The Good Shepherd

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on the 4th Sunday of Easter, 26th April 2026.

Christ the Good Shepherd, attributed to Josep Vergara

‘The sheep follow (the shepherd) because they know his voice’.

So says Jesus, in today’s reading from St John’s Gospel (John 10:1-10). These words always used to puzzle me. It just didn’t chime with my own experience.

I remember helping to move my Grandfather’s sheep as a child. Those sheep certainly didn’t recognise anyone’s voice, let alone mine aged 12! You couldn’t lead them. In fact it was the divil’s own job to stop them charging off the wrong way. We stood in gaps, we waved our hands and we hunted them as best we could to their new field of fresh grass - but they just wouldn’t follow! Surely, I thought, shepherds in Jesus’s time must have had a very different relationship with their sheep to us.

But then some years ago a farmer explained it to me. He was amused by my difficulty moving sheep. ‘I never have any difficulty getting sheep to follow me’, he said. ‘I just carry a bag of sheep nuts with me, and they come running.’ There’s more than one way to move sheep - the sheep follow the shepherd who shows them the way to food!

‘The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing’.

So begins the 23^rd Psalm we read earlier. We all love it, don’t we? It is such a favourite because it is so filled with comforting images of God caring for us and keeping us safe.

This metaphor of the shepherd runs right through Hebrew scripture. That’s hardly surprising because the Israelites were a pastoral people.

God is often likened to a shepherd, as in Psalm 23, or as Isaiah writes (Isaiah 40:11): “(The Lord God) will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

But Ezekiel 34:2 applies the metaphor to the leaders of Israel, in a great indictment for their bad leadership and corruption: “Ah you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” The same indictment might be made of some of the great and powerful in the world today. I do not need to name them, do I?

Jesus chooses to use this metaphor of the shepherd in today’s reading (John 10:1-10).

It is the first part of a longer parable about his relationship with his disciples. In the very next verse, which the lectionary keeps for another day, Jesus continues “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is both familiar and lovely. We have all seen pictures of him as the strong, self-reliant, country man keeping his little flock safe from harm, carrying the lost sheep back to the flock on his shoulders.

In the rugged Judean countryside sheep had to be kept in a sheepfold at night, to prevent them straying into the crops, and to protect them from wild animals and rustlers. In the two halves of the passage we have just heard, Jesus is probably talking about two different kinds of sheepfolds.

The first kind is a large communal fold near a village, surrounded by fences with a gate. The village would employ a gatekeeper to protect the sheep in the communal fold. In the morning the gatekeeper would open the gate to the shepherd who would call his own flock out. The other flocks wouldn’t recognise his call and would stay behind until their own shepherd came.

The second kind of sheepfold would be up in the hills, far from the village, and much smaller. It would be used in summer when a single shepherd would stay out with the sheep for days or weeks on end. To protect the flock at night, the shepherd would lead them into a small enclosure, perhaps just a dry-stone wall he had built. Instead of a gate, he would lie down to sleep in the entrance, where any movement in or out would wake him up. I’ve found similar structures up in the Burren hills. When Jesus said “I am the gate”, everyone would understand what he meant.

In this passage I think Jesus is deliberately doing two things:

Firstly, he is promising his disciples – sheep who recognise his voice - that he will care for them. He will keep them safe and feed them. “Whoever enters by me will be saved”, he says.  They “will come in and go out and find pasture”. It is also his promise to us, today.

But secondly, Jesus is implicitly accusing the leaders of his own day for being bad shepherds, just as Ezekiel had done centuries before. “All who came before me are thieves and bandits;” he says, “but the sheep did not listen to them”. The thieves and bandits are surely those who mislead and oppress the people, whether in the time of Jesus or in our own day. As his disciples we must not listen to them, but rather we must listen to the gentle, loving voice of Jesus, our Good Shepherd, who leads us to green pastures beside still waters.

Jesus will always be our Good Shepherd.

We should hold on to that comforting, familiar image, and listen to his words. After all he has told us “Remember, I am with you always.”

But Jesus has handed on his shepherd’s mantle to others too, starting with the apostles. John (21:15-17) tells us that Jesus said to Peter “Feed my lambs … tend my sheep … feed my sheep”. Bishops from that day to this have inherited a shepherd’s mantle, as Bishop Michael has.

