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…”
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?
