12 March 2023
Readings
Exodus 17:1-7
Writing of this Exodus reading Maurice Andrew suggests that:
Creation does not of itself liberate an oppressed people, but a liberated people must also be able to live from creation, as we see when, after only three days in the wilderness, they find no water. After liberation, people become migratory and their wandering is characterised, not by the will to go forward for life, but by the desire to return to security. In the difficult period between liberation and the gaining of land, which the wilderness wandering represents, the limitations of the people are witheringly exposed. [1] We could call this episode ‘the whinging in the wilderness’ and there is a lot of it about.
John 4: 5-42
We often get long readings from John’s Gospel because, in John’s Gospel, Jesus makes long complicated theological speeches and the teaching is in those speeches rather than in the description of events. In this episode we get the vision of the inclusive Christ who will accept a drink from a woman who is of a race considered unclean. Jesus also teaches this woman and sends her out on mission and she in turn brings people to Christ.
Sermon
Through the magic of Facebook, I recently saw a picture of the Minister of Education, Jan Tinetti, with the Ministry of Education interns who were finishing their 12 week paid internship. What initially stuck me about the group of smiling young people about to return to their studies was that we are obviously a nation of immigrants. If you took a DNA swab from everybody in the group and sent it off to Ancestry Dot Com the results would pretty much cover the globe.
Following my own ancestry my maternal grandfather left England and went to Canada and then to South Africa at the age of 16 because he felt oppressed by his stepmother. However he did return, married, had a family and was conscripted to fight in the first world war. I suspect it was the impending Second World War that sent him with his family to Aotearoa.
We only have speculation about why the Perry family abandoned their smelting business and boarded the Amelia Thomson bound for New Plymouth, although it is recorded that they hoped to smelt the iron sands on the Taranaki Coast.
When my mother arrived the colony was well established and through her interest in Amateur Theatre she met a young photographer, Geoff Perry in Wellington. Like most of his brothers Geoff didn’t want to be a farmer in the Wairarapa where our branch of the family tree had ended up after marrying Mary Masters. According to his memoirs Joseph Masters was an economic refugee from a life of struggle that was close to slavery in England. When he and his family moved from Wellington to the Wairarapa they certainly had to live, as Maurice Andrew noted, off creation. However there were former immigrants from the Pacific already established who were happy to trade.
What my forebears, who came at different times, had in common was that once they came here, going back was not an easy option. Therefore, I have little sympathy for the people who complained about our leadership when their access to travel was restricted by a deadly pandemic.
However, the book of Exodus tells us that Moses’ leadership was also continually challenged on the journey from slavery to freedom right from the very beginning. When the escaping slaves saw the Egyptians advancing on them they complained to Moses:
‘Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (Exodus 14:11)
Mum wasn’t going to die in the wilderness although when we lived near the Tararua Ranges she did worry about that happening to me. But she often told me about things that were better in England. I distinctly remember when I speculated about working in the film industry, she told me that feature films were only made in England and America. Ironically I later learned that about that time a young boy was running around with a movie camera on the beach at Pukerua Bay photographing paper mâché severed heads. Peter Jackson did make movies in Aotearoa and Peter Snell did run a world record mile in Whanganui without the benefit of a European cinder track.
Looking back often blinds us to future possibilities and even the memory of deliverance from slavery and an avenging Egyptian Army was blotted out by the struggle of the Exodus journey.
The chorus of one of the most important Negro spirituals, ‘O Mary Don’t You Weep’ helps keep the tradition of the wilderness journey from slavery to freedom alive. That song tells us, ‘Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded!’ It was a song that looked to the Exodus tradition to inspire another group of slaves not to lament the journey but look to a future of unlimited possibilities. A future where their descendants could help send people to the moon or marry a president.
One would think that, after ‘Pharaoh’s army got drown-ded!, Moses’ leadership would be secure.
But freedom in the wilderness always involves the challenge of self-sufficiency. Those seeking freedom in the wilderness must learn to live off what the wilderness provides and that, as our own colonising ancestors have testified, is always a hard journey.
Furthermore, we can see from today’s reading, when it is difficult to find what we need to survive, people blame their leadership and they want to go back to the slavery of the past. Some would even seem to prefer dying in a pandemic or dying in a plane crash in a cyclone, to having their travel plans disrupted.
