The Woman at the Well - John 4.5-42
Introduction
It will not have escaped your notice that the Gospel reading this morning was quite long. This week and for the next two weeks our Gospel readings will be taken from John’s Gospel and will each consist of a fairly long story of Jesus encounter with an individual and will tell of the way in which that encounter transforms the life of the individual concerned and draws from Jesus teaching about who he is and what he is doing.
Next week we will be hearing of Jesus encounter with a man born blind and the week after we will hear the story of Lazarus, who has died. But this week we have the story of Jesus and the Woman at the Well.
Exposition
Jesus is travelling up from Jerusalem to Galilee and he is taking the short route which passes through the land of Samaria. Many Jews would have taken a detour around Samaria because there was a great of animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. Despite the fact that Jews and Samaritans both worshiped the God of Abraham and sought to follow the Law of Moses they the Jews despised the Samaritans, considering them to be unclean, and of course this hatred generated a similar response from the Samaritans towards the Jews. The roots of this mutual contempt lay back hundreds of years in history but, as with so many places on earth today, this historic prejudice was the controlling factor of their behaviour in the hear and now.
This prejudice had no hold on Jesus, however. So, with his disciples he takes the shortest route home and finds himself passing by the ancient well near Sychar, a well whose origin was attributed to Jacob – the common ancestor of both the Jews and the Samaritans. He remains by the well whilst his disciples go get food, and while he is waiting there, at noon when the sun is at its hottest, a woman comes to draw water from the well.
Now, many interpreters point out that it is quite strange that the woman should come to the well in the middle of the day. It was not strange that the woman should come to fetch water, fetching water was considered ‘women’s work’, but it was heavy work and normally it was done in the cooler parts of the day – the morning and the evening. There might be many reasons why this woman would come to the well outside the normal times but one of those reasons might well be that she was coming at time when she hoped no one else would be there. That she was someone who, even in her own community was despised and outcast and who was coming at this time to avoid the looks of contempt, the cutting remarks and perhaps even the physical violence she would draw if she came at time when others were around.
Why might she be so despised? Well, we find out later in the story that she is a woman who has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. When we hear that we tend to think of her as a ‘femme fatal’, an Elizabeth Taylor type figure who discards one man after another as she gets fed up with them but, of course, that is to entirely misunderstand the situation. She could not possibly have been such a figure because under the Jewish law, which both the Jews and Samaritans kept, women had no right to divorce. There are only two possibilities here, one is that she had been widowed five times, the other is that she had been divorced by her husbands – and in the this context this meant that effectively she had been discarded. And that this had happened, no once but five times, over and over again. And, because a woman in this context had no rights even to her own children and could not survive without a male protector, she had taken up with a married man as her only way of survival. She must have considered herself the lowest of the low and certainly those around her in her small village community would have thought of her in that way.
And then she encounters Jesus. Normally a male Jew at this time would not begin a conversation with even the most respectable of women unless he was related to her. To begin to speak to a strange woman, and a Samaritan woman as well, was unheard of. Her initial thought must have been that she was being propositioned. However, the conversation does not develop as she expects and soon this woman who has been used and despised by every man she has ever met finds herself discussing theology with a Rabbi. And to this outcast woman Jesus discloses the secret that he is the Messiah. No other person in the Gospels is given this information by Jesus. Everyone has to work it out for themselves. This outcast woman is the only one to whom Jesus unequivocally gives this information.
And it transforms her. This woman, who is creeping out to the well in the heat of the mid-day sun in order to avoid the company of others because she is so ashamed of who she is, now goes running back to the village shouting out at the top of her voice “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!” By the time we come to the end of the story the woman is accepted and valued by her neighbours who all share together a common belief in Jesus.
Application
One of the things we love to do as human beings is to draw lines in the sand. To place others on the other side of those lines and regard them as beyond the pale, contemptible. Jesus dose not do this. Jesus does not see the label, he sees the person, and the person other people reject is just the person that he will use to bring his love and care to others. He himself is prime example of this, despised and rejected on the cross he brings salvation to the whole of humanity. Over the next few weeks we will hear again and again the phrase that he quotes from the old testament “The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone” – that stone that holds everything together.
