There are a couple of preliminary comments that I think are really essential to getting a hold on the readings today. This massive reading from John particularly needs some kind of context. The Gospel of John was probably the last one that made it into the New Testament. We do not know who wrote it, but we do know that it was written by a group of people who grew up in a Jesus tradition apart from the groups who knew the Gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke. They are really a strange group of people. In fact, a lot of people didn’t really think that the Gospel of John should really be in the Bible until about the 2^nd century. Why? Because its depiction of Jesus is so odd, so weird. Jesus in the Gospel of John does not look at all like the Jesus of the earlier Gospels. So clearly, what has happened is that these johannine people have, out of their own frame of mind, thought long and deeply about this man and have reconstructed his life very much out of that prayer. That is true of all Gospels, but particularly so of John. The historic Jesus would never have gone around saying: "I am the Messiah"; or "I am the living water". In other words, what we are seeing is that these people are appropriating their understanding of who this man really was in their lives, and then projecting that onto the figure that is written about in this text. That is really important to know.

The second thing that is important relates to the culture. Samaria was the middle range of Palestine. Galilee was on top and Judea was on the bottom. Samaritans were considered as half-breed Jews. They had their own temple, their own mountain where they worshipped. (That is why the matter of who worships where comes into the conversation.) Semitic men never talked to women in public, much less a woman who had a really bad reputation in town, it is a very dense text and the authors of Gospel of John call us over and over: "Don’t stay on the surfaces of life or of this depiction of Jesus, but rather look further".

The Gospel of John is a particularly apt Gospel for what I am proposing this Lent: that the whole business of growing in a Christian life is a process of illumination. The Gospel of John quite explicitly depicts Jesus as the Great Illuminator, more typically called The Revealer. So we have, time after time conversations with Nicodemus, with this lady, with this man that Jesus cured of blindness, who kind of know who he is, but really don’t. This woman thinks she knows what is going on when Jesus says: "I will give you living water". She says: "That is great because I don’t want to come down here in the heat of the day and have people mock me. I would love to have a tap in my home so that I would not have to come down here an expose myself to people and go to all this trouble". What the author is saying is that is what a lot of people want from religion. They want God to be a kind of convenience store; who will precisely fit my programme. Over and over the Gospel points out that danger that we miss the point of Jesus’ words. And what Jesus is saying is that something is going to be disruptive in this woman’s life. He is not going to make her comfortable. To the extent that she comes to know who Jesus is, her life is going to be upended. She goes back and tells all these people. A woman in the Semitic world would never go back and tell a bunch of men: "this is what is going on, this is the truth". Even here you see her caution: "could this be the Messiah?" She puts it as a question.

But, she clearly understands herself differently in the light of this Man’s self-revelation. In knowing Him, I also know who I am. I can come to terms with who I am. So the illumination that Jesus provides is not just illumination of who He is and who God is and what God is doing through Jesus. But basically it results in the illumination of who I am. The phenomenon is very simple. What enables people to come to know who they really are? And why are so many of us, so much of the time, so out of touch with who we really are? Simple word: trust. I mean even the historic Jesus seems to have been this kind of character who gave people space to be. He was someone to whom they could entrust themselves. Trust of course also means that I know that I am trusted by this other one. Trust is essentially mutual. In light of someone trusting me then I can be who I am, I can discover who I am. And therefore I can, at the same time, entrust my real self to that other one. And this is what illumination looks like from these readings today.

There is a small footnote. Would that the Church was a place where people felt trusted. Would that the Church was a place where people could totally entrust themselves. We don’t do badly here: we who meet here every Sunday. But if there is anything Godly about us and our gathering here it is that we can be brought to entrust ourselves to God because we feel that we are trusted by God. And therefore we can come to see who we really are. And we don’t see who we really are most of time. We live in an alien and alienating world, a world to which we cannot entrust ourselves. It is not easily done. As I said Jesus disrupts this ladies life. She cannot carry on as usual. Jesus is essentially disruptive figure in her life as the Gospel of John puts it. And this is why we need Lent to precisely deal with that disruption, with that disturbing and strange man.

Finally, to pick up this thing from Romans. Jesus didn’t go around saying I am going to die for everybody, I am going to die for sinners. The historic Jesus almost certainly never said anything like that. But here, amazingly, within 20 years after his death, we have Paul saying to the people in Rome, but God proves his love for us, while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Where did he get an idea like that? Paul was speaking out of the regular Christian consciousness of this man whose life was illuminating, and whose death was a consequence of that disturbing yet illuminating life. So I now can say that Jesus died for me because I believe that this man is what being a human is all about. That is why I can look at his life and look at his death and appropriate that life and that death, and say Jesus really did die for me. But notice: it is not automatic as if there were a kind of divine salvation faucet in the sky, God just turns it on and saving grace falls on me. No, that is not the way it works. Rather for me to claim that Jesus died for me is me, taking responsibility for my life, choosing to be human as Jesus was. And therefore I grab on to that man and say that this man’s life if salvific for me. But it is I who am doing it. There is nothing automatic here.

Finally, that is Lenten too. Because so much of our life is lived for us, I think, so much of our life is on automatic pilot: I have my job, I have my email. To the extent that we are defined by all of those peripheral things, we do not have a life. It is only when we begin to look at this man and try to understand how he operated that I can grab hold of my own existence. And that is why we are here today with each other, trying to do it together.