The Deep Well of Desire
News now reached the Pharisees that Jesus was winning and baptizing more disciples than John; although, in fact, it was his disciples who were baptizing, not Jesus himself. When Jesus heard this, he left Judaea and set out once more for Galilee. He had to pass through Samaria, and on his way came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the plot of ground which Jacob gave to his son Joseph; Jacob’s well was there. It was about noon, and Jesus, tired after his journey, was sitting by the well.
His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Meanwhile a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ The woman said, ‘What! You, a Jew, ask for a drink from a Samaritan woman?’ (Jews do not share drinking vessels with Samaritans.) Jesus replied, ‘If only you knew what God gives, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’ ‘Sir,’ the woman said, ‘you have no bucket and the well is deep, so where can you get “living water”? Are you greater than Jacob our ancestor who gave us the well and drank from it himself, he and his sons and his cattle too?’ Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never again be thirsty. The water that I shall give will be a spring of water within him, welling up and bringing eternal life.’ ‘Sir,’ said the woman, ‘give me this water, and then I shall not be thirsty, nor have to come all this way to draw water.’
‘Go and call your husband,’ said Jesus, ‘and come back here.’ She answered, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said, ‘You are right in saying that you have no husband, for though you have had five husbands, the man you are living with now is not your husband. You have spoken the truth!’ ‘Sir,’ replied the woman, ‘I can see you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where God must be worshipped is in Jerusalem.’ ‘Believe me,’ said Jesus, ‘the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship you know not what; we worship what we know. It is from the Jews that salvation comes. But the time is coming, indeed it is already here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. These are the worshippers the Father wants. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.’ The woman answered, ‘I know that Messiah’ (that is, Christ) ‘is coming. When he comes he will make everything clear to us.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, I who am speaking to you.’
At that moment his disciples returned, and were astonished to find him talking with a woman; but none of them said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you talking with her?’ The woman left her water-jar and went off to the town, where she said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who has told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?’ They left the town and made their way towards him.
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, have something to eat.’ But he said, ‘I have food to eat of which you know nothing.’ At this the disciples said to one another, ‘Can someone have brought him food?’ But Jesus said, ‘For me it is meat and drink to do the will of him who sent me until I have finished his work.
‘Do you not say, “Four months more and then comes harvest”? But look, I tell you, look around at the fields: they are already white, ripe for harvesting. The reaper is drawing his pay and harvesting a crop for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. That is how the saying comes true: “One sows, another reaps.” I sent you to reap a crop for which you have not laboured. Others laboured and you have come in for the harvest of their labour.’
Many Samaritans of that town came to believe in him because of the woman’s testimony: ‘He told me everything I ever did.’ So when these Samaritans came to him they pressed him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. Many more became believers because of what they heard from his own lips. They told the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard him ourselves; and we are convinced that he is the Saviour of the world.’
Everyone who comes to know Jesus arrives by a path that is peculiar to us. None of us get there in quite the same way, nor do we have identical experiences of what it is to know and love Jesus. There are lots of similarities, of course, and some aspects that hold true for all of us. One of the great mysteries of God is how it is possible for God to be the one who knows us better than we know ourselves since before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs, but also the one who is the God of everyone and everything. One of the consistent traits of Jesus is his willingness to meet us where we are, to welcome us into his life, and to reveal himself to those who seek him.
In today’s passage from John, we hear of one such meeting. The famous Samaritan woman at the well, alone at midday, with whom Jesus strikes up a conversation as he rests. In many commentaries and countless sermons this woman is often painted as someone ostracized from her community. Why else would she be at the well alone at midday? Gathering water was often a social event for women in a village like this and midday is a hot, unpleasant time of day for this kind of physical labour. We hear the exchange about her previous husbands and eagerly assume that her marital history is the result of poor choices and questionable morals. Surely this has led to her being a social pariah and that is why none of her peers from the village are with her today.
These assumptions are possible and certainly appealing depending on what sort of teaching a writer or preacher might want to offer. But they don’t seem to hold up when we hold them up against what happens later in the story. When the woman realizes who Jesus is, she runs into the village to share the news with her neighbours. They all believe her and come to see him. Many of them, because of her testimony, come to believe in Jesus. (John 4:39) She seems to be a respected and trustworthy member of her community.
The setup of her living with a man to whom she is not married may predispose us to thinking she doesn’t take these kinds of relationships very seriously. Perhaps this is why she has had so many husbands in the past. However, we know a fair bit about marriage law in this society and expectations of how women ought to behave. There are very few circumstances in which a woman can initiate divorce proceedings. And a woman who is divorced because she was an adulterer will have a very difficult time getting remarried, especially so many times.
We cannot know for certain, but it is much more likely that this woman has endured a string of tragedies, being a widow several times or perhaps grievously abused by one or more of her ex-husbands. It is also possible that she was sent on her way by some of those men for reasons of little significance. This is a world where women are largely understood as the property of men to whom they are connected; husbands could divorce their wives at will, leaving them highly vulnerable. The practice was common and ugly enough that Jesus preached against it, demanding that men divorce their wives only for reasons of adultery and that those who divorce their wives give them the proper paperwork so that they might remarry with as few complications as possible. (Matthew 5:31-32)
The woman also appears to be rather a clever theologian in her own right. The woman knows and cites the rule that Jews and Samaritans do not share drinking vessels. When Jesus waves it away with a reference to God putting “living water” on offer, the woman does not retreat into fear over cultural differences. She is immediately intrigued about what Jesus means by “living water”. The term is a double-entendre. Jesus is, of course, referring to waters of baptism and new life. But it can also mean living in the sense of running water, like a stream or river. Quite different from a well full of still water. I am uncertain as to whether the woman is misunderstanding Jesus or is working out for herself, piece by piece, exactly what he means. (I prefer the latter possibility.)
The woman refers to Jacob, asking if Jesus is greater than him who found this well, giving the village life-sustaining water. Jesus says that he is. The woman asks more questions, bit by bit moving toward her curiosity about the promised Messiah, using a methodical technique that would please St Thomas Aquinas himself. She finally gets to the question she is hoping for, hears that Jesus is the Messiah, and off she runs, like Anna the Prophet, to tell her neighbours what she has heard. By her enthusiasm for the good news Jesus has brought, many of the people in her village come to know him as well.
Rather than the oft-repeated trope of a woman of questionable morals saved by Jesus, I think this woman has far more in common with Nicodemus from last week’s gospel passage. Both seem to be respected members of their communities. Both are theologians. Both are given new ideas by Jesus that spark their imaginations. Both misunderstand what Jesus is saying at first. Both go away from the conversation with Jesus bearing a fresh understanding of their relationship to God. And both become evangelists, sharing the good news of their divine encounter with their neighbours.
In Lent, as we pray for those preparing to be baptized and for our own renewal of baptismal promises, this story seems especially important. It is a reminder that we all come to know Jesus by different paths. We bring different questions. We are presented with different challenges. We hear the call to dip into the living water of the font and share in the body and blood of communion in different ways. We sometimes misunderstand what Jesus is trying to reveal to us. But Jesus’ willingness to meet us where we are, to welcome us into his life, and to reveal himself to everyone who seeks him stays constant. Thanks be to God.