We give thanks for Bishop Michael’s wise and loving Christian leadership which it is his job as a bishop to give us. We give thanks too for the shepherding of our Rector Keith. They both need our prayers as they lead us to face many challenges. The thieves and bandits have not gone away, you know!

But shepherding is not just a job for those who are ordained. Jesus has commissioned every one of us - disciples who follow him - to continue his mission. We are all called to be shepherds in our different ways. Let us be attentive to the Holy Spirit prompting us to tend to the needs of our families, our friends, and the communities of which we are part.

So I finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word appointed for today:

God of all power,
you called from death our Lord Jesus,
the great shepherd of the sheep;
send us as shepherds to rescue the lost,

to heal the injured,

and to feed one another with understanding;

through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

 

Living in Community

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 14th April 2026

St Barnabas

‘Everything (the first Christian congregation in Jerusalem) owned was held in common’, we are told.

Does this mean that Christians today should practice some kind of primitive communism? I think not, because most Christians have never done so.

The first Christians in Jerusalem decided among themselves to live as a religious community, surrounding the apostles, and sharing all personal possessions. Their community must have been much like the monasteries that grew up in Ireland in the early days of the Irish church. Or much like the monasteries that developed in the high Middle Ages, following a ‘rule of life’ bound by vows of poverty, obedience and stability. Some few Christians today still decide to live together, sharing everything in community. While we may admire their lives of prayer and service, we are not all called to it.

In today’s reading (Acts 4:32-37), we heard the first mention of a Levite, Joseph, nicknamed Barnabas.

‘He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet’, we are told.

Later, the Christian community in Jerusalem sends Barnabas to oversee the growing church in Antioch. He seeks out St Paul to help him. After a year, the church in Antioch sends them back to Jerusalem with money for the relief of the poor Christians in Judea. Barnabas then travels with Paul on his first missionary journey. Together they visit the Jerusalem community again for discussions with the Christian community there, which we know as the Council of Jerusalem. The question they seek to answer is whether Gentiles who do not follow Jewish practices, such as circumcision, can be included in the church. The Council confirmed that Gentiles need not follow the Jewish law to be included, authorised Barnabas and Paul to continue their mission to Gentiles, and asked them to maintain contact with the Community at Jerusalem.

What a life Barnabas had, and how much we owe him! We celebrate him as a saint and example, a true hero of our faith! Sent out by the Community in Jerusalem, with Paul he founded churches across the Eastern Roman Empire. At first these were probably what we would call ‘house churches’, meeting to worship in each other’s homes, without holding possessions in common. They kept in touch with each other, and with the community in Jerusalem by exchanging letters in the hands of messengers.

We who are members of the Community of Brendan the Navigator are part of a dispersed religious community.

We are rooted in the Church of Ireland but with an ecumenical outlook. We welcome as members any who are interested in walking with us.

We do not ask members to live together or hold their personal possessions in common, but we do expect them to follow a simple rule of life: to be regular in prayer and contemplation, to support Community events, and to commit to a personal spiritual practice, which members must work out and apply for themselves.

Through the Community, we experience fellowship on our Christian life’s journey. We come together and walk together in the spirit of pilgrimage, sharing our personal faith and experience with others, and bringing back the gifts of faith we receive from them to our home places.

On Saturday this week the Community of Brendan will hold a 16km pilgrimage walk between the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow and St Lazerian’s Cathedral, Old Leighlin. I plan to attend a shortened walk of about 6km – my old legs would not carry me any further. I would be glad to give a lift to anyone who would like to join me.

 

We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses

Reflection at Compline in Killodiernan Church on the Wednesday in Holy Week, 1st April 2026

‘We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.’

So says the anonymous author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the reading (Hebrews 12:1-3). But who are these witnesses?

For the author of Hebrews, it was all the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets who held to their faith in Yahweh, the God of Israel, as the one true God. He gives a long list of them in the previous chapter. As Christians, we still hold them in honour today as our ancestors in faith.

But to them we add all the named Christian apostles, saints, and martyrs. They are examples to us of people who held firm in their faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and his teaching, despite every discouragement. They are heroes of our faith.

But our cloud of witnesses is even bigger than that. It includes all those Christians whose names we have never heard of, but who died in the faith of Christ. 

And it also includes all those, living or dead, who have formed our own faith. We remember them with gratitude for their examples – may their names be a blessing to us!

How wonderful it is to be surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses!

We are not alone on our personal journeys of faith. Others have gone before us. Let us take inspiration from them. As Hebrews urges us, let us ‘lay aside every weight’ that holds us back. Let us lay aside ‘the sin that clings so closely’ to us. And ‘Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us’, the race to the kingdom of God, our promised land.

And in this Holy Week, let us focus our minds on Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’.

He endured the pain of the cross, and the mocking of hostile crowds, ‘so that (we) may not grow weary or lose heart’, as the author of Hebrews puts it.

It is Jesus who has inspired the cloud of witnesses who in turn inspire us. Jesus showed them, as he shows us, the way to defeat evil, the Way of the cross. He also promises us forgiveness when we fall out of the race, as we surely shall sometimes. Though we fall all too often, when we seek God’s forgiveness, Jesus gives us the strength to pick ourselves up, and continue the race. With his help we will win the ultimate prize, we will abide with our triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in his eternal kingdom.

 

Deep despair and triumphant joy

An Orthodox Icon of the Parousia, Christ's 2nd Coming

A reflection in the April 2026 issue of Grapevine, the newsletter for the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I am writing this in the run up to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, with Good Friday and Easter almost upon us. The moods of the season, expressed in liturgy, swing wildly from triumphant joy to deep despair and back again. You may find it a bit unsettling, as I do.

We begin with Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Jesus rides into town on a donkey. Cheering crowds, lay their cloaks and palm branches in front of him. We sing joyful hosannas. Though we also listen to the long Passion Gospel, and hold up crosses made from palm leaves.

The mood darkens as Good Friday approaches. The Gospel readings intimate what is to come. In the Maundy Thursday Gospel, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, setting them an example of servant leadership. And we act out the Last Supper in his memory, through which Jesus offers the bread and wine as his body and his blood.

On Good Friday, we mourn as we reflect on the enormity of Jesus’s death. We hear his anguished cry of desolation, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And we re-enact his last earthly journey to Golgotha and his agonising crucifixion.

Then on Easter Sunday we greet his resurrection with abounding joy and shouts of ‘Christ has risen!’.

It is as if the very weather at this time of year echoes these wild swings between joy and despair, in what the literary critic John Ruskin called ‘pathetic fallacy’. One moment we suffer an arctic blast with freezing rain and frosty nights, and the next we rejoice in balmy sunshine. One moment our spirits are lifted by the spring flowers, and the next they are dashed by the sight of frosted shoots.

And this year, as bystanders, we see and hear the frightful news of wars and destruction in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other places in our broken world. Cruel national leaders stride across the world as if they were Gods, spouting venom and launching brutal attacks, then pivoting to words of peace, as markets gyrate and rich men profit. We dread what is to come, as we hope and pray for peace.

But listen and absorb the Easter message, which is this. The kingdom of God has come near. Jesus’s Good Friday death and Easter resurrection promise us that evil cannot win. Our sins will be forgiven if we only repent, and we shall enter God’s eternal kingdom of peace and justice. Spring’s wild swings will turn to summer’s steady, fruitful days. Wars will end and tyrants will be overthrown. Let us face the future filled with Easter hope.

Resurrection

Address given at Killodiernan Church on Sunday 22nd March 2026, the 5th of Lent 

The vision of the valley of the dry bones. Ezekiel 37:4-5. Illustration by Gustave Doré

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.
Oh hear the word of the Lord!

Forgive me for my poor singing, but after hearing the words of Ezekiel’s stirring vision in our OT reading, I couldn’t resist it!

Both readings today are about resurrection: the renewal of life in someone or something that to all appearances is dead. Ezekiel (37:1-14) prophesies the resurrection of the House of Israel, at a time of desolation and exile. And John (11:1-45) tells us the story of the raising of Lazarus.

