Montreal Dio principal Jesse Zink was to preach and be installed as canon theologian of the Diocese of Montreal at Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday, March 15, 2020. With the cancellation of services, the sermon was written but never preached—but is shared here. The lectionary gospel text is John 4:5-42.
I teach a course just up the street at McGill University where one of my favourite questions to ask students is this: who is a theologian? By the time they get to this course, these students have been through the considerable rigours of courses on Philosophy of Religion and the Principles of Christian Theology. When asked to name theologians, they can come up with a ready list: Augustine of Hippo or Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth or Kathryn Tanner. Each of these people, regardless of the century or the part of the world in which they lived, is recognizably someone who “does” theology. They think about the big questions about God. They write down their questions and point towards what they think the answers are. Their books end up on syllabuses of courses like Principles of Christian Theology.
But who else is a theologian? I want to know. What about the women whose faith motivates them to organize peaceful protests to end civil war in west Africa? What about a charismatic preacher who starts a church under a tree with Bible in hand and preaches God’s good news to those who pass by? What about the young woman whose life revolves around fetching water, cooking food, growing crops, all of it sustained by a rhythm of prayer and song throughout the day? People like this may not leave behind written books for us to study or end up on the syllabuses of courses at places like McGill but each of them, I tell my students, is engaged in the work of theology.
This question comes to mind on this day when this diocese takes a moment to set aside one of its number and designate him as canon theologian. It can sound like an august title. The word canon in this context means “rule” or “standard.” To call someone a “canon” for anything is to set them apart and point them out to everyone else and say, “This is the model we want for our people.” To call someone a canon theologian, it seems, is to say, “See, this is what a theologian should look like.”
But you could be forgiven for asking yourself, “Canon theologian? Is that really what the church needs right now?” Many congregations are struggling to attract new members. The church needs a canon for more bums in seats, not a canon theologian. You might look at the balance sheet of the average congregation and the serious questions these raise about their future and say that what we really need is a canon for fundraising and deficit elimination. These concerns come in the midst of a world that is wrestling with existential questions of its own, from viral pandemic to the always present, ever increasing threat of catastrophic climate change. What we really need, you might say, is a canon for social distancing or a canon for carbon reduction. In the existential moment that many parts of the church and world seem to be confronting, theology can seem to be a luxury, a vague irrelevance, among the first things to be dispensed with when the going gets tough, as indeed it is right now.
In the midst of this comes the wonderful story of Jesus’ encounter with a woman at a well in Samaria. The author of the gospel of John tells this story in such loving detail it’s worth spending a little time on it. It begins with Jesus traveling in the land of the Samaritans, the historic enemies of Jesus’ Jewish people. It’s the middle of the day. It’s hot. Jesus is tired. He comes to a well and sits down. There’s a woman there getting water. Pause, there, for a moment. If you’ve ever spent time in a part of the world where women have to fetch water, you’ll know that this is strange. Women get water in the cool of the morning or evening, not when the sun is beating down on them. There’s something curious about this woman.
Jesus asks her for a drink of water. The woman, strikingly, responds not by complying but by questioning: “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” Don’t you know we’re not supposed to like each other, she’s saying. A dialogue ensues. Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have you given you living water.”
The woman’s reply reveals her to be deeply human. You can sense how much she wants to get this, to understand what he’s saying, but she’s not quite to the point of comprehension. “Sir,” she responds, as if pointing out the obvious, “you have no bucket, and the well is deep.” Then she asks two more questions, “Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
Perhaps Jesus is getting a bit exasperated at this point. After all, he’s still hot and tired and the woman has not managed to get him a drink of water. All she’s done is pepper him with questions. So Jesus responds again, “Everyone who drinks of this water”—that is, the water in the well—“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.”
The woman, who still hasn’t given him the water, still does not quite comprehend but you can tell she so deeply wants to: “Sir,” she responds, “give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” She’s heard Jesus talk about an eternal spring that comes right up within you. Thank goodness, she’s thinking: I never have to lug water from this well again. The conversation is happening on parallel tracks, with Jesus talking about the gift of eternal life and refreshment that comes through him and the woman fixated on the every day, but nonetheless very real, concerns related to her survival.
