Exodus 17.1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5.1-11; John 4.5-42

THIS Gospel is one of the longest set for a principal service outside Passiontide. Length alone tells us that the message must be important, must be taken as a whole, and must be covert as well as overt.

Overt messages in scripture come as instructions: “Honour your father and mother”; “Forgive one another.” The Ten Commandments take up 16 verses (Exodus 20.2-17). This Gospel (37 verses) has room for many more. But it would mean delivering teaching in a form that is less appealing than story. How many Christians enjoy reading Leviticus?

Within this Gospel is an overt instruction: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” An overt acknowledgement follows later, a human counterpart to divine disclosure: “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.”

Other gospel teachings come in a covert or oblique way. We tease the teaching out of its context, in story (told about Jesus) or parable (spoken by Jesus): by interpreting the setting, the characters, the presenting “issue”, and the form in which the teaching is delivered (proverb, question, parable, or reaction).

John’s Gospel contains many theological statements and instructions, but delivers them within the story of a life lived in interaction with other lives. So, those two overt teachings are embedded in a life setting, albeit one that is saturated with significance. Here is Jacob’s Well, and Jacob is a Jewish patriarch. We are drawn back to a time before the division of the kingdom — before even the beginning of that kingdom — when there were not “Jews” and “Samaritans”.

Last week, the Gospel was a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, who was “a leader of the Jews” (3.1). This passage takes the covert message a stage further. Again, it is a conversation, but this time not between two men of apparently similar status (“leader”, “teacher”). Instead, Jesus has an encounter that might appear to be random, but is not. It is between an insider and an outsider (a Jew and a Samaritan), a man and a woman (potentially shocking).

In 4.6, there is a covert suggestion that Jesus had a purpose in sitting at Jacob’s Well: “Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.” I picture bright sunshine, but no shade. Perhaps there was shade near by, where Jesus could have waited. But I think he was waiting for the right person to come along — as Abraham’s servant had once done, long ago, at another well, further north, in Nahor (Genesis 24).

The noonday sun makes Jesus’s request for a drink natural, but the woman is still surprised that he asks. Without being told, she knows that he is a Jew, although the text does not explain what it is about Jesus which makes this fact plain to her. The order of events in this little scene sets a pattern for innumerable encounters with the Lord in the Christian future (though it has taken me a while to recognise it as such).

Jesus makes the first move, asking something from the woman. When she replies, she deflects his request, responding in a way that suggests that she considers herself not to be a proper person to take up the Lord’s invitation. So, ethnic identity, or sex, can be an obstacle in the mind of the person who meets Jesus. Yet, he ignores her objection. It is as if, for him, her identity as Samaritan and female not only did not matter, but did not even exist.

Instead, Jesus offers her something: something both utterly simple and utterly mysterious — in this instance, “living water”. It is possible that the woman assumed that he was referring to “running” (as opposed to “standing”) water. But she is still in find-the-stumbling-block mode; so she points out that he has no bucket. Her objection makes perfect sense to her. But it is a covert message about the ignorance of those who do not yet have “eyes to see” what God is reaching out to bestow on them.

Hurrying on to the end of the Gospel, we find confirmation that human issues such as ethnicity and sex must not stand in the way of recognising Jesus.

Two days were all it took for the Samaritans to recognise him as “the Saviour of the world”. We have known Jesus for much longer than that.