Moses exemplifies leadership that, despite the criticism of others, finds a way for the people to survive whatever challenge the wilderness puts in the way of their march towards new beginnings.
Lack of water for the journey is something much of Aotearoa understands at the moment with a dry summer in the South and flood waters destroying infrastructure in the North. Suddenly Climate change is very real, but it is never fruitful to try and find geographical, or any other scientific explanation, for biblical metaphors. The important thing is to let the story speak to us with its message of leadership and freedom through self-sufficiency in the journey of life. Like all journeys towards hope and new beginnings our own life journeys are wilderness journeys filled with unexpected twists and turns.
Freedom involves living off the fruits of the journey and involves leadership that cares for all people on the journey. True leadership encourages people to adapt and grow in ways that not only find new beginnings but blends diverse folk to form a new people, a new culture.
That is the journey towards new beginnings that is woven into our Gospel reading.
The two readings are linked together through water drawn from the ground and living water drawn from cultural and religious tradition. The gospel reading winds through a typical Johannine theological journey wrestling with personal morality, theological and cultural differences. The passage concludes by marginalising places of worship in favour of an intimate and spiritual relationship with God. Connection to God that is available in all places through the Jesus image Christians have of Christ.
The Samaritan woman highlights a theological dispute between Jews and Samaritans over places of worship. Jesus then dismisses both places of worship, temple and sacred mountain in favour of a spirituality that worships God as Spirit.
Both Jews and Samaritans were slaves to places of worship. Unlike the group of young interns in Jan Tinetti’s photograph they were ethnically similar. But history through conquest, exile and marriage with other ethnic groups had separated them. That separation had given them alternative places of worship and their slavish adherence to those places of worship reinforced their separation.
The well of Jacob was the water that attested to their common cultural and religious history. Jacob was one of the patriarchs of both Jews and Samaritans. Using the metaphor of living water, the gospel writer points the reader towards Jesus as the way to a future religious heritage that welcomed all people to worship a God of Spirit that recognised all human beings as spiritual people.
The detail that is woven into this story means that it is very easy to get moralistically tangled up in the woman’s five husbands. The detail that the man she was presently living with was not her husband is also a distraction. The real issue was that the woman was amazed that Jesus knew all about her.
Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the messiah, can he?’ (John 4:28)
The woman lived in a world where women did not have a place in society unless they had a father, husband or son. In the culture of the time and place the woman should not have spoken to Jesus and Jesus should not have been talking to the woman. Therefore we are challenged to notice that woven into the story is one of many examples of Jesus challenging his culture.
This was a society where marriages were arranged and girls as young has twelve were married to much older men.
To exist in that society widows had to remarry. If they again married a much older man, there was a good chance they would be widowed again. There was also the practice of Levirate marriage where the brother of a deceased man was obliged to marry his brother’s widow, and the widow is obliged to marry her deceased husband’s brother.
Her statement that she had no husband may also mean she was living back in her father’s household, her brother’s household or even her son’s household.
Jesus goes on to introduce the symbolic place of water—living water. The water metaphor reminds us of the water that is crossed to enter new beginnings, the water that springs from the rock on the wilderness journey and the water of baptism that signals new beginnings.
We can assume that what was said between Jesus and the woman was greater than we are given in this Gospel passage but what we can discern is that Jesus made such an impression on the woman that she went back and told the people she knew. She impressed them so much that they came to see Jesus for themselves. This is the message from the author, John the evangelist. We, his readers, are called to meet with Jesus, tell others about that meeting with Jesus and those we tell will then seek out Jesus for themselves.
But wait there is more!
They said to the woman, ‘it is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the saviour of the world.’ (John 4:42)
However we pass on the good news of Jesus Christ, by words or action, it is when those we interest in Christ’s presence experience that presence for themselves that the living water flows, not only into our world but into the world of the future.
Our world may well seem a spiritual wilderness with a rock hard resistance to the Christian faith. However, the message from both these readings is, that when we draw water from the well of our tradition and strike the rock with the staff of faith that supports our own journey, then the living water of Christ will flow into our world.
Our calling is to release the living water, the Christ within us, into our world and allow it to trickle past us into the future.
Rev Hugh Perry
[1] Maurice Andrew The Old Testament in Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: DEFT 1999) p.105.