On Wells

Many years ago I was a parish priest in the South Yorkshire market town of Penistone. This market town on the edge of the Peak District National Park lay just to the north of Sheffield. Just to the west of Barnsley, the parish covered over 100 square miles. With five churches, the parish was made up largely of the Upper Don Valley, with Pennine hills, a bit of light industry, not far from the coalfields of Barnsley. While the population numbered some 10,000 souls, the parish was made up largely of cattle and sheep. Until the mid-twentieth century, the baptism registers showed that, in a slight detour from convention, baptisms would take place on a Thursday, because that was market day.

Like any rural community, we had our local customs. One of them – a custom which is quite common in Derbyshire, less so in Yorkshire – was the annual well-dressing. Down the hill from St. John’s Church lies St. Mary’s well, next door to the fish and chip shop. Barnsley Council had done it up a few years previously - the well rather than the chip shop - and the tradition of the well dressing was revived, if not invented. Large clay trays are created, and fixed into the clay using a selection of flower petals and seeds, people create a huge collage, a vibrant and colourful picture, which is then placed above the well. Each year, the local schools were involved. With increasing artistry and ingenuity, each of the six primary schools within the parish would submit their own panel. 

Then on the Sunday after Ascension Day, we would have a great procession through the town from the parish church down the hill with a Brass Band, the mayor, the MP and all the local worthies. When we got to the well, there would be crowds of people around. It was the task of the parish priest to bless the well, giving thanks for the gift of water. Then taking a sturdy branch of yew, doused in the horse trough next to the well, the parish priest proceeded to bless the surrounding crowd by drenching them in water. Thirty years ago, this is what passed for entertainment. It was however a great occasion, a wonderful spectacle – but like everything else in Penistone, it did depend on the weather.

My colleague and I took it in turns to perform this ceremony. One year it was raining so hard that when my colleague had blessed and sprinkled the crowd, one of the councillors turned round to my colleague and said: “Ee, Father George, as fast as tha’ were chuckin’ it up,  ‘e were chuckin’ it down.” 

In the Gospel reading from John today, we find ourselves standing by another well, no doubt a place where people were used to congregating and chatting. 

But there are perhaps some significant differences. John records that it was about noon. In other words, it was the hottest part of the day – not a time to be carrying water. And the fact that this Samaritan woman comes at this time, alone, suggests that she has been shunned by the other members of her community.

There is a tremendous playfulness about this encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. And I love this story because it’s a story which challenges some of the assumptions which we so easily make about God. It’s important to remember that this story is about the question, “Where do we encounter God?”

Jesus comes to a Samaritan city called Sychar, and he sits by Jacob’s well, exhausted in the heat of the day. 

A Samaritan woman comes to draw water from the well. And Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.” The Samaritan woman is surprised and when she expresses her surprise, Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

So they start talking about “living water” and then they talk about the place where you should worship God. There follows this rather convoluted theological discussion. With a lot of misunderstanding along the way. Now we know that the Samaritans and the Jews didn’t exactly hit it off, but how do we get from asking someone for a glass of water to questions about worshipping in Jerusalem Where’s the sense in this? What’s the thread of this conversation?

An important clue lies in the Book of Exodus. In chapter 17, the writer records that the people of Israel, who seem to be perpetually lost in the wilderness of Sinai, are thirsty. Moses strikes a rock in the wilderness, and water gushes from the rock to quench the Israelites’ thirst. Now we know that for the Jewish rabbis, this story had an important association with another story from Exodus, when Moses is given the Law by God. Both the Law and the water are gifts from God, gifts which are bestowed to provide for his people. So there is this close association between the Law and water, so close that some of the Rabbis would refer to the Law as “living water.” So references to ‘living water’ usually mean that what is at issue in the conversation is the Law. 

It’s at this point that we can begin to identify the real thread of this conversation. The discussion turns to whether you can encounter God on Mt Gerizim as the Samaritans claim or in Jerusalem as the Jews claim. Jesus says: “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.” Immediately the discussion turns to the identity of Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. So the basic thrust of the conversation is that we encounter the mystery of God, principally, not by reading a book (the Law) or by visiting a particular place (Jerusalem) but by growing in a relationship with a person. God makes himself known to us in the person of Jesus Christ. 

So the characters in our gospel reading today learn to be attentive to Jesus. And yet if we are attentive to the Jesus revealed in this story, we discover something remarkable about him. In the playfulness of this conversation, note that Jesus does not shun the Samaritan woman, as the others do. He does not diminish her humanity. He does not look through her – or ignore her. He does not look away in embarrassment, because she has had five husbands or has been shunned by her neighbours. He doesn’t pretend that she is not there, and he just didn’t happen to notice her. He talks to her. He pays attention to her. He accepts her. More than that, he offers to her the water of life, that abundant spring which wells up into eternal life, the water which refreshes and revives the soul, which frees us to live life to the full. 

And he offers all of this…. to a Samaritan woman, with a dodgy past. Ancient commentators were fascinated by this story, because of the way in which it appeared to break all social conventions. John Chrysostom lavishes praise upon the Samaritan woman, because she joyfully does the work of an evangelist, rousing an entire city to pay attention to Jesus Christ. In a certain sense, she is even superior to the apostles, who left their fishing nets only after being commanded by Jesus; in contrast, she leaves her water jar of her own accord and performs the work of an apostle and evangelist with far more zeal and enthusiasm. A later Byzantine commentator, Theophylact, describes her as ‘an apostle ordained by the faith which had seized her heart. It is a point picked up by St Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on John (Aquinas, Commentary on John, p. 254.). Thomas says that Jesus asks the woman for a drink in this story, because he thirsts for the salvation of human beings on account of his love for them, just as he cries out ‘I thirst’ while hanging on the cross. But very quickly, in this story, we see the fruits of her preaching and her evident joy.

The story perhaps invites us to reflect on the way in which the gospel constantly challenges our assumptions and our prejudices, our desire to limit the extent of God’s love and forgiveness, our willingness to reserve it for ourselves, to keep it from others, to keep it all neat and tidy. 

As human beings, we like God to be neat and tidy. That way, God is predictable and safe and under control. Well, if that’s what you’re after, you’re going to find that you’ll be disappointed, because the God revealed in Jesus will not play along with your desire for control. God’s sovereignty and abundance will always overwhelm our human desire for control. There is a wildness and a playfulness about the divine mystery, which will not be constrained by our conventions - or our prejudices. We learn again and again in our encounter with Jesus Christ that God’s grace is almost breathtaking in its recklessness. And as the encounter with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and the man born blind demonstrate in these Sundays of Lent, God’s grace is not always readily understood. 

But sometimes we glimpse it. And when we do, when we discover the grace and the love of God made known in Jesus, perhaps we may share the mixture of surprise, excitement and consternation of the woman of Samaria: “Come, and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Can this be the Messiah?”