So today I’m going to examine these readings more closely and ponder the meaning of resurrection. What a fine subject resurrection is for a fine spring day, when all about us seeds and plants and trees and lambs and calves are bounding into new life in our gardens and fields!

So firstly, what about Ezekiel’s dry bones?

Ezekiel is writing in Babylon around 580BC, shortly after Nebuchadnezzar’s armies had laid waste to Jerusalem and the Temple. The Israelite leaders and many of the people had been deported into exile by the banks of the Euphrates, close to Babylon in what is now modern Iraq.

Ezekiel conjures up such a vivid picture, doesn’t he? The unburied corpses of the Israelites killed in the Babylonian invasions have weathered to parched, dislocated and scattered bones. We are told they represent the whole people of Israel, the exiles crushed by despair, and the dislocated and disoriented Israelites left behind, not just the dead. And Ezekiel tells this devastated people that their God YHWH will not let them down; he will open their graves, he will give them life, and he will restore them to their land.

Ezekiel’s prophesy is, of course, a metaphor, a metaphor carefully crafted to give a devastated nation hope, hope that one day they will be restored to their land. His words resonated with the people of Israel, and helped to hold them together, until eventually the exiles were able to return to Jerusalem 50 years later, when Babylon in turn was captured by Cyrus the Persian. The ancient people of Israel did indeed experience a resurrection to new life!

These words resonated once again with the devastated Jewish people of Europe, emerging from the Nazi extermination camps after the Holocaust, the Shoah in Hebrew, as they created their modern state of Israel in Ezekiel’s ancient homeland. A heart-breaking consequence has been the devastation of the Palestinian people they displaced, which they call the Nakba, or Catastrophe in Arabic. As we walk with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and the cross this Lent, let us pray for an end to the evil cycle of hatred and bloodshed there, for reconciliation with peace and justice, for a resurrection to new life for all in the Holy Land.

The black slaves transported to America were another devastated people. The plight of the Israelites in exile and Ezekiel’s message of hope resonated with them too, inspiring Gospel songs like ‘Dem bones’, which are now part of our common inheritance.

Now let’s turn to John’s Gospel and the raising of Lazarus.

It’s a rather long passage, and it’s a puzzling story, but the Evangelist fills it with so much incidental detail that the scenes really come to life. It is easy to imagine being there,

One lovely thing that shines out is how much Jesus loved Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus.

Luke also tells us about Martha and Mary, but not Lazarus. If you remember, Mary sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him talk, leaving Martha to do all the housework. And when Martha complained, Jesus gently chided her for being so distracted by mundane tasks. How delightful it must have been for Jesus to visit these close friends, to relax, to be himself, and to drink in the warmth and love of their home. As a wandering teacher Jesus had no home of his own. I feel sure that he must have needed that sort of refreshment, just as much as we do.

But this visit was different. Lazarus was dead. Both Martha and Mary separately said to him ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’. I think Jesus must have felt guilty for arriving late. When he saw Mary weeping, Jesus too broke down and wept. Our translation has it that he was ‘deeply moved’, but this really isn’t strong enough at all. The Greek word used by John is also used of a horse snorting. The meaning must be that Jesus’s heart was so wrung by anguish that he howled.

And then Jesus did what he had come to do: he called Lazarus out from the grave, back from the dead.

There are a number of things that puzzle me about John’s story:

Firstly, some of the words he puts in Jesus’s mouth seem rather out of character to me. Think for a moment about his declaration that Lazarus’s illness ‘is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it’. What a cold way to look at a friend’s suffering! Could Jesus really have said that? John's purpose in writing his Gospel was to convert Greek speaking Jews who were not believers. Did this lead him to put words in Jesus’s mouth?

Secondly, John makes it clear that the raising of Lazarus is the immediate reason why the Jewish authorities decided to do away with Jesus, leading directly to his crucifixion. Yet the other three Gospels say absolutely nothing about it, nothing at all! We know that at least one of the apostles was there, Thomas. So how could the other Gospel writers not have heard of and written about such an important miracle, with such momentous results, if John’s account is correct?

And then there’s the elephant in the room. How can we explain satisfactorily - scientifically - a four day old, stinking corpse rising up and walking? A person who has apparently just died might be woken from a coma. But one that has started to decompose?

