At the edges

Water is in the news again. It often is. Thanks, we are told, to global warming, most years now produce summer drought, beginning in the south east of England. Hose pipe bans in Kent seem to start ever earlier. Yet the same phenomenon also brings floods, as it did so devastatingly to large parts of Britain last year. This year, however, it is bottled water which is causing controversy. The World Wide Fund for Nature is arguing that bottled water is not only environmentally unfriendly, but a waste of money. Often selling for a thousand times the price of tap water, the quality is seldom better than the water from our taps. Water is by its nature heavy to transport, yet it is flown or shipped in from all over the world. In its plastic or glass bottles it has a massive carbon footprint, and yet the bottled water market is the fastest growing drinks industry in the world.

As we heard in today's first lesson, to the people of Israel on their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, it was the sheer shortage of water which caused both suffering and dissent. The same is true today in the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian. Israel takes a huge amount of water from the River Jordan (which is why the level of the Dead Sea is sinking so rapidly) and from the region's principal aquifers, leaving very little for the Palestinians. They in turn sink illegal wells which often produce dirty or polluted water.

In all the major religions of the world water is a symbol of cleansing and purification. In Christianity it has the added significance of being, in baptism, the symbol of our dying with Christ in order to be reborn with the risen Christ. And in today's Gospel Jesus uses water to speak of himself: he tells the woman of Samaria that he is the ‘living water' who quenches our spiritual thirst for ever and gives us eternal life through him. [John 4: 1-42].

How sad, then, that something so vital to physical life and so central to spiritual life should be argued over and fought over, dividing people and races and forcing many to the edge of despair. So perhaps it is no accident that Jesus declares himself to be the ‘living water' to someone who was herself on the very edge of his world.

We need to picture the scene, to think ourselves into it, as it were. Jesus has arrived at a town called Sychar on the road from Judea to Galilee. It is Samaritan country, which means that for a Jew it is alien territory. Despite their similar roots, there was an ancient antipathy between the people of Judea and the people of Samaria. Even to use the same drinking vessel was forbidden. But Jesus is tired and thirsty, and by the roadside is a well. Not just any old well, either, but one known as ‘Jacob's Well', on land given centuries earlier by Jacob to his son Joseph. A holy well, then, ancient and very deep – but Jesus has no means of drawing any water.

Then someone approaches with a bucket, and there is hope after all. But there are two problems. First, that someone is a Samaritan, and for a Jew to ask a Samaritan a favour, let alone drink from a Samaritan's bucket, was unthinkable. And then, second, this Samaritan someone is a woman, and whilst it was not forbidden for a man to converse with a female stranger, it was against all custom for a rabbi to do so.

Yet, much to the woman's surprise, Jesus addresses her directly and asks for a drink. Without fuss of bother, he simply accepts women, and Samaritans, as equal and rightful members of the human race, and treats them as such. ‘Never despise anything human' wrote St Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century – because to denigrate human nature is to blaspheme against the Incarnation of God in Christ, which took place in human nature. Christians must be in the forefront of upholding the dignity and the sanctity of all that is human, of all men and women regardless of creed, colour or class.

A long conversation then ensues. Jesus speaks of the gift of living water, and at first the woman misunderstands. He sees to the heart of her spiritual blindness, and pinpoints the obstacle, the blockage, between her life as it is and the eternal life that could be hers. And then, amazingly, to this woman doubly on the edge of his world, Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah, the Christ.

Time and again the Gospels show us that Jesus lived on the edge of religious life, that he was least comfortable with the representatives of institutional religion and most at ease with those on the margins – Samaritans and women, tax collectors and Roman soldiers, sinners who recognised their sinfulness, who knew their need of God. Here was a man who, as Father Harry Williams put it in his book Tensions, seemed to the pompous churchy folk of his day to be a jester, a fool, a Lord of Misrule:

No wonder the Pharisees, who seem to have been always wholly serious, had to have Jesus put down. He couldn't be allowed to go on indefinitely standing everything on its head and making their piety look ridiculous. Why, in the end, they might even laugh themselves, and that would be the ultimate catastrophe. Who in reality had ever witnessed a pious man blowing a trumpet before he put a pound in the church box? The notion was irresponsibly misleading. And then there were camels going through the eye of needles, not to mention camels being swallowed easily by those who choked when they swallowed a gnat. And if people did sometimes get a speck in their eye, who ever heard of a man, and an improving teacher at that, who had a log in his? And worse: idlers who were given full pay, stewards who were successful cheats, spendthrift and debauched sons being fêted on their return home – what had all this pernicious nonsense to do with religion? It could only undermine the morals of society, and, being socially dangerous, had to be stopped; stopped before the contagion of eternal love showed up the whole solemn system of moralism and religiosity as a complete knockabout farce. So the Jester had to be crucified.

And so Jesus was edged out: edged out of religion, edged out of the community. He had ministered to those on the edges, and now he himself was edged out of the world and onto a cross.

So Christ reaches out to those on the edges, on the margins of faith and even the margins of society. And if you have been part of the institutional church for a lifetime, and if you have tried conscientiously to fulfil the obligations of our faith, then it is for that to make you feel like the elder son hearing the sounds of merriment coming from the party for the returned prodigal. Somehow we feel a bit cheated, a bit short-changed, and it can't help but seem that the mavericks are the ones who get all the prizes. But that is to see the Gospel the wrong way round. As the father in the parable says to his elder son: My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. How could we help celebrating this happy day? Your brother here was dead and now he has come back to life, was lost and is found [Luke15: 31-2].

And so those of us who have tried to be faithful tour calling for many a long year should not be resentful of the welcome given to those on the edges. Rather we need to be on the edges too, helping in the search for the lost sheep, helping in the healing of the broken and the restoration of the fallen , and leading the thirsty to Christ the living water, that water who alone can dissolve away our enmities and our hatreds, all our fears and our suspicions, and ensure that no-one need ever thirst again.