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!”