The Woman at the Well

John 4:3-30, 39-42

Stephen Nkansah is an evangelist trained in Ghana.  He tells the story of a friend of his who is a cab driver.  One day his friend drove a fare to Potomac, Maryland, and decided to attend church while he was in the area.  He walked into a Baptist church, and the congregation called the police, reporting that he was trespassing.  He said, “No, I am a Baptist, from Ghana.”  They insisted that he was trespassing. 

Sam Takunchung, who is from Cameroon, had a similar experience when he attended a church in Texas.  The pastor refused to serve him communion, even though he had just spoken the words, “This is Jesus Christ’s table; people shall come from everywhere to it.”

Clearly, the walls of race and culture are high in the church, and there are many barriers that need to be overcome.  But that is nothing new.  As we discover in this story about the encounter between Jesus and a woman at a well, there have always been barriers between people, and Jesus has always been about breaking down those barriers.

There are so many surprising statements in the opening verses of this story, but only if you understand the historical and theological context in which it took place.  So, I want to walk with you through the story and try to explain what the subtext is behind the written words.

First, it says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.”  Well, not really.  At least not in the opinion of most Jews.  Palestine was about 120 miles long and was divided into three parts.  In the north was Galilee; Judea was in the south; and in the middle was Samaria.  While it is true that the quickest way to get from Judea to Galilee was straight through Samaria, most Jews would have taken the long way around, stretching the journey from three days to six.  Why was that?

Because of a feud between the Jews and the Samaritans that had been going on for roughly 400 years.  It makes the Hatfields and the McCoys look almost civilized!  In the year 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel, deporting most of the population and resettling the land with foreigners.  This was in an effort to prevent rebellions.  Some of the Jews who were left chose to intermarry with these foreign people.  When the Jews returned to their home some two hundred years later, they refused to have anything to do with these mixed-race people, the Samaritans.  In fact, when they began rebuilding the Temple and the Samaritans offered to help, they turned them down with utter contempt.  They told them that they had lost their Jewish heritage and had no right to share in the rebuilding of the house of God.  The Samaritans understandably turned against the Jews and built their own temple on Mount Gerizim.  The hatred between the two groups only grew over the years.  They typically did anything they could to avoid each other.

So why did Jesus “have” to go through Samaria?  I think this woman was the reason.

And that is our second surprise.  This woman came to the well at noon.  That was very unusual.  Most women came to the well early in the morning or at dusk, when it was cool.  And it wasn’t just a task to them; it was an event.  Ken Gire writes, That she comes at noon, the hottest hour of the day, whispers a rumor of her reputation.  The other women come at dawn, a cooler, more comfortable hour.  They come not only to draw water but to take off their veils and slip out from under the thumb of a male-dominated society.  They come for companionship, to talk, to laugh, and to barter gossip – much of which centers around this woman.  So, shunned …, she braves the sun’s scorn.

The next surprise is that Jesus speaks to this woman.  He was a male, single, Jewish rabbi, and never should have spoken to this woman privately.  For a rabbi to be seen speaking to a woman in public would have ruined his reputation, especially to be speaking to a woman who herself had such a bad reputation.  But Jesus spoke to her, engaged her in conversation.

And look at the conversation they had! 

Jesus asked the woman for water.  And she was amazed that he would do such a thing, to ask her, a Samaritan woman, to give him water!  Which opened the door for Jesus to talk to her about living water.  He offered to give living water to her.  Literally, living water meant running water, water in a stream or river as opposed to water in a well.  But Jesus was also speaking figuratively about quenching the thirst in the soul for God with living water, or the Spirit of God.  Jesus was not talking in deliberately mysterious language; he was using imagery that was in the Old Testament; his terms shouldn’t be misunderstood.  But this woman didn’t seem to understand what Jesus was saying.

Jesus then stated that he could give living water that would well up into eternal life and banish her thirst forever.  She took him literally again, but Jesus this time was making a claim to be the messiah, the deliverer promised in the prophets.  Isaiah mentions several times that the messiah would bring living water and life.  It is true that there is a thirst in the human heart for God, and only God can satisfy that thirst.  Augustine wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  Jesus saw that this woman had that kind of thirst.  But again, she seemed not to understand.

So, Jesus confronted her more directly.  “Go and get your husband.”  She replied that she had no husband, and Jesus let her know that he knew her situation.  It was true that she had no husband, but she had had five husbands and was now living with a man who was not her husband.  This woman had been trying to fill the emptiness inside her with a series of relationships with men.  She had been looking for love in all the wrong places, as the country song says.  But in meeting Jesus, she had found the one who could fill that emptiness, she just didn’t understand yet.

Paul N. Tassell writes, Jesus could have given her a lecture on the sins of divorce and adultery and sexual promiscuity.  He could have railed on her for trying to evade the truth.  He did instead get to the heart of the problem by getting to the problem of her heart.  She was thirsty.  She knew her sin did not satisfy … And Jesus tactfully brought all of that into focus for her.  Unfortunately, because Jesus had gotten too close to the truth, the woman changed the subject.

Where should I worship?  That was her basic question.  The Jews believed you could only worship in Jerusalem; the Samaritans believed you could worship on Mt. Gerizim.  Who was correct?  Ken Gire writes, [It is] remarkable what Jesus doesn’t say.  He states her past and present marital status but makes no reference to her sin.  He gives no call to repent.  He presents no structured plan of salvation.  He offers no prayer … Yet to her, an anonymous woman with a failed life, he gives the most profound discourse in Scripture on the subject of worship – that God is spirit and that worship is not an approach of the body to a church, but an approach of the soul to the spirit of God.

The woman then tried to make another detour in the conversation.  “I know the Messiah is coming.”  Maybe she hoped to get Jesus off and running on that subject for a while, rather than making her uncomfortable with a discussion of her personal life or the deeper side of worship.  But I can almost promise that she never expected to hear what he said next.  Jesus said, “I Am.”  That was the divine name that God had revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, and Jesus is claiming that name for himself.  He was saying, “I Am the Messiah.  I Am the Son of God.”

Of all the people that Jesus might have first revealed his true identity to, I never would have picked this woman.  I might have expected him to tell his chosen disciples.  Or maybe even the religious leaders.  Or even the Roman governor.  But no.  As Max Lucado writes, It wasn’t within the colonnades of a Roman court that he announced his identity.  No, it was in the shadow of a well in a rejected land to an ostracized woman.  His eyes must have danced as he whispered the secret.  “I am the Messiah.” .. Don’t miss the drama of the moment.  Look at her eyes, wide with amazement.  Listen to her as she struggles for words … Suddenly the insignificance of her life was swallowed by the significance of the moment.  ‘God is here!  God has come!  God cares … for me!

The woman left her water jar and ran back to Sychar to tell all those people who ostracized her about Jesus.  And they believed in him because of what she said.  They also invited Jesus to come and stay with them, which brings us to the final surprise of the story.  Jesus and his disciples stayed with them for two days.  This was huge.  Jesus not only went through Samaria, he stayed in Samaria and accepted Samaritan hospitality.  Craig S. Keenan says, For Jesus to lodge there, eating Samaritan food and teaching Samaritans would be roughly equivalent to defying segregation in the United States during the 1950s or apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s – shocking, extremely difficult, somewhat dangerous.  The Jesus of the Gospels is more concerned with people than with customs.

Jesus broke down every barrier that presented itself during this encounter.  He broke down the racial barrier between Jews and Samaritans.  He broke down the gender barrier between men and women.  He broke down the ritual barrier over where to worship God.  He broke down the barrier between God and human beings.  And in that, he revealed himself to be the Savior of the world.

And the world needs a Savior.  Because human beings are still very good at putting up barriers between themselves, and between themselves and God.  We hide behind those barriers, feeling safe and smug and secure.  We comfort ourselves with the belief that we are right to put up those barriers, because it is too scary to come out from behind them and deal with each other as people.  Rich people and poor people put up barriers between themselves.  White people and people of color put up barriers between themselves.  America and other nations put up barriers between themselves.  Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists put up barriers between themselves.  Methodists and Baptists and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics put up barriers between themselves.  And pretty soon we find ourselves surrounded by so many walls that we don’t even know each other anymore.  And we find that God is calling us to be and do something different.

God calls us to take down the barriers.  God calls us to relate to each other, regardless of race, or culture, or religion, or sexual orientation, or socioeconomic level, or form of worship.  And God calls us to himself, to be in relationship with God on a personal level.  Jesus calls us to know him not only as The deliverer but as Our deliverer, not only as the Savior of the world, but as the Savior of you and me.

What barriers lie between you and other people?  What barriers keep people away from you?  Away from our church?  Away from God?  Just like Jesus, we need to get to work on taking down the barriers.