We have these readings today set in the context of the Exodus, as last week’s were set in the context of the sending out of Abram. “Go, leave your country, your kindred, your father’s house and go to a land where I will show you.” As when Jesus says, in effect, to Nicodemus “you can’t get there from here; you must be born again” there is an urgent call to systemic discontinuity, to leaving something definitively behind.

Gaining a little theological distance from the immediacy of this man standing before her, the woman at the well says to Jesus, “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” And Jesus answers her, “Believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…” Abram, Nicodemus, Moses and Israel, this woman—all are confronted with the requirement to break from the cycle of biological, religious, and cultural determinacy. But the catch is that this break cannot be accomplished by strictly natural means. As our collect has it, ‘we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.’

Even if the Samaritan woman’s religious milieu isn’t personally consolatory or healing—she is obviously shunned and excluded, possibly for immoral behavior—even if she lives a life of quiet desperation, the religious system still has a certain ordering capacity and is still objectively manageable. “Jacob gave us this well and our ancestors worshipped on this mountain; when Messiah comes he will make everything clear to us.”

But Jesus comes into this ordered system with holy disorder to meet the woman where she is and with what she needs. After her encounter with Jesus, the woman becomes an actual person again—restored to place in her society, and taken seriously by it. For, acknowledging her part, the people say, “Now it is not only because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know this is truly the savior of the world.”

How is this woman’s Exodus effected? Presenting himself to the woman, asking for a drink, Jesus carefully finds the crack in the woman’s armor plating, the place where light shines through, and goes straight there. “Go, call your husband and come back.”

Jesus tests her degree of thirst, and searches her heart. The place of greatest wounding is going to be the place with the most protection and padding on it. Whatever interior wound the woman was attempting to anaesthetize by continual intimacy, that is what Jesus touched.

As many have supposed and understood it, the Gospel still has a moral, intellectual ordering capacity, but it does not lead us out, it gives us nothing to drink. Unable to recognize Jesus in the Gospel for his very immediacy and homeliness, many still lead lives of quiet desperation, on the outside looking in. To receive the Gospel as it is, one has to allow oneself to be seen, and one’s wounds to be found out and touched.

When Jesus comes into our way and says ‘give me a drink’ we are going to recognize him to the degree that we allow ourselves to be thrown into disorder—in other words, to the degree of our capacity for availability, vulnerability and daring hospitality. The continual expansion of this capacity is our own exodus into freedom, and what our whole life is about.