Early in the 1600s, in Cambridge, there was a famous horse dealer by the name of Thomas Hobson. He kept a stable and made his fortune by hiring out horses to the city’s students. What he is chiefly remembered for is the rule by which he ran his business: once you had paid your money you were led to the stable where, in theory, there was a large selection of horses for you to choose from. However Thomas Hobson’s rule was this: when you entered you had to take whichever horse that was closest to the stable door. Hence the expression Hobson’s choice has passed into the English language: it refers to a situation where although it may seem that a choice is being offered, in actual fact you have no choice at all.

In this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy I can’t help feeling that the people of Israel are being offered something of a Hobson’s choice. Which do you want, asks Moses: life or death? Which do you choose: prosperity or adversity? Well, life, of course! And while you’re about it, yes, why not throw in the prosperity. Who isn’t going to sign up for the good life in the Promised Land? And what did you say it’ll cost? We have to obey the Ten Commandments? That sounds easy enough. And all those other rules in the fine print? Sure, but I’ll read them later… Only we are now in the last chapter of the book of Deuteronomy – chapter 30 – and most of the previous 29 chapters have consisted of rules in fine print.

By contrast, Jesus’s strategy in today’s gospel seems to be just the opposite: it’s almost as if he is deliberately putting people off from following him. ‘So’ – he seems to be saying – ‘you think you want to follow me? You like the look of what you’ve seen? You’ve heard rumours that I can heal the sick? And you like the stories I’ve been telling? Well, think very carefully my friend: this is going to be a whole heap more demanding than you ever imagined. Are you really prepared to pay the price?’

Then we have those terrible words, perhaps the most off-putting that Jesus ever uttered: ‘Unless you hate your father and mother, your spouse and children, your brothers and sisters, even your own life, you cannot be my disciple.’ Where in the gospel, I wonder, does Jesus say anything more alarming, more puzzling, or – quite frankly – more unacceptable than that?

Approaching this verse any preacher is bound to feel a bit like a bomb disposal expert – you know the ones, the lone soldier dressed in something that looks like a cross between deep-sea diver suit and a space suit – who has to approach a suspicious package in the middle of an empty square.

I am going to try and defuse this verse in three steps. First of all, remember Our Lord’s fondness for exaggeration. “If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out” – he likes to use a vivid image, even a violent one, to make his point. And that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s just exaggerating to make a point. Secondly, we should look again at context. Jesus, you remember, is on his long, wandering trek towards Jerusalem. He is something of a crowd-puller. In the previous verse we read: ‘Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them,’ etc. etc. – so these words are for entertainment seekers, the merely curious, the once a year attenders of a Christmas carol service. And he’s saying to them ‘Look guys, there’s a lot more to me than today’s spectacle – are you sure you really want to be involved? Have you considered what effect it’s going to have on your life if you take me seriously?’ If your answer’s ‘no’, or even just a ‘maybe’, then why not just go home?

But by the same token, if we do call ourselves Christian, if we count ourselves as followers of Christ, our discipleship should be challenging us, squeezing us, and changing us.

And the third step is this: much has changed in the translation. Jesus spoke in Aramaic: and the word which reaches us in the English translation as ‘hate’ was probably much closer to ‘turn away from’ or ‘detach from’: ‘unless you turn away from your family, unless you stand back from your own life…’ This is already beginning to sound a lot more palatable. St Luke, writing in Greek, was forced to use of stronger verb; subsequent translations into English then turned with volume right up, so that ‘hate’ replaces the original ‘turn away from’. Much has been added, rather than lost, in translation.

Nonetheless it’s still a high price we are being asked to pay. Nor is this the whole cost: As well as putting Jesus before those who are most dear to us, to deny our own interests, we must also ‘carry the cross’; we must also ‘give up all our possessions’.

It turns out that the creature we’re being offered for our journey, the one just inside the stable door, is not a horse at all – it’s a much more fearsome beast. Are you sure you want to ride it? It looks more like a lion! Are you sure you want to set out for Jerusalem on that?

Surely, the answer for many of us is no!

There comes a point where the demands that the gospel makes, and which Jesus makes on our lives, seem overwhelming, impossible to meet. So are we allowed to say no?

Indeed, how many of us, at some stage in our lives, have said no? I did: at the age of 24 I left the church, and I stayed away until 10 years ago.

And how many of us are still saying no, in some corner of ourselves, to something that Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, is asking us to do, or to be, or to become?

Well that’s a lot of questions, and my prayer for us is that we are asking them of ourselves. Better still, I hope that you have someone you can share your answers with.

Ultimately though, rather than calculating whether we are in or out, whether we’ve got what it takes to be his disciple, or whether we can cope with the most challenging of his teachings, we just need to stay close and keep our eyes open:

Think, for example, of the rich young man who wanted to follow Jesus but went away when Jesus asked him to give away his wealth. Think of the look of sadness in Jesus’s eyes.

Think of all those whom Jesus cured, and sent away, commanding them to tell no one about him.

Think of Legion, released from a thousand demons, begging to be allowed to follow Jesus, and Jesus telling him to go home.

Or think of the disciples, who indeed gave up everything to follow Jesus for three years, but who were then all fast asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when he most needed them.

In remembering his words, his actions, even, at times, the expression on his face, we find that we too are in a relationship with Jesus. Jesus has a different relationship with each of us; God has different plans for all of us. If we follow, we will fail. If we fail, and we will be offered forgiveness. This is the grace and love of God. Amen.

Good morning! I’d like to begin by asking a question – not a rhetorical question, but one to which I hope you can give me some real answers. And to give you time to think of how you are going to respond I’d like to tell you a story.

So first the question, and then the story.

What is the difference between a journey and a mission? Don’t answer me yet! But I hope you’ll have some answers for me later on: How is a mission different from a journey?

The story I want to tell you is one of Graham Greene’s. It comes somewhere in the middle of his delightful comic novel ‘Travels with My Aunt’. That’s a book I read very many years ago and this particular story is one that has always stayed with me.  

An unmarried butcher becomes very very rich. He has worked extremely hard all his life and when he finally retires it occurs to him that the secret of a long and happy life is travel. As he has no attachments, he decides that he’s going to set out on a journey around the world – just himself and his manservant.

He starts off in France, then moves on to Italy. However he only gets as far as Venice when disaster strikes. He has a stroke and remains paralysed. It looks as though his travel plans are at an end. However, he doesn’t give up; instead, he buys himself a huge ramshackle villa in the Veneto and moves in. This villa has exactly 52 bedrooms, and at the end of each week his manservant packs up his things and moves the still wealthy but now immobilised traveller to a different room – and thereafter he continues to journey whilst never leaving this one house.

So what has this story, the story of Graham Greene’s wealthy but paralysed traveller, to do with today’s gospel reading? At least two things, I would suggest: first, they are both stories about journeys within journeys; and secondly, they are both stories about journeys that don’t seem to go anywhere. That are oddly directionless.

First, then, journeys within journeys. The wealthy butcher wanted to travel the world: instead he is confined to a single palazzo and continues to travel within its confines. Last week we heard how Jesus begins his journey towards Jerusalem. Chapter 9 verse 51 reads ‘when the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ We will be accompanying Jesus on this journey, Sunday by Sunday, over the coming weeks. This week, however, we have another journey, the story of the Seventy Others who Jesus sends out ahead of him. We’ll say more about them in a minute. For now I want to look at Jesus’s own journey to Jerusalem. He doesn’t get there for another ten chapters – until chapter 19 verse 28, actually, which in our lectionary comes somewhere in early November – these 10 chapters, which we will be listening to all through the summer and through much of the autumn, make up the longest section of Luke’s gospel. Sometimes, though, it is such a meandering journey, so full of digressions, of meals and table talk, of teaching, and parables, that it’s easy to forget that we are on a journey at all.

Yet later in this same chapter, which we will hear in only a fortnight’s time, Jesus visits Mary and Martha; and they live in Bethany, which is just a few miles outside Jerusalem; but immediately after that he is back in Galilee again, and so it goes on. If you plot Jesus’s journey on a map, it’s hard to see it as a journey towards Jerusalem at all. Like the butcher’s journey from week to week through his villa, the journey to Jerusalem looks peculiarly directionless. But if this journey is not geographical, what kind of journey is it? Incidentally, the journey towards Jerusalem section of Luke’s gospel, from chapter 9 to 19, consists almost entirely of material which is either unique to this gospel, or which is shared only with Matthew. So in a sense, what we have is an narrative device for organising his material, rather than a real journey. Perhaps its purpose is to prepare the disciples, and ourselves – who are also disciples – for Jerusalem, and for what will happen to Jesus when he gets there. In the meantime though, we seem to be in something of a villa in the Veneto.

