A crowd has followed Jesus out into the wilderness, seeking healing even as he is seeking some quiet. Moved to compassion, he cures their sick, working all day to care for them. Finally, it is evening and the disciples want to send everyone on their way to find their own dinners. They themselves have thought ahead and brought dinner with them. Jesus, however, refuses to break up the party. “They need not go away;” he says “You give them something to eat.” Then he takes what the disciples have and blesses it, making it sufficient for the task. Then he gives it back to the disciples so that they may feed the people.

Preached by the Ven. Rhonda Waters on Sunday, June 11, 2023.

This is what God does. Blesses so that we might be a blessing; so that in being a blessing we might be blessed. This is the economy of God – one where there is only ever abundance for the act of giving is also the act of creating.

If Jesus is the gate – who is everything else – sheep, and shepherd, and bandit?

It’s not often we see promise in emptiness, is it? Promise, potential, possibility – it’s usually associated with fullness the roundness of a woman’s womb full of child; the fatness of a letter stuffed with many pages; the groaning of a table laden with a feast.

This is the promised redemption of the cross. Whether we find ourselves on the cross, or at its foot, or on the judgement seat – Jesus is there with us, either in loving opposition or in loving consolation, but with us, in love.

Christian hope is found in the willingness to face death, in all its costliness, because we trust in the promise of the resurrection. And resurrection is impossible without death.

The Samaritan woman is the kind of Christian our world needs today – not afraid to spar with Jesus, not afraid of the stirrings of the Spirit in her own soul; not afraid to tell other people about her experience and not afraid to invite them to come and see for themselves and tell her what they think is going on.

The judgment, it seems to me, is not about what you or I mean when we say “belief in Jesus”. The judgment is about deeds that people don’t want exposed – dangerous secrets, wicked acts, hidden selves. Things of death that people will not raise up to be transformed, by repentance and forgiveness, into a doorway to true life.