There may be problems with John’s story. Some of us will believe that it all happened just as John sets down that it did. Others will be much less certain, or interpret it metaphorically. And we can never know for sure what exactly happened so long ago. But does it really matter whether or not Jesus literally brought a corpse to life in Bethany in AD30?

 

What really matters, I think, is the spiritual message.

That message is that that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Perhaps John has crafted the whole story around that message.

 

Jesus said to Martha ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die’.

 

One thing is clear – Jesus is not speaking of physical life. We all know that Christians experience physical death just like everyone else. We will all die.

 

But if we believe in Jesus Christ, if we accept what he teaches us about his loving Father God as true, if we stake our lives upon it, then we enter into a new relationship with God, and we enter into a new relationship with life. We become certain of God’s love. We become certain that above all he is a redeeming God – if sin is death, forgiveness is resurrection. And the fear of death vanishes, because death means nothing more than a merging with God, the great lover of souls.

 

With faith in Jesus Christ, our life becomes a new thing, a strong thing, such a lovely thing, that we cannot imagine it ending incomplete. ‘Do you believe this?’ said Jesus. ‘Yes, Lord’ said Martha, ‘I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’.

 

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Life-giving God,

your Son came into the world

to free us all from sin and death:

breathe upon us with the power of your Spirit,

that we may be raised to new life in Christ,

and serve you in holiness and righteousness all our days;

through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit. Amen

How many times must I forgive?

The Unmerciful Servant, John Millais

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th March 2026

We have just heard Jesus tell us a story about forgiving debts (Matthew 18:21-35).

The king has lent 10,000 talents to a slave. It is an unimaginably large sum - in today’s money well over €1billion. The slave cannot repay it, so the king threatens to make him bankrupt – to sell him, his family and all his possessions to recover what he can. But when the slave appeals for mercy, the king responds mercifully. He forgives him the debt and lets him go free.

But slave #1 has lent 100 denarii to another slave - a more modest sum, equivalent to roughly 100 days wages, say €10,000. As slave #1 leaves the king’s presence, he sees slave #2, grabs him by the throat and demands to be repaid. He ignores slave #2’s pleas for time to pay and has him thrown into the debtors’ prison.

When the king hears about it, he is furious. He calls slave #1 to him and says, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?’

We can all see slave #1 is a nasty piece of work. How unjust it is for someone who has been forgiven such an unimaginably large debt to force another to pay a modest one!

But of course the story isn’t really about forgiving debts.

The context of is that Peter has come to Jesus to ask, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’  To which Jesus replies, ‘Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times’.

Now, the Rabbis believed that God would only forgive a sinner three times, based on an obscure text from the prophet Amos. So, as nobody could be more merciful than God, no one should be obliged to forgive another more than three times. ‘Three strikes and you’re out’, as it were.

Peter went beyond that to suggest seven. Perhaps he hoped that Jesus would commend his greater mercy. But in his response Jesus teaches Peter and the other disciples – and through them us – that there should be no limit to our mercy toward our neighbour.

Jesus tells the story to explain why this is so. He concludes it saying, ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ God’s mercy, Jesus is saying, is without limit. God forgives each one of us an unimaginably large amount of wrong. Therefore, God expects us to forgive whatever modest wrongs other people have done to us. And if we don’t, we will forfeit God’s forgiveness ourselves. After all, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’.

The story is about the forgiveness of sins, not about the forgiveness of debts. Disciples of Jesus must forgive people who do them wrong. Otherwise they will not receive God’s forgiveness for the wrongs they themselves do.

It can be very difficult to forgive wrongs done to us by another, even if that person says they are sorry, and shows contrition. If we find ourselves in that situation, if we find ourselves unable to forgive someone who has wronged us, we should pray for the grace to be able to forgive from the heart, because followers of Jesus should imitate God’s mercy, which is without limit.

The Samaritan woman and Jesus at Jacob's well

The Water of Life Discourse, Angelika Kauffmann, 17th–18th century

Today’s Gospel reading (John 4:5-42), about the Samaritan woman at the well, is a beautifully vivid story, isn’t it? It could almost be a film script.

To begin to understand it we need to know something about the Samaritans and their relationship to Jews in the NT period, Jews like Jesus and his disciples.