Journeys, of course, make for wonderful metaphors. Incidentally, it was only when I was preparing to speak to you today that I realised how much the journey of my life resembled the story of Graham Greens’s butcher. When I was in my twenties I became an EFL teacher – a teacher of English as a foreign language – largely because I wanted to travel the world. And for a few years I did do: however, for most of the last 30 years I’ve actually only been travelling no further than the commute between Milan and Pavia!

Indeed, for all of us, there are times when life’s journey looks more like the slow progress around a ramshackle villa in the Veneto than ‘Around the World in Eighty Days.’ But that is God’s time and we must trust it. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. You only have to look at the map to see that if they had marched up the coast they could have gone from Egypt to Canaan in a matter of months, even with all their tents and sheep, and cooking pots and children. But God’s travel plans are not our travel plans, and we must trust that the journey of our lives is in God’s hands. Indeed, we must place the journey of our lives in God’s hands.

Travel is often seen as an adventure and it can indeed give us a sense of being alive. But journeys are not always and only exciting: they can also be boring and exhausting. Some of us dream of a job that brings with it the glamour of international travel; all too often, however, such jobs entail endless queues in airports, lonely evenings in faceless hotel rooms, and no chance to see the sights as the taxi whisks us back to the departure lounge. And finally, as Jesus reminds the seventy who he sends out, journeys can be dangerous: ‘See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.’

And that brings us back to the story within the story of today’s gospel. The story of the seventy who are sent out. It also brings us to the moment when I am going to ask for your answers to my question: what is the difference between a journey and a mission?

Acknowledge answers.

So there seem to be two essential ingredients to a mission. On a mission you have something to do. A person with a mission is person with a purpose. And someone, or something gives you that sense of purpose: you can’t just start a mission on a whim.

The seventy have been sent on a mission: Jesus sends them out in pairs ‘to every town and place where Jesus himself intends to go’. Whatever house they enter, they are to bring peace to that house. What’s more, they are to remain in those houses. They are to tell everyone, even those that reject them, that the kingdom of God has come near.

However, the question is, given the wandering journey that Luke’s Jesus is on, whether the 70 are being sent to prepare the way for our Lord in the same way, when Jesus finally enters Jerusalem, in which Peter and John are sent to prepare the upper room, or whether we are to understand the sending out of the 70 in a more metaphorical fashion. The realists will point out that the 70 returned, and what’s more they return with joy and enthusiasm: ‘Lord in your name even the Demons submitted to us’. Those who favour a more metaphorical reading will point to the literary construct of Jesus’s journey itself; there is also the absence of any concrete details as to where the appointed 70 went. Then there is the number 70 itself, which in the Book of Genesis is given as the number of the nations. All of the descendants of Noah are listed in Genesis chapter 10 and we are told that ‘from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood’. Jesus is not just concerned with his own travel arrangements as he travels to Jerusalem, but he is sending out missionaries to spread his gospel to all the nations of the earth.

The solution, surely, is not an either/or, it is a both/and. As with so much of the gospel story, what happened then, and there, is to be understood as what is happening everywhere, at all time, and that includes what is happening to us, here and now.

So what of the destination of this rather meandering talk I’ve led you on today? Simply this. If you are a Christian your life is never merely a journey; we have all been sent on a mission. If you need clarification as to what your mission is look again at today’s gospel: there are your instructions. Alternatively, you could also look at the words of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. Today we heard this: ‘So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith’. Incidentally, I would like to draw your attention to one word in Paul’s writing, a word which is central to Paul’s teaching: and that’s the word ‘faith’.

The Greek word pistis has a much wider meaning that the English word faith: pistis means both faith and faithfulness; trust and trustworthiness – it’s a two-way street, whereas the English word faith is something of a one-way street. So part of our mission is not just to trust in God but to be trustworthy servants of God. We are called both to rely on God, but also to be reliable servants of God.

And just as the 70 who were sent out return to Jesus in joy, so we return to his table week by week, to celebrate his presence with us and to receive further instruction for the mission ahead. Perhaps that reminds us of the manservant who comes at the beginning of each week to move his master to another room in the villa. Or perhaps you will think of the way John Pritchard, the former Bishop of Oxford, used to conclude Holy Communion with these words: ‘The Worship has ended. Now let the service begin.’ 

Amen.

Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes Lord, you know I do.
Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes Lord you know I do.
Simon, son of John do you love me?
This time Peter is hurt. ‘Lord you know everything – you know that I love you.’

We need to read Scripture with three sets of eyes.
We need to listen to Bible stories with three sets of ears.
We, too, need to listen to the Lord until it hurts.