In a world and church where the voices of intolerance and exclusion are becoming louder and more powerful this is a lesson we who seek to be faithful to Jesus must learn, and learn well. That those you despise and exclude and put down are exactly the kind of people we find Jesus among and if we ignore them we ignore him, if we exclude them we exclude him, and if we reject them we reject him.
Jesus is found amongst the outcast, the marginalised and the rejected, and if we listen to their voice we may well hear them crying “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!”

Introduction
Last Sunday we celebrated Candlemas, which in the Churches calendar markes the end of the celebration of Christmas and the turn towards Lent, Holy Week and Easter. We have turned from looking back to the manger to looking forward to the cross and beyond it the empty tomb. Because Easter is very early this year we have only this one Sunday before Lent begins this coming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday.
Every year the readings set for this the Sunday before Lent point us to that mysterious and startling event recorded in the first three Gospels which we call the transfiguration. Jesus, accompanied by the inner circle of his disciples (Peter, James and John) climbs a high mountain in the north of Galilee and there something happens. In his disciples eyes he appears to shine with a dazzling light and a voice like the voice which was heard at Jesus baptism declares “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Exposition
So what is happening here? One of the dangers of the way we read the Bible in church is that we can read isolated passages and miss out on the important insights we can gain by knowing what happened just before the event we are looking at and what happens afterwards. To properly understand what is going on in this passage we need to know what happened before it. In each of the Gospels in which the story of Jesus transfiguration appears it is immediately preceded by a conversation which Jesus has with his disciples. He asks them who people say he is, and they come up with a number of answers reporting what other people have said about Jesus. Then Jesus turns the question on them, “But you,” he said, “who do you say I am?” It is Peter who answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus praises Peter for his insight, but then goes on to explain that what that means may not be quite what the disciples are expecting. “From then onwards Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously … and to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day.” From this point forward in the gospels every step that Jesus takes will be a step nearer the cross as he journeys towards the great confrontation which lead to the crucifixion.
So at this point it has just become clear to the disciples exactly who Jesus is. He is the Son of God, the long awaited Messiah, he is the one who will suffer and through whose suffering the world will be saved. Now, up on the mountain top, that which the disciples have come to believe in there hearts becomes visible to their eyes. They look on Jesus and they see in him God’s glory shining out.
Take good note of the order in which this happens. First they believe and then they see. Most people say “Seeing is believing” but often in the Christian faith you cannot see until you believe. There is an old Christian slogan which goes ‘Fact, Faith, Feeling’. It means that when we come to God we accept the facts about him, we build our faith by trusting in those facts, not in how we feel. We may or may not feel any different because we are trying to follow Jesus, that doesn’t make any difference to the facts.
So what can we learn from this story?
For me this story teaches me the importance not just of looking at things but of looking through them. The hymn writer George Herbert wrote:
Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see;
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.
A man that looks on glass,
on it may stay his eye;
or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
and then the heaven espy.
In other words, you can look at something and see it simply as it is externally or look through it and see the spiritual reality which it holds. Another poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, wrote this:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins was able to look through a world seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil to find it still charged with the grandeur of God.
Application
At the time of the transfiguration Peter, James and John saw through the outward appearance of the human Jesus to see the glory of his divinity. As Christians we must become people who don’t just look at the things we see but through them to spiritual realities which lay within them.
Let me give you some examples.
Let’s start with Jesus. He can be just a figure from history, a character in the pages of a book or we can see through that to the living Lord who fills life with meaning and significance.
Then there’s our church. A group of largely elderly people who meet together once a week, or an outpost of heaven, agents of Gods love and signs of his presence.
Or our worship. A boring ritual consisting of some repetitive prayers and some poorly sung hymns or a sacrifice of praise made in presence of Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. The most important act that a human being can carry out.
Or our neighbor. An irritation and a nuisance or a beloved child of a heavenly Father.
Or ourselves. Poor specimens of fallible humanity or Children of the heavenly Father who loves us and is well pleased with us.
The answer is, of course, both. It depends on whether you just look on the surface or look through to the reality beyond.