Samaritans and Jews saw each other as outsiders, and they lived apart. These two peoples shared so much: the same land, the same God, and the same Torah – the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But they saw each other as having different religions. To Jews the Samaritans were ritually unclean – they contaminated anything they touched. Samaritans, on the other hand, believed they had preserved the true Israelite religion, which the Jews who returned from exile in Babylon had perverted. The Jews worshipped God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans worshipped God on Mount Gerizim. As they still do, for a small Samaritan community has persisted through centuries of persecution in the land of Palestine.

But Jesus consistently tried to break down the barriers between Jews and Samaritans. For example, the Good Samaritan is not a stranger but is the very best example of a good neighbour (Luke 10: 29-37). And among the Ten Lepers who Jesus healed, only the Samaritan returns to give thanks, and Jesus praises this “foreigner” for his faith (Luke 17: 11-19).

In the story, the disciples do something surprising.

They go into the city of Sychar to buy food. But this is no ordinary city – this is a Samaritan city. Any food they might buy from Samaritans is going to be unclean according to Jewish ritual standards.

While the Disciples are in Sychar, Jesus sits down at nearby Jacob’s Well, and begins talking with a Samaritan woman who has come to the well for water. ‘Give me a drink’, he says. She is intrigued, ‘How is it’, she replies, ‘that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’. She is surprised Jesus would accept a drink from her, as she knew Jews would consider it unclean.

Their conversation is a model for how we should respond to outsiders in our midst, whether they are foreigners or people of a different religion or culture. It is a real dialogue, involving both speaking and listening – speaking with the expectation of being heard, and listening honestly to what the other is saying, rather than listening to what our prejudices tell us they ought to say. And it is tinged with humour.

They speak about water. Jesus says, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And the woman replies with wit, ‘Sir, give me this water … so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

And they speak about their different faiths. The woman says, ‘I have no husband’, and Jesus laughingly replies, ‘You are right … for you have had five husbands’ – no doubt a reference to the five books of the Torah. The woman says, ‘Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain’ – Mount Gerizim – ‘but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’. To which Jesus replies, ‘The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’

For Jesus it does not matter where or how you worship God, so long as you do so in spirit and in truth.

When the Disciples arrive back, they are shocked to find Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman.

They are filled with questions, but they cannot bring themselves to ask them. Their silence reflects their inability to reach out to the stranger.

But their failure and their prejudices are shown in another way: the woman gives Jesus water as she and Christ talk, but they fail to join in the conversation about faith and about life.

They are still unable to articulate their faith, but the woman recognises Christ as a Prophet. They made no contact with the people in Sychar, but she rushes back to tell the people there about Jesus. No one in the city was brought to Jesus by the disciples, but many Samaritans listened to what the woman had to say, and they came to believe that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world.

Jesus was thirsty, he asked the Samaritan woman for water, and she gave it to him.

But in return she received much more from Jesus: he gave her the ‘living water’ which became in her ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. She believed in Jesus, and because of her many Samaritans came to believe in him.

‘I am thirsty’, is the fifth of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross on Good Friday, and in response he is given wine with bitter hyssop (John 19:28-30). Many people have compared the thirst of Christ on the Cross with his request to the Samaritan woman, ‘Give me a drink’, and the promise that follows, ‘Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’.

In expressing his thirst out loud in that cry from the cross, Christ shows his humanity and his humility. In expressing such a basic need, he shows his solidarity with all those people who are in need, living or dying, healthy or sick, great or small, and who in humility are forced to ask for a cup of water.

In his thirst on the Cross, I think the dying Christ seeks something much more than water or vinegar. He thirsts for a new humanity to be formed and shaped through his incarnation, life and passion, death, resurrection and ascension. His thirst is for our salvation.

So, let us give thanks for the openness and trust of the Samaritan woman.

And let us pray that Christ will give us, as he gave her, ‘living water’ which will become in us ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’:

O God, the fountain of life,
to a humanity parched with thirst
you offer the living water that springs from the Rock,
our Saviour Jesus Christ:
stir up within your people the gift of your Spirit,
that we may profess our faith with freshness
and announce with joy the wonder of your love.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen