Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne
Exodus 17.1–7; John 4.4–42
“They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman…”
Elsie Tanner holds court
People of a certain age might remember Elsie Tanner, a character from Coronation Street’s golden age. For those who can’t remember her, let me quote an academic anthropologist who described Elsie Tanner as a “tarty woman” who had the ability to “attract men like bees to honey”. At the same time, she had a heart of gold, helping those down on their luck even when she was barely managing herself. If you’re too young to remember Elsie, a similar figure might be Ophelia, brilliantly played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie Trading Places, a working girl who rescues the wealthy banker played by Dan Aykroyd after he ends up on the streets when his employers destroy his life in a bizarre sociology experiment.
The traditional term for characters like these in fiction is a “tart with a heart”, although Wikipedia tells me this term is “now considered offensive”. This character type exists in the literature of many cultures, including ancient Greek comedy, popular in the Eastern Mediterranean where Jesus and St John the Evangelist lived.
The Samaritan woman from today’s reading from John’s Gospel is clearly such an Elsie Tanner character. She had already been through five husbands and was now living with yet another man. Jesus was a holy man, and holy people weren’t supposed to hang around with disreputable people like that. But Jesus is chatting away, one-to-one, with nobody else present, with this woman known to be of loose morals. This is a scandalous encounter that provides a harvest of theological meaning rich for the picking.
In fact, his followers were surprised, the text tells us, that he was talking to a woman at all! Men and women did interact in Jesus’ time, both in Jewish communities and among the Graeco-Roman cultures they lived among. But there were limits! Men – in respectable society, anyway – were discouraged from having private or extended conversations with women they weren’t related to, and discouraged from being alone with them in public. Such situations, it was believed, brought temptation to the man and suspicion upon both parties.
But that wasn’t the end of Jesus’ trampling on social conventions. He isn’t just chatting to the ancient Holy Land’s Elsie Tanner. He’s chatting to a Samaritan – and we all know what dirty rascals those Samaritans are, don’t we?
Well, if you don’t, let me explain. The Samaritans were the traditional rivals of the Jews in the Holy Land and sometimes they were outright enemies. And they were the most dangerous kind of opponent – they looked and sounded similar to Jews, and their beliefs were similar. They believed in one God, believed they descended from the group Moses led into the Holy Land, and they shared most of the first five books of the Bible with the Jews. But they had important differences, and because they were otherwise so similar and lived in the same country, those differences became magnified out of all proportion. The Jews and the Samaritans saw each other as heretics. If you’ve ever lived in Northern Ireland, you’ll understand how this works, and if you lived there during The Troubles, you became very skilled at looking for subtle cues about whether people who looked and sounded just like us were indeed from your own tribe – or were potentially dangerous outsiders, especially if you were in places where a lot of them lived.
Like us, many of John’s readers won’t have grasped this, as even by the time he wrote this, many of them weren’t from Jewish backgrounds and lived hundreds or even thousands of miles from the Holy Land. So John lets them know explicitly that Jews took nothing to do with Samaritans, and explains that Jesus had to go back through Samaritan country while returning to Galilee from Jerusalem. This story is set up from the start as a journey through hostile terrain.
So here’s Jesus, supposed to be a holy man, talking to a loose woman, in public, and she’s one of those dirty Samaritan heretics… but that’s only the set up. Here’s the really important bit of the story: when she says that she knows that the Messiah is coming, Jesus tells her simply, “I am He”.
This incident takes place early in John’s Gospel, and Jesus doesn’t tell anyone else that He’s the Messiah until He confronts the High Priest at His trial. A few people do work it out along the way, and He either tells them to keep quiet about it or else says nothing to confirm nor deny it. So, this outsider of outsiders is the first to hear that Jesus is the long-awaited Saviour. Then she goes back to her city and leads her people to Him, and these Samaritan heretics become the first people to acknowledge that Jesus Christ is truly the saviour of the world.
There’s still more here. In the Old Testament, meetings at wells were often associated with betrothals to be married—Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Zipporah. So this is a sort of symbolic betrothal of Jesus to the whole human race, not just one nation or tribe; and a betrothal to those who know they’ve often failed, not just to those who think they’ve always kept the rules.
In our first reading, Moses and the people he has led from Egypt have no doubt that they are God’s chosen people. They have escaped slavery thanks to a succession of dramatic miracles. But the journey has turned out to be harder than they expected, and stuck in a barren desert they have started grumbling. At first they grumbled at the lack of food, and God provided them with manna from heaven to eat, and in today’s reading they are complaining about the lack of drinking water. Despite all the miracles they’ve seen, some of them complain that they’d rather still be in Egypt, where at least they knew where food and water were coming from. By God’s grace, Moses provides them with yet another miracle, water in the desert.
Yet pretty soon the chosen people will be back to bad habits, abandoning God entirely to worship a Golden Calf. Yet God never abandons them: they do, eventually, after many difficult moments, reach the Promised Land, despite their constant grumblings and straying from faith.
One choice that faces Christians is whether to be like the Hebrews in the wilderness or like the woman at the well. For we like to kid ourselves that we’re God’s chosen people, the faithful Christian remnant in a godless country and a world falling apart, but we know how often we’ve grumbled and how often we’ve let God down, and how often our faith has faltered even after all that God has shown us through our lives. The Samaritan Woman presents us with a different alternative—to acknowledge that our lives are sometimes total car crashes, yet always trust that God comes to us and refreshes us with living water, not because we deserve it, but because of how great His love is for us.
On one level it doesn’t matter which of those stories we tell. God’s faithfulness to us doesn’t depend on us getting things right.
But it might matter in terms of how we bear fruit for God. One part of this long Gospel reading I haven’t discussed yet is Jesus telling His disciples that the fields are ripe for harvest. I think it’s when we’re honest and admit that Jesus refreshes us with living water even though we have a bit of the Elsie Tanner about us – undercutting the assumption of a sceptical world that Christians have far too high an opinion of ourselves – we’ll find that we reap the richest harvest.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