Jesus is still hot, still tired, and still thirsty but let’s pause the story for a moment to note a few things about this encounter. First, let’s note the great difference between Jesus and this woman. Jesus is a Jewish man and a teacher at that. He would be expected to be concerned about proper interactions, particularly with people of the opposite sex. The woman is, well, a woman and a Samaritan and definitely not a teacher. In just a few verses we’ll learn that she has been married many times and is living with a man who is not her husband. That might explain the oddity of her fetching water in the heat of the day. It’s a time, she knows, when no one else will be there to gossip about her behind her back. This well is a place that no one would expect Jesus to be in, and the woman has no expectation that there would be another person here at this hour.
The second thing to notice about this encounter is the way in which it is marked by the woman’s relentless questioning. She keeps asking questions and asking them directly of Jesus. The uniqueness of what she is doing becomes apparent just a few verses later when Jesus’ disciples come to the well. They are astonished that he is speaking with a woman. But the text is quick to point out that “no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or ‘Why are you speaking with her?’” That is, Jesus’ followers cannot bring themselves to do the thing that this woman was just doing repeatedly and ask a question. Instead, they offer Jesus some food and Jesus, mysteriously, responds that he has “food to eat you do not know about.” Now, at last, the disciples can ask a question, but they don’t ask Jesus directly. Instead, they whisper to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?”
Meanwhile, the woman has moved on. The woman leaves her water jar there at the well and rushes back to the city. Hopefully, she has left a ladle there so Jesus can at last have a drink of water. There, she starts talking to the first people she meets, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” She has had this transformative encounter and becomes the first evangelist of Jesus’ good news in this gospel. And, characteristically, she adds another question, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” At the end of this passage, we hear that as a result of this woman’s testimony, many Samaritans believed in Jesus and invited him to stay in their city and teach them.
The character in this story who should be made the canon theologian is the woman at the well. She embodies the activity of theology that is close to the centre of the life of the church. First, she is open to encountering difference. Jesus is almost entirely unlike her but she is not phased by the encounter. Instead, she embraces it. Second, her reaction to difference is what we might describe as wonder. You can almost hear the wheels turning in her head when Jesus is speaking: I wonder what he means by that? And instead of keeping that to herself, she spits it right out in the form of a question, however ill-formed and half-baked it may be, however much it betrays her own ignorance and failure to immediately comprehend that it is the Messiah of God in front of her. “Are you sure you want water from a Samaritan like me?” and “Yes, Lord, where is that water so I don’t have to keep lugging this stuff every day?” Slowly, gradually, she comes to comprehend but even before she fully understands, her wonder and her questions have already taken her away from Jesus to share this encounter with others. This is what theology looks like: the persistent, wondering, questioning, transforming encounter with difference in the world around us, wrapped up in a deep commitment to God and the manifestation of God’s love in the world.
So who is a theologian? Yes, it’s true that the church needs people who can write books and teach classes at places like McGill and occasionally it makes sense to set these people apart and call them canons. But what the church really needs is more people like the woman at the well. People who are deeply human. People who are not willing to let their ignorance get the best of them, but persist no matter how silly it may make them look. People who are willing to look around the world for that which is different or strange or odd and encounter it with a sense of wonder and curiosity, to ask I wonder what God is doing over there?
Difference is a tricky thing these days. As we draw closer together through the social media, global travel, and a never-ending news cycle, we see ever more forms of difference but, it seems, a striking deficit of wonder. The patient, persistent work of encountering difference is, for many, not for them. In Montreal, we are blessed to be surrounded by difference: language, race, class, ethnicity, profession, national origin, political persuasion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and so much more. There is so much difference to encounter, so much to wonder at, so much to question. Migrants from around the world continually come to this city, many of them Christian and some Anglican. Can the church bring itself to ask, “I wonder how our congregations can listen to the voices of these Anglicans from around the world?” There are great differences of economic wealth in this city. It is a place for the church to ask, “I wonder how this church can encounter the great differences in social position we encounter when we stand in this church and look across the street at the people looking for shelter by The Bay?” At a time of viral pandemic and social distancing, there is a place for Christians everywhere to ask, “I wonder how we can be a people who speak a word of trust and love to a people consumed by uncertainty and fear?”
Yes, it is true, I am a theologian. But so is each one of you here today. Each one of us is able to follow the timeless model of that nameless woman at the well who encountered difference, turned to wonder, persisted in questioning, and transformed not only her life but the life of her community. That is the model for my ministry as canon theologian, and if it is a model I can set for this community I will count it a success.
The image that accompanies this post is by Neil Thorogood, a pastor in England’s United Reformed Church. It is from his “Bible from the Air” series and depicts a birds-eye view of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman.