It is a big responsibility to preach for International Women’s Day. There is so much to say and so little time.

We might wonder why there is bias, oppression, and violence towards women in history.

Neurology tells us that at a very deep unconscious level, we see another person’s age, race and gender with very fast neural processing that goes undetected by our conscious mind.
We may decry ageism, racism and sexism, but they are very deeply hardwired. And because we are also language users, we add all sorts of other assessments, like class, and status, to the list.

That is why I find Bridgerton so fascinating. It imagines a world that is completely blind to race and, in some ways, to gender. There is a female queen. But not blind to class. In the latest episodes it is class and illegitimacy that must be overcome.

Jesus, however, embodies a different reality, one in which all these hard-wired and acquired prejudices are overcome.

The woman we meet at the well in today’s reading has tribe and gender against her and probably age as well. The short passage reveals a huge amount about the plight of women in Jesus time.
Jewish men, for historic reasons, did not engage with Samaritans and never with a woman alone at a well. Jesus, however, does just that.

The encounter at the well takes place in Shechem. It is or is near the town of Nablus on the the West Bank. Right at the heart of things.
It was said to be the place where Abraham encountered God and a covenant was made, where Joseph is buried. But it has also been a place of violence and struggle and division.

Shechem had a long pre-history, but it entered into the biblical record with violence. It centred around another woman. Dinah, the daughter of Jacob.
Jacob was moving with his tribe into the land of Canaan, but peacefully. At Shechem, Dinah was raped by a local prince. But the prince also loved Dinah and tried to persuade Jacob and his sons to allow him to marry Dinah and in fact for his people to marry theirs. There is room for everyone, he said. A phrase that is particularly poignant today. The brothers demanded that all the men be circumcised. While they were in post-circumcision agony the brothers massacred them. And later they desecrated the city.
Of course, as with every rape, we have no idea what really happened. Was there mutual attraction? Was she taken by surprise? There seemed to be genuine affection on the part of the prince. The only thing we know is that she was not consulted and her voice does not register. We know that her brothers were concerned for their own honour, rather than her welfare. She represented social capital that had been squandered. We note also that this first brutality was completely disproportionate violence, in a middle eastern history that specializes in over-reaction. At its heart was a silent woman, not to mention the wives and children of the men who were massacred. We don’t know Dinah’s fate. We hope for her that she found happiness and family.

After this, we have the history of the sons of Jacob and Joseph going off to Egypt, and four hundred years of slavery before the Jews come back to Israel as conquerors. But the land of Israel became divided, and this well, and the land bought by Jacob became a part of Samaria, as distinct from Judah to the south. Today, it is in an Eastern Orthodox monastery in Palestinian territory. So this well was even then a place that symbolized an ancient heritage and bitter divisions.
In this holy and highly charged place Jesus encounters a woman at the well.
And Jesus started the conversation, asking for water. She replies, puzzled that he has no jug and that she is talking to him. He ends up offering her living water that will never run out, that will flow to eternal life, and he reveals he is the messiah. Yet he was often coy about revealing exactly who he was.

So one of the unusual aspects of this story was that Jesus had a deep and theological conversation with a woman, a Samaritan woman, alone, at a well in Shechem, reversing in a sense the dishonoring of Dinah.

This woman, whom we encounter today had had 5 husbands. Today people have read that statement as a judgment. It was more likely a measure of her trauma and how hard her life had been. Given in marriage perhaps to one brother after another, eventually living with someone she was not permitted to marry. Not consulted. Bearing children and gathering water. Never really seen. Very far from the comfortable or scandalous serial monogamy of today. But the judgments placed on this woman are typical of those placed on women today in those circumstances.
Jesus doesn’t seem very concerned about the husbands. He doesn’t offer her condolence or judgment or closure. In this place of such traumatic memory, he speaks of living waters, of waters overflowing, and of being in himself the source of this water. Something registers, very deeply for this woman. The intimacy, the way he knows her, sets her free.

The disciples when they return were surprised to find Jesus conversing with this woman.
That might be us. We often look at the world through the lenses of our culture and its sexist and exclusionist assumptions, not seeing what magnificence is on offer.

This reminds us on this women’s day of the other time God had a conversation with a despised and despairing woman. Hagar right near the beginning of things. God revealed God’s name to her when she had run away from Sarah.

In both cases, the women felt heard; they felt seen. There was an intimacy established very quickly. In a few words of recognition, Jesus showed that he knew this woman. And her response was jubilation. She became in many ways the first missionary.

She is known in tradition as Photine, or bright shining one. She is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And we should pause for a moment and realise that in the gospels, our natural sexist, classist, imperialist, colonialist, racist lenses are upended. Quietly, without fanfare. The least shall be great, the last, first, Jews and Samarians will be no more. And so on.

We should note at this time of unprecedented violence that weighs heavily on all of us, that is waged not reluctantly or carefully, but with a terrible recklessness that is disproportionate in every way, that threatens all life on earth, that Jesus is still offering us, not just a good enough life, not just a life free from violence, but abundance, abundance of life, waters of life, There truly is enough for everyone, if we are following him and not the way of war.

Jesus will show us in the weeks and days before Easter that this abundance and plenty is not associated with the usual grasping of the world, or its underlying violence. It is by taking the gift, accepting the spirit, understanding the words. And this message was entrusted most completely, not to the male disciples but to a woman at the well who had led a complicated and hard life. The Bible is quite open about the oppression many women experience, but it also offers resistance, freedom and hope.

And lastly, this gospel speaks of sowing and reaping and how they are often not connected. One person sows, another reaps. We who are women did not sow the seeds that led to universal suffrage, that enabled most of us to work in most jobs that men have today. We have reaped the benefits of generations of women before us. We are no longer just social capital for a family. Even if many of our gains are in jeopardy, and even if a deep sexism still remains. And this thing about sowing and reaping is true in another way as well. Women have always been the ones who nurture and care, not knowing whether the years of nurturing and caring will bear fruit.

Photine, the woman at the well, had had many years of nurturing and caring and carrying water. She was so changed by her encounter with Jesus that she brought all her village to see him, and together they proclaimed him to be not only the messiah but the saviour of the world. In the end, she not only sowed but saw the fruits of her sowing as well. She had encountered Jesus. By tradition, it is said that she went on to evangelise throughout the Middle East and died a martyr.

And us, what of us. What can we do in this world, overcome by violence, and in the same land that Jesus declared himself to be living water, the saviour of the world? It seems hopeless, just as it was for Moses in the desert. We can resist by joining the world at prayer. And when that seems not to work as the Collect says, we have to go on praying. And in eucharist. We need to listen to women, unlikely women. We can give to the Red Cross, which is always called in to mop up the carnage of war, and we can pray for those working for peace. For example, Peace Now, a group of Israelis resisting their government’s slaughter.

Shechem was also the place where Jacob called on the Jews to choose life, that they and their children might live. That choosing of life, choosing of the living waters, is still our basic choice in all things. It is also a choice that favours the life and flourishing of women.
We can’t be blind to differences among us, especially gender differences, but we can transcend them and imagine a future peace, a future flourishing of men and women and everything in-between all together. And this time of Lent is a time to reflect on our lives and our biases. What oppressions are we a part of just by going about our everyday business. And in our everyday words? How can we resist our country’s violence. How can we show the living and eternal waters of which Jesus speaks?