Today our “elect”, those preparing for baptism at Easter, are “given” the Creed.  We will all recite it for them to hear. We are playing the part of Mother Church. We are being Mother Church – handing on the faith to her new children. In two weeks’ time, we will “hand on” the Our Father, the gift of prayer. Mother Church, like any believing mother, wants to pass on to her children the gift of faith and the art of prayer. These are life-giving things.

Today, with the Creed, the emphasis is on faith: that faith we bring to baptism and which at the same time is given, in a new way, at baptism. This is the faith that justifies us, makes us right with God. Christianity uses the word faith in two senses. There is faith in the objective sense: what we believe, faith as content. It’s the business of Creeds to summarise that, to spell out the essentials of what God has revealed through Christ. We believe in God the Father, the Creator. We believe in his co-equal Son, the Redeemer. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. That’s how the Creeds are structured. We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and we’re baptised in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The hour is coming, says Jesus to the Samaritan woman, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth: worship the Father “in spirit”, with the help of the Holy Spirit, and in truth. “I am the truth”, said Jesus. We are a people of the Trinity. It is all God’s gift. And the second meaning of faith answers to the first. It’s faith as our response, as opening our hand to receive, faith in us, a gift of God, our “yes”, our “I believe” in our will and on our lips.  We make the faith of the Church our own and, thanks to it, base our life on God. We trust him, we seek him. We move towards him, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And this faith flowers into hope and love. In today’s Gospel we see this faith growing in the Samaritan woman and then in the townsfolk. The climax comes at the end: “we know, they say, that this [Jesus] is indeed the Saviour of the world”.

We can hardly not mention this woman. In the Eastern Christian tradition, she’s named Photini, the enlightened one, enlightened by her faith and baptism. She’s the archetypal seeker, questioner, enquirer. There’s an interest in her. She responds to Jesus. She stands for the Church, says St Augustine, the Church of the Gentiles seeking the salvation given to the Jews. She’s a missioner too; she tells her story to her neighbours and brings them to Christ. And before all this, she’s just so typical of us. She’s connected to so many of the challenges people face. She knows about being a woman. She’s a Samaritan, born into a people who are at a spiritual disadvantage, which most of humanity is. She’s caught up in the struggle to exist, as so many people are: needing the basics like water. And there’s something suspicious in her going to the well at the hottest time of the day. That was not normal. She must be keeping a low profile. The reason perhaps emerges when we learn she’s had five husbands and is now with a “bidie-in” – here’s another well-known connection: a complicated domestic situation. And yet this strange Jewish man is ready to talk to her, to ask her for water to start with: thirsting for her faith. As the conversation unfolds, he begins to offer her fresh connections freeing ones. He promises another kind of water; more than that, a spring of water within her welling up to eternal life. She struggles to understand that, but she listens. Jesus is offering her the inner gift of the Holy Spirit, living water within. Then he talks of worship: God is really the husband she has been looking for. He takes her beyond the arguments between Jews and Samaritans, between their mountain and hers. He takes her to a quite new place: worship of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, 24/7, all-embracing communion with God. He heals her inner loneliness. Beautifully, he leads her on and out, and in a sense without changing anything. She’ll still need water from the well.  But now she has met the Messiah: “I who speak to you am he”.   She knows she’s known – “he told me everything I ever did”. And she has the confidence to tell the people of her town. She needn’t hide any more. She’s out there now.

Step by step in Lent we’re approaching baptism and the renewal of our baptismal promises: Jacob’s well. Step by step we’re approaching our Easter communion: the true worship of the Eucharist. We’re learning to believe and to pray again. We are the Samaritan woman, next Sunday we’re the man born blind, the Sunday after we’re Lazarus. And the following Sunday, Palm Sunday, we find – best of all perhaps – we’re the Lord’s donkey whom he rides to victory.

Let’s keep going!

St Mary’s Cathedral, Aberdeen, 8 March 2026