Sunday 8 March 2026 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
Sermon based on:
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
May I speak in the name of God, +creating, redeeming, sanctifying.
+ + +
A few years ago, a friend of mine went on an Ignatian retreat in the hills north of San Francisco. Ignatian spirituality – from the 16th century saint, Ignatius of Loyola – invites people to pray with scripture imaginatively – to enter a gospel scene as fully as possible, attending to what they see, hear, smell and feel. They have a tradition of making 7-day or 30-day guided silent retreats, structured around this practice.
On my friend’s retreat, one afternoon her retreat director invited her to meditate on the story of the Samaritan woman, and she found the experience nearly overwhelming. It was summertime, hot and dry… She set out along a track behind the retreat centre, the words of John’s gospel in her mind, and she slowly walked up a hill to a seat under a spreading tree.
And there in the shade, to her amazement, she encountered the real presence of Jesus, waiting for her as he had once waited for the Samaritan woman at the well. And he looked at her, into her very being, and he knew her – ‘he knew everything she had ever done,’ as the words of John’s gospel say… he knew her full identity. It was a life-changing experience for my friend, very deep, very grace-filled.
Unlike Nicodemus, whose story we heard last week, the Samaritan woman is nameless in the scriptures. But the Orthodox have named her Saint Photini… Photini is a Greek name meaning ‘light’ – it shares a root with our word ‘photon’. Her name is Photini, Light, because in John’s gospel she is the first to recognise Jesus as the Messiah, and in that same exchange – this is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in John’s gospel – she herself is recognised, fully welcomed. Nothing in her is hidden, nothing is left in darkness. And she went from that exchange to share the light, to tell others about Jesus – she is one of the first great evangelists, ‘equal-to-the-apostles’ as the Orthodox say.
In our world today, it is hard to grasp how radical Jesus was in asking this particular woman for water. She seems surprised by his approach. There were strong social and religious conventions around public interactions between men and women, and Jesus’ disciples were shocked when they returned from the town and discovered Jesus speaking with her… she is a Samaritan woman, from a people long estranged from and distrusted by the Jews. Respectable women went to the well in the cool of early morning, where they could gather and talk, but here she was in the noonday sun, knowing she could draw water alone at this time and wouldn’t have to suffer the shame of their sidelong glances and whispers.
But she is the one whom Jesus approaches. She, whose life is a dead end of shame, a foreigner, a woman living without the social protection and status that marriage could confer in their society… in so many ways an outsider, an invisible person… she is the first to know Jesus as the Messiah.
John’s gospel, despite the efforts and assumptions of many commentators who portray her as immoral or promiscuous, actually attaches no blame or guilt to the Samaritan woman. But clearly, she is a person who is shamed, who lives on the margins.
This ambiguity about the Samaritan woman’s history is perhaps what makes her such a powerful figure in our imaginations… because there is space in her story for all of us… We have perhaps all known, at times, what it is like to feel ashamed in relation to our family, our friends or our faith community.
Shame and guilt are different things… we feel guilty when we do something wrong. But our actions are outside us, and are a moment in time… they can be terrible, but usually we can cling to some shred of objectivity, and make things right through apology or confession, and move on. We are not our actions.
But shame is different. Shame lives inside us – it is that voice that, for whatever reason, tells us that we’re not good enough to be in a certain group or do something special… Shame can distort our identity, our actions, our hopes, our relationships. If guilt is the feeling of having done something wrong, then shame is the deeper feeling of being wrong – it is the irrational but powerful feeling that we are not worth knowing, or that we are unlovable, or that we don’t belong.
Sometimes it’s a way of being and thinking that we learn very early in life, or that we become trapped in through difficult life experiences when we feel deep rejection or a sense of failure. Appallingly (and to my shame), the church has a history of shaming various groups of people – women, people with disabilities, gay people, divorced people – and teaching them that they don’t have a full place in the house of God. And of course, the church is not alone in this. We live in a world that runs on public shaming – online and offline – where whole groups of people are treated as suspect, lesser, or expendable; where migrants, minorities, the poor, trans people, indigenous peoples, and those who do not fit the norm can quickly be made into targets. The old human habit of deciding who belongs at the well and who must come alone at noon is still very much with us.
It’s the feeling of Job when he cries out to become invisible so that God will no longer be able to see him… It’s the irrational feeling that God’s grace is available to everyone but me…
But the story of the Samaritan woman, the woman who has been named St Photini – the saint of ‘Light,’ holds out hope. When she walked to the well that day she suddenly discovered that she was no longer invisible… for the first time in years, perhaps in her lifetime, she was spoken to by another as an equal… a man who knew her fully, one who broke all boundaries and taboos and masks of good manners to speak with her, and one who trusted her with his own identity… and in so doing, he transformed her.
It can take a long time to unlearn the habits of the heart, and it can be a frightening thing to approach God, whether in silent prayer at home or in coming forward at communion, when we’ve been taught the lie that we’re not good enough to do so. But God knows all that we are, and God in Christ welcomes us. That’s the voice of grace, the voice of blessing… and it can take practice to live according to that voice rather than the voices that have shamed us.
Lent is a season for this kind of honesty. Not for beating ourselves up, or pretending to be better than we are, but for coming into the light. Lent invites us to bring our thirst, our woundedness, our half-hidden selves, and to discover that Christ is already there ahead of us, waiting not to condemn but to meet us in truth.
There’s a beautiful poem, a prayer, by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and in it he captures this hope, this desire to be fully known by God… he writes,
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.[1]
Like my friend on retreat who walked in the hills north of San Francisco, we can all imagine ourselves walking in the footsteps of the Samaritan woman, approaching that well as we always have, alone in the dust and the hot sun… and we can imagine ourselves speaking and being spoken to for the first time, being known fully in love, and knowing fully.
Amen
[1] Robert Bly, ed. and trans., Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 27 (poem #7 from “A Book for the Hours of Prayer”.)