A sermon on John 4:5-42 & Romans 5:1-11 by Nathan Nettleton

I think it was Carlyle Marney who once said that, unlike us, God knows the difference between adjectives and nouns. We often make the mistake of using qualifying adjectives as nouns, so instead of talking of a black person, we just call them ‘a black’, or instead talking of a gay person, we just say ‘a gay’, or instead of talking of geeky people, we just call them geeks. In the process, we reduce others to a single attribute and make them less than human beings. If we no longer see people as fully people, it is no longer so obvious to us that we should be treating them with dignity and respect. We too easily forget that the other is a person, created in the image of God.

Perhaps even more damaging is when the labelled people begin to think of themselves only in terms of the labels that have been put on them. When people reduce themselves, or accept the reduction of themselves to the embodiment of a label, it cripples and diminishes and limits them. There used to be a bloke in this congregation whose definition of himself was “a no-hoper”. Now I’m betting that he wasn’t the first person to use that description of him, to put that label on him, but once he adopted it for himself, once he accepted it, it became increasingly true. Once accepted, it became self-fulfilling, and he went about living down to it.

The other thing about such labels, is that they become boundary lines that keep us apart. It seems to be a deeply seated human characteristic that we are suspicious of those who are unlike us, and we choose to associate as much as possible only with those who are “our kind”. And so people who are labelled as “other” are pushed aside and kept at arms length. And the very process of labelling makes it easier for us to do this. If you are the one who is labelled as somehow being an ‘other’, an undesirable, and if you’ve taken on those labels for yourself and so see yourself as inadequate, undesirable, and unacceptable, then you probably find yourself in a very lonely place. Others don’t seem to what to connect with you and you don’t see yourself as worth connecting with either, so you hide yourself away, cut off and isolated and lonely; hungering and thirsting for contact, but unable to cross the lines.

The woman who Jesus met at Jacob’s well in the Samaritan city of Sychar appears to have been just such a lonely labelled woman. Even the time of the encounter tells us that. She is coming out for water at noon. Everyone else comes out for the day’s water in the early morning, and it was quite a social event. You only come at noon if you want to avoid meeting anybody else there. And when she unexpectedly runs into Jesus there, and he proves to be talkative, we very quickly hear her list of labels, of reasons why she has come to accept that she is unacceptable, an outcast. She is a woman, and in that culture, women are second class citizens and men do not talk to women. She is a Samaritan, and the Samaritans have been written off by the Jews as heretics and cut off from access to the temple in Jerusalem, and Jews do not talk to Samaritans. And she has had five failed marriages. The world said goodbye to Elizabeth Taylor this week, a woman who I think had eight marriages. I’ve sometimes heard people refer to her as an expert on marriage because she’d had eight of them, but of course we all recognise that that doesn’t make her an expert on marriage; on weddings perhaps, but certainly not on marriage. People who keep getting married and divorced are people who are unable to sustain intimate relationships. They may be skilled in attracting love, but they are unable to make it work for any length of time. I don’t know if the woman at the well had half the beauty and glamour of Elizabeth Taylor, but they appear to have been similarly lonely and desperate for affection and love but unable to cope with it if it came near. Elizabeth Taylor apparently said that she didn’t like the way she looked or the way she spoke or the way she acted. She didn’t really like anything much about herself. And when you don’t like anything much about yourself, you will probably reject and push away anyone who does seem to like those things you hate in yourself. The woman at the well appears to have been a very lonely woman, labelled and shunned by those of her town, sneaking around trying to avoid everyone, and labelling herself with the same dismissive labels that others put on her.

There is a metaphor used in the reading for this desperate loneliness. It is the image of being parched and desperately thirsty. A craving thirst for acceptance and intimacy. We heard the image in the first reading too, as the people of Israel cry out for water in the desert, and the metaphor is developed by Jesus with his contrast between the water that only fleetingly satisfies, and living water that quenches our deepest thirsts and satisfies forever. Many of the things for which lonely people grasp to try to quench their thirst are things which provide very little satisfaction. And of course, there are whole industries built up around keeping it that way. If you can offer the promise of satisfaction in a way that looks convincing but which leaves the thirst still craving more, then you can keep selling the same product over and over again. The gambling industry is an obvious example, and perhaps more closely related to the thirst for intimacy is the pornography industry. It is one of the biggest money spinners on the planet, and its whole mode of operation is to turn the visual appearance of intimacy into a saleable product which will keep people coming back for more, still unsatisfied. And pornography does that by feeding people images that undermine their ability to enjoy real meaningful sexual relationships. We have a whole generation of young people, young men in particular, whose ability to enter and enjoy proper sexually intimate relationships is being deliberately destroyed by an industry that is making massive profits out of keeping them lonely and unsatisfied and with an unquenchable thirst. It is like an industry comes along and conceals the source of fresh living water and sells us bottled water instead, slightly salted so that it increases our thirst and keeps us desperate for more.

The way Jesus behaved with the woman at the well was a shock to everyone. The woman expresses her surprise. The disciples express their shock. And the people of the town are no doubt initially scandalised too. Jesus is breaking all the rules and crossing all the boundaries. Jesus is treating this woman as an equal, as someone worth talking to and relating to, when all the social expectations that the rest of them abide by say that she should be kept where she belongs — on the margins, in the shadows, and out of polite company. She’s a scandal and a disgrace, and she should be treated accordingly. But Jesus couldn’t care less about such niceties. He doesn’t see a scandal and a disgrace, but a person, created in the image of God, and desperately in need of the living water of love and mercy and grace and intimate communion.

The townspeople no doubt think she should mend her ways and clean up her act and repair her reputation before they would be considering rethinking their attitude to her, but that’s not Jesus’ way. The Apostle Paul put it very clearly in our other reading: “While we still were sinners Christ died for us. … while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” God does not demand that we make the first move and earn an offer of renewed relationship. God takes the initiative and simply offers it to us — a gift of living water offered to us while we are still treating God as an enemy. Without that gift, we will stay locked behind our labels, unable to take the risks that intimacy and friendship require. But God comes to us, in Jesus, and finds us where we are hiding, and simply offers us the gift of himself, and through the gift of himself, the gift of a new family, a new community, and new network of relationships that are not based on the old labels, but on our common identity as those who have found forgiveness and new life in the living water of Christ’s love.

Shortly we will be gathered around this table where Christ offers himself to us again in bread and wine and water. This story we have heard comes from John’s gospel, the same one that provides the images that the Church has used in using both wine and water at the table. Jesus offers himself as the source of living water, and when he hangs on the cross, a soldier stabs him in the side with a spear, and John says that water and blood poured from the wound. It is here at this table that Jesus continues to offer himself to us as living water, as the true drink that can quench out thirst so that we will never cry out in thirst again. It is here that Jesus invites us into the communion of his own love and of the fledgling love of his stumbling community so that we might find ourselves beloved and set free to be the people we were created to be. Living water, pouring forth for the healing of every individual and for the healing of all the world.