Reflection by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
Somewhere along our tortuous route to God many Christians, following the mistakes of their Jewish forefathers, came to think that only the good or righteous, the squeaky clean could be acceptable to God. The fact that Israel has NEVER behaved well, and that we Christians are the heirs of an enormous list of depravities, has not deterred us from this misapprehension. The Jesus of the Gospels, and the surviving early Christian letters of Paul and his like, laboured long and hard to disabuse us of this crazy notion, but all to no avail. In Britain, we inheritors of the ‘deserving poor’ as opposed to the ‘undeserving’, and with a long history of imperialistic abuse of those we conquered, rarely if ever shake off this notion that ‘we’ are fine with God but that ‘others’ are not.
Our Reading from Exodus (17:3-7) gives us an early glance at this prevailing problem; Israel, led by Moses, the one called by God to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, finds the people full of revolt and ready to murder him when the going gets tough. Even Moses seems ready to accuse God of deserting him and of putting his own life in danger. Yet God persists, instructing him to lead the people to Sinai/Horeb (his mountain of revelation) and instructs Moses as to how to find water. Saved from death by God however, this is not by any means the only quarrel Israel will have with the divine plan, yet despite this a theme runs through Jewish literature emphasising the love, mercy and forgiveness of God to his chosen. Oh, if only they and we could ever learn.
St John, the ‘Beloved Disciple’, wrote what is almost certainly the last of the four gospels from Ephesus most likely between C 80-90 CE. His is such a different work from the synoptics, though it recounts the same story of Jesus. I suspect it reflects the life of Ephesus, where the young man grew to manhood and acquired his more polished Greek and his understanding of the great city of learning, questioning and discussion which was such a feature of this vibrant pagan place. Certainly Ephesus would have had its Jewish minority, what city in the east did not; but John was able to blend that art of Semitic story telling we have met in the Jesus of the synoptics, with the sophistication of the Greek intellectual world too. John plunges us into details of what was Jesus’ own meeting with the religion of Samaritans, a syncretistic pagan/Jewish faith, the result of their being conquered in the 8th C BCE by the Assyrians, and ending up a mass of imported and Jewish peoples thoroughly despised by Jerusalem. John’s Prologue lays out precisely the meaning and nature of Jesus ministry as the Man from God, whose ‘signs’ point to his identity. Jesus kicks off with the wedding at Cana in Galilee, but rapidly we see Jesus branch out, and in our Reading we find him (Jn 4:5-42) in pagan,, or at very least extremely dubious Samaria, meeting not respectable, worthy souls, but a woman of truly scandalous reputation. Already five husbands down, and now co-habiting (just think how many husbands she had seduced), she is such an outcast that she has to go to the well, albeit one famous in Abrahamic legend, at the hottest part of the day, alone and unprotected, to collect water and lug the amphora back home. And of course she meets Jesus, tired and thirsty, who needs a drink. She in her turn is amazed at his request, for she would have heard his accent and known he was a Jew from Galilee. What she does know about however is men! So she is very wary if not defensive at his attempts to engage her in conversation. Jesus and the woman engage in a rather elliptical conversation, he immediately via the spiritual, she firmly with the prosaic, ‘You have no bucket.’ Yet intrigued she pushes him over his offer of ‘living water’. Was she merely thinking of the fresh-flowing at the bottom of the well? And she ribs him over his ability to secure it, perhaps he’s greater than Jacob! Jesus perseveres with the ‘water’ metaphor, and she continually worn down by this task, relents and admits she would love this ‘living water’ which would solve her daily struggle for life. Jesus shifts tack, ‘Go and get your husband’; (no doubt having counted the number of the dowry rings in her nose) and really gets her attention, so that she can move on by asking deeper questions about the faith and places of worship. Jesus then rejects the idea of any one site being ‘the’ place, as he expects the worship of God to be universal, something not stuck in materiality, but in our total openness to God wherever and whoever we are. The rejection of Judaism with its law should not escape us here.
At this point in their conversation, where she speaks of the Messiah, Jesus reveals his identity to her! An outcast even among pagans, a scandal to her city, friendless and exhausted. What does she do? She abandons her precious water amphora and runs to the city, persuaded of his significance to share the Good News with its citizens. Undaunted by his awareness of her sinful life, she is transformed by his presence and his grace: ‘Come and see a man who has told me everything I ever did; I wonder if he is the Christ?’ Through her belief and action her city comes to Christ.
Previously in John we have had the Prologue, the vision of the Baptist and the call of some of the disciples, just what we might expect as they in some shape or form ticked the ‘revelation boxes’; but here with this woman of truly appalling reputation we find the first example of the way in which Jesus will work to redeem a fallen world. Cana had its miracle in which Jesus revealed his glory and the disciples believed; here in dubious Samaria a woman way beyond hope of inclusion in society is made the catalyst for the revelation of God in human form. And the people of Sychar believe. Significantly, this scene in John follows that where Jesus ‘cleanses’ the Temple in Jerusalem, a savage attack in which he makes clear that the Court of the Gentiles, where non-Jews should have been welcomed to pray, was not to be perverted by the profit hungry Jewish authorities. It was a devastating attack on what Temple Judaism had become. Surely this action would have scandalised the authorities and placed Jesus way beyond the pale too. Already, and inclusively of pagans and the syncretistic, Jesus claims ‘The hour’, God’s inbreaking in Jesus, ‘Will come-in fact it is here already-when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.’
In Romans (5:1-2.5-8) written some twenty years before John’s Gospel, we find Paul insisting on precisely this message of salvation by grace and the capacity we are given through faith to link ourselves to God, something which Paul emphasises was the grounding we first met in Abraham, the founder of Judaism. ‘Through our Lord Jesus Christ by faith we are judged righteous and at peace with God, since it is by faith and through Jesus that we have entered this state of grace in which we can boast about looking forward to God’s glory.’ What more could possibly be said?
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