Jesus, a woman, and the "will of God"
Jesus was a rule-breaker. And I don’t just mean he broke silly little institutional rules; he broke the big rules that function to shape and order religions, communities and societies. John 4 recounts an incident where he meets a Samaritan woman by a well as she’s coming to get a drink. They talk together, conversing around theology and spirituality, as well as Jesus’ uncharacteristic reveal of his own identity as Messiah. The rules being broken here are many.
Jews and Samaritans were enemies of one another. There was significant religious and ethnic hatred at the heart of the Jew-Samaritan dynamic, and to stop and talk in this kind of way was controversial to say the least. Jesus moves to transcend the division of race and religion that would usually keep them apart. She was also a woman – and one with a scandalous past at that – and he was a man. To talk alone in the middle of nowhere like this was not ‘appropriate’ behaviour, especially with a woman with a past that was not religiously, socially or morally approved.
And yet it is here, that Jesus chooses to engage in a theological back-and-forth, inviting her into a conversation that would lead to her own transformation. Not a transformation from “this” to “that” as much as it was a transformation in the way she saw herself within the story. And it is to this woman that Jesus chooses to reveal his own vocation and identity – something he is nearly always reluctant to do.
During the conversation, Jesus employs the use of metaphors related to food and drink. The first, is the metaphor of living water, in which he suggests that whatever is happening through him is supposed to open up the idea of divine presence, Spirit, worship and truth, to all people regardless of what their identity and background might be. This living water is not for the “right” kind of person as religious systems understand people to be, instead the “right” kind of person is revealed in the face of someone across the social, religious and political divides who would normally be kept “out.”
The second metaphor is when his disciples come back with lunch and Jesus says that he has food to eat they know nothing about; his food is to do the will of the Father. In this context, the will of the Father is not some mysterious or anxiety-inducing plan. The ‘will of God’ in this moment was found in the crossing of divides, the closing of the gap, it was to go against all the reasons why she should not be included and to find instead a moment of inclusion and empowerment. And Jesus believes that to participate in God’s will in this way, is sustaining to him like food is to our bodies. If living water was about something he would give out that would sustain her, he says that it was his giving of that living water to her that was in fact the food that sustained him.
Perhaps the reason we might find ‘doing the will of the Father’ challenging is not because God is trying to find things we’ll really struggle with as some strange sociopathic test of our loyalty; it’s the challenge of being able to lift up our eyes to see others with empathy, with love, with compassion, even when it goes against our convenience, or against the rules of our tribe, or against the generally accepted norms. And the encouragement here is that this way of being is life-giving rather than life-taking.
Jesus doesn’t have to start a new programme or try to figure out the elusive divine plan. He just stops to talk with a woman he’s bumped into. In this season of ordinary time at Edge our key text is that “the heart regulates the hands”. It comes from this passage in 2 Cor 8 where Paul is encouraging the church to keep being generous to the poor, and says
“Your heart's been in the right place all along. You've got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it. Once the commitment is clear, you do what you can, not what you can't. The heart regulates the hands.”
The desire to follow God’s ways is not about being forced or manipulated into having to do things we don’t want to do, but about our hearts being enlivened so that we’re able to see that which is right in front of us to participate in. And that’s what so many of us do day in and day out, the sacrifices we make for each other, the way we spend our lives on behalf of one another, the work we do and the meaning we find hidden within it. And the more we’re able to do that, perhaps the more we’ll find rewarding and life-giving sustenance for ourselves too.