Sermon, Parish Eucharist, 10.30 Sunday 15th March 2020 

Only God is Good 

Reading: John 4.5-4.42

by The Revd Mark Wakefield

As many of you know, I’ve been running my own, small business since leaving BBC in 2011.  We call it – rather grandly – a “leadership development consultancy”.  At the heart of the work I do are one-to-one relationships with senior people in organisations facing a great deal of often disruptive change.  The measure of success of my work with them is the extent to which they learn more about themselves and are so able to overcome obstacles and realise their potential.  It’s often deeply rewarding work, not least because the challenges of today’s workplace are so considerable; in some cases they seem overwhelming. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years of doing this work it’s the importance of deep listening.  For all my training and qualifications I’ve come to realise that the ability to listen is something you can only learn from experience.  To listen – to really listen – is to honour and fully respect the other person.  I stress this because it’s all too easy when confronted with someone with big challenges to think you know what’s best, to go into rescue mode, dishing out comments and advice even to the extent of giving direction.  However well meaning one may be in doing this, such interventions are so often grounded in wrong assumptions for lack of listening. 

I don’t want to sound pious but Jesus is my role-model in this work and nowhere more so than in today’s gospel reading.  Jesus’ openness to the woman at the well is astonishing.

Firstly, he’s a Rabbi and here he is talking to a woman.  This was unheard of. 

Such was the low opinion of women that Rabbis would generally not be seen talking to their own wives or daughters in public.  Secondly, she’s a woman with a reputation, to say the least, with five husbands to her name and now, it seems, with a live-in lover too. Thirdly, she’s a Samaritan and Samaritans and Jews were at each other’s throats; they loathed each other, hence her astonishment – “how is it that you, a Jew, are asking me for water?”

There’s no judgement on Jesus’ part in this exchange – just an interest in the truth that will set this woman free.  It’s truth that is arrived at by dialogue and what a dialogue it is.  The woman is in no sense cowed or awed by Jesus and the conversation flows and is easy.

It’s hard not to think she’s joking when Jesus promises her living water such that she’ll never be thirsty again and she replies to the effect  of “well that would be great as I won’t have to come schlepping back to this well again!”   But what I find so interesting and so inspiring is that the end result is for the woman to know herself better for having talked with Jesus.

When she excitedly tells others about him she tells them “here is a man who told me everything I’ve ever done” and she experiences that as the most wonderful liberation. 

Jesus was no great respect of authority when it was abused and not earned – look at how he viewed the Pharisees and Herod - but he was the greatest respecter of persons

The one-to-one relationships that Jesus modelled lie at the heart of any worthwhile Christian mission and I know that it’s not just the clergy here at St.Mary’s that see them as central to their calling; many of you do too.  That’s one of the things that makes this current health crisis so very difficult for the church with so many valued relationships made so much more difficult, not least for the most vulnerable and isolated.

Given the importance we attach to these relationships it is a cause of special sadness when they are abused, as we know they often have been, in the wider church.  And there is no sadder story than the recent one concerning Jean Vanier. 

For those of you who don’t know of him Vanier, who died recently aged 90 founded the L’Arche communities in 1964 which now have 10,000 members in 38 countries.

These are communities in which those who are mentally challenged or incapacitated live alongside their carers in relationships of equals.  Vanier started the L’Arche movement after a visit to an asylum during which one inmate looked at him and said “will you be my friend”? 

The businesswoman and charity campaigner Rosa Monckton who has a daughter with Down’s Syndrome and who knew Vanier said this of him: 

“He had an extraordinary facility of engaging completely with people who had multiple and profound disabilities; completely at ease with them, as equals face to face.  I have Jean Vanier’s voice recorded on my telephone and when things….are getting fraught, I listen to him telling me, ‘Don’t spend time worrying; spend time loving.”

Well, who does that remind you of?  So you can imagine the shock -despair even – for all those of us who looked up to Vanier when it was revealed, after an internal investigation by the L’Arche organisation itself, that Vanier had had “manipulative and abusive” sexual relationships with six women from 1970-2005, persuading them that these encounters were in some way “holy”. 

For me, this news came as a profound disappointment; it was like a light going out.  I’d read his books and articles, I’d looked on the work of L’Arche with deep admiration and a sense of personal unworthiness and suddenly it felt like all this was sullied and in question; that Vanier’s work was somehow negated by these awful revelations.

But then it occurred to me that this wasn’t just an overreaction – it was actually wrong.  Of course the disappointment was – and is – real but then so were – and are – his achievements. And while there is no denying the seriousness of what he did, there was also fault in my putting him on a pedestal in the first place.  In this, of course, I was not alone.  We live in a culture of heroes and idols – think sportsmen and women; think film stars; think “Love Island”.   We may laugh at such idolatry but we people of faith can be just as guilty of it and we really shouldn’t be because as soon as we assume the person we admire to be beyond reproach we begin to make a god of them.

As the book of Ecclesiastes puts it:

“Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning”.

Or, as the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn said of his time in Stalin’s labour camps:

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.

So, here’s a Lenten discipline for you.  As we reflect on our own sins let’s commit to giving up any form of hero-worship or idolatry, knowing as we do that the object of our worship is almost certain to have a heart at least as dark as our own and instead, let’s commit to worshipping the one true God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen