Third Sunday of Lent 2020

Lectionary readings: Romans 5:1-11 and John 4:5-42

Our Gospel reading today is timely. The woman at the well experiences the personal impact of social distancing; of, quite likely, self-isolating herself. She is also someone who becomes a viral carrier, spreading, in this case, hope throughout her community. What might we learn from her, today?

First, it will help to understand the context, because that is quite different from our own. In her culture, it was of real importance that families did not lose their ancestral share in the land that God had given to them. It was also of paramount concern that widows were provided for. The Law of Moses provided a solution to address both the long-term need for sustainable communities and the personal need of widows for security, at least under one particular circumstance. Where a man died without leaving an heir, his closest kin was obliged to marry his widow. Their first child would be counted as the heir of the dead man, with subsequent children counting as their own. It is a solution that seems very strange to us in our culture, which focuses on romantic love and finding ‘the one,’ but it made sense in their very different culture. Indeed, it was common enough to warrant a place in case law. Jesus was asked a question about this very practice, which you can read about in Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27 and Luke 20:27-40.

This particular woman had had five husbands, and was now living under the protection, if hardly security, of a man who was nonetheless unwilling to marry her. For this reason, she is often understood to be a serial adulteress; but, in a small and conservative community, while adultery undoubtedly occurred, you simply would not have men queueing up to marry such a woman: it would be social suicide. No, this is a woman who has lost five husbands.

Today, we would be screening those brothers or close male relatives for a hereditary life-limiting condition. But they had no such knowledge. For them, the woman is an obvious common denominator. Perhaps she has been ostracised in case whatever curse she lives under rubs off on the other women. Perhaps, for this reason, men, worried for their own lives, have put pressure on their wives to avoid her. Or, it is possible that she has self-isolated in order to avoid the burden of their sympathy, the pain of seeing their children grow up while she remains childless. But whether the driver is a community decision of social distancing, or a personal decision of self-isolation, her is a woman who is living with the consequences. In the division of labour, drawing water was women’s work, a burden made lighter by social interaction, the women of the community drawing water together in the early morning and early evening, in the cool of the day. But this woman comes to the well alone, at the hottest hour of the day, when she can almost guarantee that she will not come into contact with anyone else.

And there, she meets Jesus, and everything changes.

The Western Church will forget all about her, but the Eastern Church preserves her memory. She is baptised with the name Photini, the luminous one. The one who shares in God’s glory. Not only does she bring all her neighbours to meet Jesus, but she goes on to carry the gospel all around the Roman Empire. She leads so many to Christ that she becomes known as Saint Photini, Equal-to-the-Apostles. Like them, she doesn’t travel alone but with her five sisters, and the son whom God did, in the end, give her. Eventually, she journeys to Rome. And there she is brought before Nero, and imprisoned, and tortured in a variety of increasingly cruel ways, both before and after bringing Nero’s daughter and all her maidservants to profess faith in Christ. Among other punishments, she is thrown into a dry well. But what does it matter if the well is dry? At a well, on the day they first met, Jesus had said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ This woman, at the bottom of a well, as isolating and hemmed-in place as you can care to imagine, is Photini, the luminous one. And while Nero hardens his heart in an insatiable quest to offend the gods, God is fixed in his opposition to his actions. The stories of Photini’s suffering and endurance and character and hope are surely apocryphal, revealing an epic battle between darkness and light, manifest in an emperor driving himself insane and a woman of awe-inspiring confidence who learned long ago the lesson she needs to draw on now.

And this brings us to our other reading this morning, from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome.

Paul contrasts ‘the glory of God’ and ‘the wrath of God’. The glory of God is the manifestation of God’s inherent goodness. The wrath of God is God’s fixed opposition to all that brings death rather than life, all that constrains us in the long term, rather than sets us free. Paul says that where God’s wrath is expressed, we shall be saved, our hope being in sharing in God’s glory.

Paul says, there is a process to this: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, which will not put us to shame. The word he uses that is translated ‘suffering’ describes a narrow place that hems you in, so that you feel you are without options. That’s the literal meaning. Metaphorically, it describes that internal pressure where you feel that you have no way of escape. In our own language, we might say, ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’. And this produces endurance. The word translated ‘produces’ implies bringing something about by labour, through effort. And the word translated ‘endurance’ expresses the ability to remain in that place: to be willing to remain in the place from which you cannot escape. And this, in turn, produces character; and here the word refers to approval won through testing. Again, in our own language we might say, ‘tried and tested’. This leads to hope, or, a sure expectation.

The community that finds themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, labouring with the Holy Spirit, will find that they can endure, showing themselves to have been tried and tested, and possessing even greater confidence in their expectation of sharing in the glory of God. Note the communal aspect here: ‘we’ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ repeated over and over again. This is not about individual stoicism, but about a community facing adversity together, empowered by God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, that will get worse before it gets better. We find ourselves wrestling with the need to respect spatial distancing, while rejecting social distancing: which might mean that, as we gather together less, we phone each other more; might mean, those who can run errands for those who can’t; might mean, we find new ways to resource prayer and worship at home, transforming the burden of isolation into the grace of a season of solitude in the wild places of Lent; must mean we resist viral fear and spread viral hope. Like Photini, may we shine as lights in the world, to the glory of God. Amen.