation flows from the mundane to the extra-ordinary, from being thirsty on a hot day to spiritual sustenance. How many times do we find that the conversation at a barbers or hairdressers will be springing off something in the news at the moment? Take your pick. We have a government minister whose name is now becoming rhyming slang for lying. We have the tragedy of yet another rail accident a year to the day of the Selby Rail crash. We have the mind bending ethical questions over genetic cloning in the hope that it will provide clinical treatment for a small boy in this city. The ethics of personal conduct and the stark realisation of human fragility combine and there are no sharper doorways into the heart of the Christian gospel.

Responding to these kinds of issues is Christian mission in its most rawest form. There is no strategy that can prepare us for it or more to the point control it. This does not fit within neat boundaries but it is how questions of real life can call on our faith daily and our faith is either seen to make a difference to the way we respond or it will be regarded as being irrelevant. This is about being living witnesses, people who are so filled with the gospel of Jesus Christ that it is part of the breath of our life, that it shapes our response to whatever comes our way.

When Jesus talked about living water, he was talking about his teaching, about his Spirit so feeding our hearts and minds, our souls, that it colours the character of everything we are and try to become. This is the living water that is to shape us. There is evidence from the Qumran community, the Dead Sea scrolls, that implies the term ‘living water’ was a way of talking about the Law, the teaching and spirituality which shapes the Jewish people. For Jesus to identify himself as the source of our living water he identifies himself as the root of our spirituality, of the way our faith engages with our life. And if our life is truly shaped by the spirit of Jesus, then it will be hope filled, it will be thankful and longing for God’s kingdom. These are the qualities and key themes that will define us.

Meanwhile, the disciples return and, finding Jesus talking to the Samaritan, are surprised. They are surprised that he is talking to a woman let alone a Samaritan woman. There is a hint that at least some of them thought he was chatting her up, that is one possible interpretation of that phrase ‘but no one asked him what he wanted’ (v27), and we see Jesus’ ability to risk scandal, to risk being misunderstood, in order to achieve his mission. He has placed talking to the woman above what people will think of him for doing it. The person comes first and not the spin on how it will look for the photo opportunity or even be distorted by a hostile press. Perhaps that is why the woman goes away so impressed. She has been touched by him far more deeply because the encounter was genuine and deeply personal. Christian ministry always springs best on the back of a genuine encounter than on one set up artificially or where there are other motives at work.

The disciples clearly muscle in on the act because the conversation changes to be with them. If they had any questions, any misgivings, they are answered by Jesus pointing to the approaching villagers, to the white of their clothes as they came out to see for themselves what the woman had told them about. This is the harvest that is ready and approaching, which Jesus refers to. That harvest has been sown by others and we are reminded that anyone’s journey of faith begins long before we meet them over the kettle or at the checkout. There is a natural speed for everyone to find their way to taste the living water from the well and we cannot rush it or make it go any faster than is right. No one conversation will be the last word in Christian mission and no one conversation will be the reason why someone suddenly wants to sink a bucket to see what there is in the well. There is always a lot more in the background and we will be aware of next to none of it at the time!

Finally the villagers when they have seen and heard for themselves believe because they have tasted from the well themselves. No amount of other people’s testimony or shouting can replace each person’s own sinking a bucket into the well so that they taste for themselves the living water - the spirituality and teaching of Jesus which colours and shapes our faith.

The encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well takes us to the heart of Christian mission and our own discipleship. The living water is what defines us and the challenge is to allow that to so shape us that it defines how we respond to whatever comes our way with hope, with thankfulness and with a deep longing for God’s kingdom.

© Ian Black 2002

Home