A Woman Preaches the Good News and Jollof Rice

During the June Fuel the Body, Fuel the Soul meeting, Sister Florence Anyabuonwu, a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange, showed participants her recipe for moi moi/jollof rice. Following the recipe, Sister Melinda Pellerin of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield gave a presentation entitled, “A Woman Preaches the Good News.” Find the jollof rice recipe and a recording of Sister Melinda’s presentation below!

Fuel the Body, Fuel the Soul is a monthly series held on Zoom. Each session features an introduction to a healthy recipe presented by a sister, a presentation focusing on a spiritual topic and discussion and prayer with a community of young women from around the country. There is no cost to attend.

Time: 55 minutes

Servings: about 4

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 4 Roma tomatoes
• 2 red bell peppers
• 1 red onion
• 1 hot pepper
• 2 tbs tomato paste
• 3-4 cups stock
• 2 tsp unsalted butter
• 2 cups long-grain rice
• 1 lb chicken or beef
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 tsp Caribbean curry powder
• Salt and pepper

Directions: Bring pot with rice to a boil, cook for 2 minutes and then drain. Cook chicken or beef until tender or to taste. Set aside. Blend onion, hot pepper and tomatoes together, then cook in a frying pan with oil for 2-5 minutes. Add beef or chicken broth and stir. Add rice and remaining spices to the pan. Add bell pepper last so that it is not overcooked. Cover and cook slowly until rice is soft. Serve with meat and enjoy!

The Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 4-26, happens to be the longest dialogue between Jesus and another human being. That human being happens to be a disenfranchised, foreign woman. This is Jesus, a first century rabbi, and the woman at the well.

So why do I bring up this particular gospel? This is the gospel that I was asked to pray over when I decided at the ripe young age of 50 to join the Sisters of St. Joseph in Springfield, Massachusetts, an all-white congregation. One of the first things that Fr. Warren Savage (the only African American priest in the diocese) asked me was “Do you know the story of the Samaritan woman?” And I really didn’t know very much about it. He said, “That is your journey. That’s part of why you are choosing to be a Sister of St. Joseph. You will walk with this gospel for the rest of your life.” I didn’t think he was going to be right about that, but he was right on target.

So, the history of Samaritans and the Jewish people: they hate each other. They hated each other for hundreds of years. They hate their ideology; the Jews said the Samaritans have taken and degraded the Torah. In first century, Jewish people would avoid Samaria at all costs. Samaritans were considered lower than everybody else. People believed that Samaritans didn’t contribute anything to the culture, they just disrupted the culture. Mixed marriages were a sin.

Jesus intentionally goes into Samaria. When the disciples and Jesus are walking towards Jerusalem, he intentionally tells them they are going into Samaria. You can almost hear the guys saying, “What are you doing? We never do that! We go around Samaria, but we never go into Samaria.” And he is going to meet a woman. When we talk about women in the first century, women had no status. Jesus intentionally goes into Samaria to meet this woman at Jacob’s well. She’s disenfranchised, but this Samaritan woman’s life matters to Jesus. He goes to Samaria for a reason; he is waiting for her.

He comes to a town where there’s a plot of land, and that land is Jacob land. So, there’s a common history between the Jews and the Samaritans in that particular place. The woman comes to the well in the middle of the day. Why is she coming in the middle of the day? It’s very hot. In the first century, most women come in the morning to draw water in the desert. But she has this history, and because she wants to avoid the other women in the community, she goes at one of the most oppressive times during the day. But Jesus is there waiting for her.

He’s not supposed to speak to her, according to the cultural mores of the first century. Jews do not talk to Samaritans. If a Samaritan was coming down the street, they would walk over to the other side. They never interacted with the sinners, but Jesus interacts with her. She knows that Jesus is a foreigner, because she hears his accent. I think she’s really caught off guard, when this strange man sitting by the well all by himself, says, “Woman, give me a drink.” Giving someone a drink, especially to a man that you don’t know, was also breaking the cultural practices of the first century. In order to give someone a drink of water, you may have to touch their hands. That was taboo in the first century. But Jesus says, “Woman, give me a drink.”

She’s caught off guard, and she says, “You want a drink from me? I’m a foreigner, a Samaritan, and you want a drink from me?” Jesus could have gotten offended, could have said things like, Look, lady, I’m a Jew, I’m a rabbi, and I am the Son of God. If I asked you for a drink, you should just give me a drink. He doesn’t do that. He sits, and he lets her tell her story.

When I’ve heard this gospel on a Sunday, nine times out of ten, I’ve heard the men just talk about all of the woman’s husbands and how much she was a sinner. But Jesus sits down with her, and it’s so much more than the number of husbands she’s had or the number of relationships she has. Yes, she’s called out on that. But that’s not the essence of this whole interaction between this woman and Jesus. Jesus lets her talk. She tells the history of the conflict between Samaritans and the Jews.

This is a real therapy moment where Jesus lets her just talk about all the issues she’s having. He’s the perfect counselor because he listens, responds, and listens again. He says to her, “If you knew who was saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him if he would give you living water.” The woman is beginning to recognize that there is something about this man that she really needs to investigate. I love this gospel because I don’t think the men, his disciples, do that. In their first encounter with Jesus, they have a really tough time with who this Messiah really is. The Samaritan woman understands through her dialogue and through Jesus’ effective counseling; she begins to see that Jesus is the Messiah. This is her one and only encounter with Jesus and yet she gets the message. She begins to understand what is going to take the apostles forever to understand. This new disciple who is not Jewish, who is a woman, who is disenfranchised. She gets it right away. The men don’t get it, but she gets it.

Jesus continues, saying, “Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst. The water I shall give will become in him a spring of water; it will be living water.” The woman is approaching acceptance in the gospel when she says, “I want this water. I don’t want to have to keep coming back here.” At this point, Jesus has that dialogue about her husbands. In my interpretation of why Jesus asked her this, he asks because he wants us all to know that we carry our own really heavy water jugs, our really heavy sins, our really heavy doubts, our really heavy experiences that are sometimes extremely negative. But he’s still willing to enter into this woman, even though she’s carrying this very heavy jug. At the end of this gospel, she doesn’t need the burden of that jug anymore. The gospel writer tells us that she puts the jug down, goes into the town, and she becomes a preacher.

The Samaritan woman’s life mattered to Jesus. Jesus saw her worth. He seeks her intentionally, and her encounter with Jesus changes her life. She is the first disciple to preach the Good News. If anyone has any doubt that women can preach, I always direct them to John 4:4-26.