The first set of ears, and eyes, are those of a child. Children love stories; they can listen to the same story over and over again, mesmerised.
The child in me loves this story: the risen Lord cooking kippers on a beach. We are by the Lake of Galilee, and seven of his disciples have been out all night fishing.
Kippers? I hear you mutter: there were no kippers…
I’ll come to that in a minute.

It’s first light on the Sea of Galilee. You can hear the seabirds mew and call and cackle overhead. Listen to the waves slapping against the side of the boat. Although it is still only spring it is a warm night, for the fishermen have stripped off into – well, really next to nothing. It’s first light, and the sun glints of the choppy waters. First light, and there’s a plume of smoke on the beach, a small fire, and the shadowy figure of a man huddled over it. First light, and a glorious smell of grilled fish comes wafting over the waters. Or perhaps they didn’t find it so glorious after all: the seven disciples have been out all night and they’re hungry. The grilled fish reminds them of the fish they haven’t been able to catch.

Then a voice calls out: ‘So lads, you haven’t caught anything tonight, have you?’ It’s the man on the beach. He tells them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat and they haul up the biggest catch they’ve ever seen – 153 large fish – and somehow the net doesn’t break. At that moment John, the beloved disciple, recognises who this man is. No wonder the child in us loves this story! ‘It’s Jesus,’ he whispers to Peter. And Peter, goes off on one, as he always does: it pulls on some clothes, then takes a running jump into the lake.

Okay let’s stop there. It’s time to look at this story with another set of eyes – time to listen to this story with the ears of a grown-up. First of all, what was all that nonsense about kippers? And why 153 fish? Who’s counting? What’s more, the adult in us is bewildered, even perhaps annoyed, by Peter’s buffoonery. Who pulls on clothes before they jump into the sea? And what was Peter trying to do? Was he swimming towards Jesus, in his eagerness to reach his risen master? Or was he expecting to walk upon the water, as he tried to do once before? Some have even suggested that he was trying to swim away from Jesus, so ashamed was he for having denied any aquaintance with him on the night of his trial….

Unlike the child in us, the adult in us is sceptical, and has lots of questions. To bring to mind another post-resurrection story, the adult, like Thomas, isn’t going to believe a word of this – not until he has touched Jesus’s flesh with his own hands.

Of course, adult eyes can be very useful when we are reading scripture. They will point out that this story, of Jesus instructing the disappointed fisherman to cast their nets one last time, is uncannily similar to the one told by St Luke, though there it occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry, and here in St John’s gospel, it is left to the very end. Adult ears might hear the echoes of the feeding of the five thousand, which is another story of a child and his fish. Adult eyes are going to notice that Jesus has begun grilling His fish long before the disciples even catch theirs, and he’s going to wonder where he got them from. And that’s when the child pipes up and says, ‘Maybe he bought some kippers!’

Yet neither the child’s ears, nor the adult’s ears are enough. We need to listen to these stories with a third set of ears.

