God is Found on the Margins

Gospel: John 4: 5-42

In today's readings we encounter an important realization: throughout the scriptures God is encountered beyond the city walls by those who would ordinarily be excluded by humans from having contact with God.  Cities are the domain of human-made laws both civil and religious.  Like the walls of the city, they seek to circumscribe and limit human experience of God to its own categories and place and for specific people.  And yet every encounter with God takes place outside the city to outcasts - Moses the murderer at the bush, Elijah the heretic on the mountain.  

And the Samaritan woman at the well.  She encounters the Lord Jesus on the outskirts of the town; she has to bring the townspeople to Jesus, just as people went out to the desert to encounter John the Baptist.  There they discover the water of eternal life and the realization that worship of God is not confined to place or people, but is accessible to all everywhere.  And this outcast foreign woman becomes the first evangelist to bring the Good News to her people.  

We who would seek to limit God to particular places and for particular people take note! The only ones we will succeed in excluding from God is ourselves.  God is found on the peripheries among the marginalized, and to them has been entrusted the task of revealing God to us all.