But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in sprit and truth. John 4: 20-24

I am going a bit off the official Lectionary path this Sunday – I think – by looking at this reading from John’s Gospel, which is assigned to “Scrutiny Year A” for those who are preparing to receive the Rite of Christian Initiation at Easter. We are officially in Year C and the Year C readings are here.

The reading is the perhaps familiar but perhaps not well understood story of the woman at the well. Some historical notes may perhaps shed some light on the radical nature of the story. Two things right off the bat: (a) the woman is, well, a woman, and women were not regarded well or highly or at all at this time, and (b) she is Samaritan, and Samaritans were looked upon with extreme suspicion by the Jewish people. In addition, we soon learn that this woman has a tumultuous past of the kind that would surely have led to extreme, Scarlett Letter-type social shaming, and perhaps worse.

And yet Jesus engages her – as we will see, very deeply and seriously – pushing aside all prevailing social norms. By the time we get toward the end of the story, the horrified disciples are basically saying something like We Don’t Talk About That.

Right from the start this context and setting should cause us to reflect. Who do we not talk to? Who have we convinced ourselves we need not talk to? Here is Jesus, encountering someone he could very safely have ignored, or looked the other way from, the way we might, for example, look the other way when someone is asking for money on the street corner or subway car. Or maybe the way we might treat a co-worker who is having issues at work, or a fellow student not getting a particular concept. Or maybe a family member we have had issues with that has caused a still-unaddressed rift? Their problems are not our problems, right? We have bills to pay too, right? I figured all this stuff out, right? Why can’t he? She hasn’t called me…why do I need to call her? We can’t possibly engage and help everyone…can we?

Yet that is not how Jesus leads, here or pretty much anywhere else in the Gospels. He not only treats the Samaritan woman as a full human being, but he engages her, substantively, in dialogue at the deepest level. He is not reserving his theology for the priests or the disciples or the men. No, he takes the message right to her, without judgement or filter, who all those men would have readily ignored and excluded from the conversation entirely. We find later that she picks it up quicker than many of them did.

The extraordinary conversation begins. Jesus asks for water; she is startled by his breaking of the social barrier. Jesus then starts talking about “living water” that she should be asking of him. Stumped, she asks him where his bucket is for all this water. [Note of pause – the author loves this part, as this is exactly how he thinks he would respond].

Like all great teachers Jesus is patient. He’s not talking about actual H20. Of course, water is good. But our faith is more than that. He’s actually talking about spiritual discovery and liberation, liberation from the constraints that can make our faith so small and parochial. When our faith is confined to what this or that group does, or by solely to going to Mass on Sundays, or to our Bible-study groups, when our kindness is limited to those in our community or those who look like us, our faith and spirituality shrinks. It is confined – the exact opposite of what we see in the Gospel.

The “living water” Jesus refers to is the recognition that we can find and honor God nearly everywhere, and particularly in places we don’t often go (see Matthew 25: 31-20). He continues: the time is coming “when you will worship…neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem”, when we will “worship the Father in spirit and truth.” Back then the Jewish people were doing this, the Samaritans that, the Gentiles something else. That’s all well and good. Jesus is not proposing to dispense with all custom and tradition. It is well known that he was quite observant of Jewish tradition. But our specific traditions and practices are only part of the story and not the whole story. If they are exclusionary or discriminatory in any sense, if they cause us to be judgmental, they contradict God’s purpose for us, and likely their own original purpose. And if they do not cause us to lead our lives with love and care and grace, one can reasonably question why they are adhered to at all. We Church-goers should be honest about our contribution to precipitously declining religious participation rates, particularly among younger age groups.

A lot of times Christians focus on Jesus’ later statement “I am he” in response to the woman’s wondering about the coming of the Messiah, as a way to direct people to a narrow Christian dogma where only formal confessions of faith or other ritual practices will suffice for salvation. But it is important to note what Jesus does not say here. He does not say she or anyone should worship him (in fact he never says this in the Gospels – more on this in a later post). Combined with his radical actions in this story and elsewhere, I think he is saying that what is Messianic is the inclusion of everyone in God’s love and presence, that everyone belongs.

Jesus embodies this. Indeed, he “dwelled among us” (John 1:14), but not just some of us. As this and the Gospel more broadly shows, he made a big point of dwelling among all of us. And he continues to dwell in each of us, if we believe we are members of the body of Christ (see, e.g. 1 Corinthians 12).

This all leads to the conclusion of the story – the part about sowers and reapers. Once the disciples get past the scandalous nature of Jesus’ conduct, they go back to the everyday concerns (Jesus, you must be hungry!). Of course Jesus from time to time was hungry. Of course, we are hungry from time to time. Of course, we need to pay our bills and attend to the day-to-day. No one would deny that. But the truly Good News is that there is a “harvest” already here. We are already accepted and loved. We do not have to earn that invitation, or have a certain grade point average, or live here or there or earn this or that. We can have a whole bunch credentials or we can have none at all. God welcomes all of us to this harvest, and we, following Jesus, are called to do the same. Jesus did not impose prerequisites to love and grace. Neither should we.