But let’s stay with this story a little longer. After they’ve finished their breakfast, Jesus takes Peter aside for the little chat. You can imagine our Lord putting his arm around Peter and the two of them walking along the beach out of earshot of the other disciples. And now our Lord’s question, asked three times: Simon, son of John do you love me?
What is going on here? Certainly, we hear in Peter’s affirmation, his yes Lord you know I do, an echo of Peter’s three denials: ‘Jesus? I tell you, I do not know the man’. That was when? Just a few weeks ago? And where was it? In crowded, crazy Jerusalem, with its political intrigue, barbaric Roman soldiers, the nightmare of Gethsemane and Golgotha. It seems… indeed it was … a different universe. And every time Peter answers ‘Yes Lord, you know I love you’, Jesus gives him an instruction: then look after my sheep, take care of my lambs. Jesus is preparing Peter for the future. He is schooling Simon the Son of John for the time when he will indeed be Peter, the rock, the bastion of the church. Jesus is encouraging Peter to take ownership.
And that brings us, finally, to the third pair of eyes: we must listen to Christ, with the ears of an Easter people. The third pair of ears are those that hear a story not about Peter, two thousand years ago, but about us, now. We are the ones who were on the beach that day; we are the ones – for all our failings, for all our backslidings – to whom Jesus is saying ‘Feed my sheep’, ‘tend my lambs’.
But can we do it? Could Peter? The answer is, of course, is no. But I want you to listen up, and with your best Easter ears:
First of all, when Jesus asks Peter to look after others, to shoulder, quite frankly, huge responsibilities, he does so in the context of Peter facing up to his own total inadequacy. Of course Peter can’t do this – Peter hasn’t managed to do anything he said he would, ever! Peter, to use a phrase you hear in Yorkshire, ‘is all mouth and no trousers’. And now Peter has finally owned up and recognised this about himself.
Secondly, look at the context. Peter is having a private chat with the Lord just after they’ve shared a communal meal. They’ve had a shared meal together and now they are having a private intimate conversation. Doesn’t this remind you of something? Holy Communion and private prayer. Isn’t this the very model of the Christian life?
And thirdly, this isn’t end of the story: Not for us, and not for Peter either. There is still the Ascension – that’s the moment when the story of Jesus stops being about what he did then, to His being here, among us now. When it no longer about his rising from the dead on that first Easter Day, but becomes, instead about His being alive, and with us now. There is still Pentecost to come – that’s when Peter is empowered by the Holy Spirit. There is still all that we see of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles – a story of a man who is quite, quite different from the Peter we have met in the gospels.
So finally, let us review the ways we listen to scripture. We listen with the ears of a child; that is, a child listens to stories over and over again; and marvels at them; we must also live with the Bible, learn to read it, enjoy it and let become part of ourselves. We must listen with the ears of an adult: that is, we must ask questions, we must use our critical intelligence, we must take the trouble to become informed about it. And yes, there’s room too for skepticism. And finally, we must listen with Easter ears: that is to say, we must listen to scripture because it tells a story in which we have a part. This is the story of a God who makes promises to his people; it is the story of a Messiah, who calls to us to follow him; it is the story of a spirit that will transform us and empower us to play our part in that story.
Allow me to finish with three slightly flipant footnotes:
Do you remember that moment when Peter started pulling on clothes before he jumped into the lake? Well, maybe that was the moment when this man who up until then had been all mouth, finally got some trousers…
And why the 153 fish? A number of ingenius explanations have been suggested to explain this number, and if anyone is interested, I’d be happy to talk about it afterwards. However, the short answer, the basic answer, is simply that it’s an awful lot – and I mean that quite literally: it is an awe-inspiring amount – of fish.
Have you ever wondered where the Easter bunnies came from? What have bunny rabbits got to do with all this? It’s because of their ears: they have Easter ears.

