There are certain prayers in our Church services which are special to many people – like the prayer of Humble Access and what used to be called the ‘Collect for Purity’ which is often said as a prayer of preparation for the Eucharist – as this morning.

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open….

Because these are so familiar they could be prayed without too much thought so it is always instructive to pause, from time to time, and consider more deeply what we are saying.  In the Collect for Purity we actually acknowledge that nothing is hidden from God and especially the things within ourselves that are hidden and secret from others.  From God there can be no secrets and that can be quite a sobering thought. He knows not only what is in our minds but, more importantly, he sees what is in our hearts. We might be good at hiding ourselves from others but this is impossible with God.

This is what the woman of Samaria found when she had a chance encounter with Jesus at the Well.  St John is, as usual, the master of story telling in this passage and it is quite an entertaining story as the woman pits her wits against Jesus.  The encounter is surprising in a couple of ways because Jesus is talking to a Samaritan and a woman.  Not to put too fine a point on it – the relationship between Jews and Samaritans was a bit like the Israeli relationship with the Palestinians today. They were sworn enemies.  Also Jewish men didn’t have private conversations with women who, in Jewish society (as until comparatively recently in our own)  took a subservient role.

Even in the time of more enlightened Judaism, during the modern Synagogue service, men still recite a prayer in which they pray “Blessed art thou O God …who hast not made me a woman.”  Jesus, of course, characteristically defies convention and the Gospel shows him to have an easy relationship with women but then he is coming at things from a different angle – because He is divine, he sees what God sees and what God sees is that all that He has made is very good.  Only in our modern society have we moved towards a theological understanding of women as co-equals in God’s creative plan though some in the Church of England still have a little way to go before they are comfortable with that.  

But I digress and in doing so I am behaving like the woman at the well.  She is pretty deft at twisting things round and trying make sure that Jesus doesn’t get too close to the truth about herself.  However, because God knows the hidden secret things and Jesus won’t be put off claiming our hearts.  God has a way of constantly trying to reach out to us in the depths of our being.  Frances Thompson, a poet who spanned the 19^th & 20^th Centuries once wrote a poem which he called ‘The Hound of Heaven’ which begins

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days

and which deals with the relentless pursuit by God to claim the human soul.  A similar theme is to be found in Psalm 139 which begins with the line:

O Lord you have searched me out and known me ,
you know when I sit and when I stand
you comprehend my thoughts long before.

The whole Psalm is about our trying to flee from God and of God chasing us, like a hound after its prey.  This Psalm is of particular significance for me because in my vocational journey I did everything in my power to avoid God’s call to ordination.  But God continued to chase me and it was only when I was directed to Psalm 139 that I realised the futility of running away from Him.

The Woman at the Well kept trying to divert Jesus but he was having none of it. He engaged her in easy banter and the conversation is delightful in the way it flows one way and then the other as Jesus sought to penetrate her defences.  Then, when she least expected it, he went for the jugular – Go and call your husband -he says and immediately she recognizes that he has already seen into her heart. He knew all there was to know about him.  As indeed, he does of us.

Even then the woman did her best to deflect him and they have a theological conversation which ends when, the woman professes belief, in an abstract way, in the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus immediately jumped in by saying  'I am he'.  In John’s Gospel the use of I am  is central to the Gospel’s theology because I am  is always a Divine claim – Through it Jesus is telling us that He is indeed God. The interesting thing for us is that whilst God is always wanting us to open our hearts to Him it is always in the context of a dialogue in which He also opens His heart to us.  You tell me who you are and I will show you who I am.

Jesus sees in the woman a deep need for acceptance and love and he knows that only He can provide it – and He does so by revealing Himself as God.  We are converted not by the words of others but when God can break through our defences and speak to our heart.  This is important to know because we can sometimes think that Mission and Evangelism is something we do whereas the reality is that it is always something God does – though often, of course, he uses us to prepare the way.

I hear (and even preach!) a great deal about Mission and Evangelism and its importance for the Church but it would be so easy to let that preoccupation dominate and forget that the one person we have influence over and the one who needs constant challenging and conversion to God is ourselves.  Commitment to God is a continuous process of salvation. As the old saying puts it – I have been Saved, I am being saved, I will be saved!

One of the points of our Lenten Sabbatical is to create a space so that we can spend time on our own relationship with God – and not allow ourselves to be deflected by other concerns, even noble ones like Mission. God wants to speak to us as well as others and he waits to do so.  Let the Woman at the Well be a lesson to us.

The disciples had gone off to get food and played absolutely no part in this woman’s conversion. God actually doesn’t need us and we make a big mistake if we believe the Mission of the Kingdom depends on us.    I was reminded very forcibly of this earlier last week when I went to Choral Evensong in St. John’s College Chapel in Cambridge.  I  always approach that Chapel with awe because many years ago, at a time when Christianity and the Church meant very little to me, I met God there.  In an empty Chapel I was dozing quietly on a hot summer afternoon when I became aware of someone sitting next to me. Though irritated at first that my privacy was being invaded I found myself promising to go to Church in a month’s time. When I looked round there was no one there but I was, and am, absolutely certain that God sat next to me – the hound of heaven had sought and penetrated another human heart.  Of course, I kept my promise and here I am today.

The real significance of that story (apart from its personal significance) is that I had not been led to this life-changing experience of God through the mission and witness of others. No one had prepared me for my meeting God in that way.  It was entirely His own doing.

Jesus didn’t need his disciples to reach into the heart of the Samaritan woman. He just needed the right opportunity – and, ironically, it only came when he’d sent his disciples away!  Just as well really because when they returned they were astonished that he was speaking to a woman and a Samaritan woman at that.  Had they been there earlier they would have allowed their prejudices to get in the way of our Lord’s mission.  Again, something we need to remember.

Prejudice and human judgement can  get in the way of opening our hearts – and even our churches – to people because they don’t conform to the narrow image we might have of who can or can’t be saved by God’s love.  We would deny that, of course, but the moment we judge others is the moment when we put a barrier between them and God’s love. 

Thankfully, because God is not restricted by the Church’s judgements, he always manages to get through in the end.  The way he does this is through a personal intervention in our lives. It is when we discover we really do have a personal relationship with Him and that He is always nearer to us than we realise that our faith will really take off.  That isn’t just a matter of us waiting for God to find us (though He will) but of actually making it possible for us to be found . Jesus found the woman because he was just sitting at the well – already there, waiting for her. God is often in our way and we should live expecting to meet him. God is not  remote or distant. He is ever present just waiting for the opportunity to speak to our hearts and we should develop the kind of relationship with him that will allow him into our hearts anew to love us afresh.

Don’t run away from the Hound of Heaven – he has a lot of loving to do in all our lives. We should let him in.  Once we do, we automatically join in God’s Mission. Once we are in tune with God and experience His love for us  we won’t be able to stop ourselves from sharing that with others – as indeed did the Samaritan woman who was so excited by her discovery of Jesus that she rushed back to the city forgetting her water jar. All she could think of was telling people to come and see Jesus.  And – again significantly –it was when they met Jesus that they were converted. They no longer needed the woman’s testimony. They had experienced Him for themselves.

Our Mission is always to introduce people to Jesus, showing them what he means to us, what we believe about him and what he has done for us.  But after that, it is up to God.