About 18 months ago I was teaching an English class in Pavia and – because we’d finished the work we had to do – I tried to start a conversation. Now, if you are an English teacher, and I know that there are several in the congregation, you’ll know that ‘having a conversation’ can be one of the most challenging things you have to do, especially with a dozen full time students at the end of a long afternoon. But this being Italy, you can usually get a response if you start talking about food. So after a
few minutes, I found myself asking ‘What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to eat or drink?
Immediately one hand went up, that of a Chinese girl – so I turned to her and asked, ‘So Juan, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to eat or drink?’ ‘Cold water’ was her answer. ‘Before I came to Europe, I had never drunk a glass of cold water.’
I mention this incident for two reasons: firstly, because like the two stories we have just heard – Jesus asking announcing to the Samaritan woman that He himself is the Living water, and Moses striking water from a rock on Mount Horeb – it’s about water; and secondly because everyone in that classroom was totally baffled: it just would never occur to us that anyone would find anything unusual about a glass of water.
There is also a great deal bafflement in the conversation between Our Lord and the Samaritan woman at the well. It baffles us when we read it, and it seems to have baffled the Samaritan woman.
First, he asks for water. This surprises her. In New Testament times, men were not supposed to talk to women, at least not unless they were members of same family. Jews were not supposed to talk to Samaritans. So, surprised, she replies, ‘But I’m a woman, and I’m a Samaritan’ – how come you deign to ask someone like me? In other words, I’m not just a nobody, I’m the the sort of person that people like you are supposed to despise. Then Jesus replies with a statement that not just must have baffled her, but baffles us: “if you knew who it was who is asking you for water, you would have asked me for a drink and I would have given you Living water.”
And what does she say? “How can you give me water, when you haven’t got a bucket, and this is a very deep well?” It sounds to me that at this stage she doesn’t know what this conversation is about either. Yet at the same time something must have clicked, because whatever she has seen in this man, she wants it. “Give me this Living water”, she says to him.
Then comes the amazing part: Jesus says OK, but first go and get your husband.
Well, actually I’m not married.
I know that, says Jesus: you’re just living this man but you’ve had five husbands already.
And she’s flabbergasted: Jesus knows all about her! At that point the disciples turn up and she scuttles back to the village. And what do you think she says? I’ve met this wonderful man and he says he is the living water? No, not at all. I’ve met this amazing man – and he knows everything about me!
Just as it wasn’t Jesus’s claims about himself that caught the Samaritan woman’s attention in the first place, so it isn’t catechism or instruction or theological propositions which are going to bring us to faith. Instead, it all begins with a meeting; something happens that brings us into a relationship with the very depths, the very rock of life, and thereafter we are forced to take our own existence seriously.
My own meeting with the Living Water occurred in September 2009. I had turned my back on a Christian upbringing in my early twenties, some thirty years before. And I’d done it for a mixture of reasons, good and bad. One side of me was saying ‘I don’t know what you want from me, Father, but I think it is a lot, and I’m not prepared to do it. So rather than be a hypocrite, I’m leaving. I’m out of here, and if you want me back, if you’re really there, then I’m sure you can haul me back.’ The other side was grasping after everything the world seemed to offer, and it wanted no restrictions: money, travel, the bright lights, and a self-serving career. I was a prodigal son in the making.
Two things happened in September 2009. First of all, I was house sitting for a friend of mine on Lake Orta, as I had done for several years at about that time. Lake Orta is one of the smaller, and prettier of the Italian lakes: in the middle of it is an island dominated by a convent and a basilica. Along the waterfront there are a score of houses, but only three are inhabited all the year round: my friends was one of these and I used to look after her nine cats and two dogs while she went off to the Venice film festival. So one night I took my own dog for a walk and was sitting by the landing stage, on what, in effect, is the island’s only open space. Suddenly, through the archway that leads to the convent, there appeared the figure of the Mother Superior. There was I, sitting under the stars with my yappy little dog, and I thought I would have some explaining to do. However, when she approached me, instead of asking what I was doing on what in effect was her island, she simply smiled at me: such a beautiful radiant smile that I went away afterwards thinking that there might be something in this Christianity business after all.
That was the first experience, and it served to soften me up. The real experience came about ten days later.
I was pottering around in my flat and was passing my bookshelves when I got an urge to pick up a book I don’t think I’d ever opened before. It was a book written by 17th or 18th century French priest, Jean Pierre de Caussade, and I must have bought it when I was at university and wishing I’d had the courage to study theology. Anyway, I picked it up and it opened at a paragraph that said ‘All God asks of you is that you do whatever duty has been put before you, and that you remain open to the Holy Spirit.’Actually it was a bit more complicated than that, because it defined duty in three ways, in terms firstly of Christian duty, then of your social duty, and finally the duties imposed by one’s own inclinations.
But what really struck me was that this came as a direct answer to the question I had left God with almost thirty years before. ‘God,’ I’d said, ‘I don’t know what you want from me’ – and here He was telling me. So I began to concentrate on doing what I understood to do my duty – for example, I began to prepare my lessons far more conscientiously – and within a month I came in through the doors of this church, and have been coming here ever since.
The experience was a very personal one, and I don’t if I can convey the force of it. I felt it as such a direct reply to the question I had left with God 30 years before that I was astounded. There was something out there, or perhaps something in there, at the centre of my life, that knew me intimately. In that moment, I too felt that God was telling me everything I had ever done.
Incidentally, in the Western church we don’t hear anything more of the Samaritan woman at the well. However, the Orthodox tradition has much more to say about her. At Pentecost she was filled with the Holy Spirit and received the name Photini, the enlightened one. As Saint Photini she travelled, with her five daughter and two sons to Carthage, where she preached the gospel so effectively that she came to the attention of Emperor Nero. He had her brought to Rome, where she was imprisoned, tortured and eventually martyred by being thrown down a dry well – but not before she had managed to convert Nero’s daughter, Domnina. Her feast is commemorated on March 20th, which of course is tomorrow… And here is one final thought about the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Jesus has everything to give her: Living water, the water that Jesus has to offer, is flowing water – gurgling, lapping, splashing water. And of course Jesus as Living water is not only clean and pure and life-giving water, it is also metaphorical water, spiritual water, symbolic water. It is life itself. Jesus is that living water and he is offering it to each one of us. But notice that He begins by His asking the Samaritan woman to draw up water from her own well.
Jesus always begins by asking us to do something for him. So every day, when you pray, make sure you are listening for what it is that Jesus is asking you to do that day. It might be something small: to make a phone call, to give away something you no longer need, to finally do that thing you’ve been procrastinating over; or it might be something more demanding (like volunteering to preach a sermon for the first time in your life!). Jesus has everything to give us – Living water. First, though, He asks that we draw Him a cup of water from our own well.