The Woman at the Well

I've been reviewing my blog and I noticed that I referenced this post in my initial adoption post. I dug into the facebook archives and found it, re-read it and have decided to post it here. I originally wrote this back in 2010 right before we left for Korea and if I hadn't happened to have watched "Talladega Nights" and seen Sacha Baron Cohen last night I wouldn't feel compelled to put it up. But this article still makes me laugh - and think - when I read it and maybe it will do the same for you. The story of the woman at the well is one of my favorites and this article still makes me proud.

Of all the stories of Jesus’ life the story of the woman at the well has always struck a chord in my soul. Over the past few years it has grown in importance to me and only recently did I ask myself why. The first reason I came up with was that it revealed the transforming nature of Christ’s perfect love. A woman’s life is turned around 180 degrees after a few short yet poignant words from my Savior. The second reason became clearly evident to me while I was watching, of all movies, Borat and how Jesus reaches out to those to whom no one else dares reach(At this point any good Bible-believing Christian may want to go ahead and close out this message. In a paragraph coming to your screen soon I will use scenes from a film that celebrates drunkenness, ethnic hate, debauchery, homosexuality, prostitution, and numerous other decidedly non-Christian ideals in order to not only illustrate but to reinforce the principles of Christ’s love. For the bold and those firmly grounded in their faith feel free to continue but you have been warned.) The straw that broke the camel’s back and now has me writing this little note is that I’ve realized that in my life I’ve met a few women at the well and frankly my heart still breaks for them. I still shed tears while praying for them and I still regret my inability to be like Christ enough to love them enough (ahem… in the right ‘agape’ way) and change their lives for the better. So now I have a few hours during which I will spell out how these three reasons make the story of the woman at the well so important to me. 

I didn’t come up with this first point on my own. Sometime in the last 2 years I heard a sermon about the woman at the well and the crux of the sermon was the transforming nature of Christ’s love. It may have been that sermon that started me thinking about this subject so I’m putting this down as my first reason. Crack open your bibles to John Chapter 4 - or if you’re lacking a bible but you’re online find one of the many online bibles and do a search for either John Chapter 4 or “Woman at the Well” – and start there. In the story Jesus has just finished up a rather famous conversation with a guy named Nicodemus. Sometime during that conversation there was some talk about being born again and in the middle of chapter three Jesus laid out the gospel in a nutshell for Nicodemus. You may have seen a sample of this text in the end zone of a football game once or twice. But I digress. 

Jesus’ disciples had been baptizing people as followers of Jesus and this had been irritating the religious leaders of the day. Apparently the leaders in the area of Judea were getting angry so Jesus decided to get out of town for awhile and was on his way to Galilee. I’m not a scholar nor do I have access to an atlas of 1st Century AD Israel so I have to take the author’s word that an area called Samaria lies between Judea and Galilee. The people of Samaria called Samaritans were not on really good terms with the Jews. You can do a Wikipedia search and find out the details (despite this being posted online I do not in fact have internet in my room. Normally I’d be happy to do the searching for you and give you some fantastic anthropologic data about the story but I cannot right now. Forgive me.) but the short summary is that the Jews and the Samaritans were not on speaking terms. Jesus’ disciples had gone on into town to buy food but the good teacher, “being as tired from the journey as he was,” stayed back at a well to rest. So it’s about 6 o’clock in the morning and a woman comes out to the well to get some water. (side note: this still goes on today in the middle east. Rural women still head out in the morning with their large buckets in order to draw water before it gets belligerently hot. Some are dressed in black Abayas and some, usually younger, are dressed up in bright-colored garb that contrasts brilliantly with the relatively barren landscape in which they walk.) Sitting at the well is a Jewish religious teacher who has the audacity to ask the woman to get him a drink. Now, the woman at the well is apparently quite assertive and maybe even a bit abrasive. I’m going to stop my narrative of the story and explain things as I see them. I could be wrong but John 4:9 has colored my entire reading of this story. Imagine for a minute that you’re in a downtown area sitting on a park bench and you drop your pen. Your pen rolls across the ground and lands between the feet of a younger woman sitting next to you. Thinking it improper to reach between a strange woman’s feet you politely ask her if she could pick up your pen for you. Instead of a simple, “no” you get read the riot act for daring to ask for assistance. What could have been covered in a one-syllable response or even mute refusal is instead turned into a 15 second tirade of vitriol and anger directed toward you. This is the Samaritan woman and, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan. How can you ask me for a drink?” was her reply. I have been there. I have asked a seemingly innocuous question only to be met with unwarranted anger. My typical response in that situation is to walk away muttering something about rude people under my breath. Clearly I am not Jesus.

But Jesus shrugged it off, saw it as an opportunity to touch a life, and decided to go toe to toe with this Samaritan woman. He sloughed off her rebuttal, ignored her question and did the unthinkable: He brought up religion. In the ensuing conversation Jesus equates himself with God, places himself above Jacob the patriarch, and continues to use the words of the woman only as a frame to make his point: Jesus has the keys to eternal life. And she bought it. In 3 short paragraphs the woman went from refusing to get Jesus water to nearly begging him to give her some of his water. But Jesus’ plan was not to win an argument it was to save a soul. This is where we see more of Jesus perfect love. Whereas I, a sinner with a huge ego, would have been stoked at turning the tables on this crabby tart and would have walked away smugly Jesus was looking into her heart and looking to do something spectacular. Somehow (probably something to do with the fact that He is God) Jesus was able to discern that this angry young woman was suffering from more than sore shoulders from carrying the water. Jesus knew that this woman suffered from a series of broken hearts and cut to the quick. He told her about her four ex-husbands and the guy she was shacking up with but he did so without angering her. Now, let’s go back to the park bench and the young lady. Imagine for a moment if you will, that you laid out all her dirty laundry for her right there on that bench. Imagine her response. So how did Jesus do the same thing without getting slapped. The answer is that he did it with the love of God.

Right here is the message of the gospel in one simple story. God loved this one woman so much that he offered her eternal life (John 4:13) with no preconditions. Jesus knew that this woman was by contemporary standards a slut, an adulterer, a skank, an impure woman, name your epithet – Jesus knew this. Yet he loved her so much that he looked past all of her sins and offered her eternal life. He even offered her eternal life BEFORE calling her out for her sins. The response was kind of stunning.

The young woman caught a clue sometime during Jesus’ talk about the coming kingdom. She put two and two together and hesitantly brought up the coming of the Messiah. Jesus confirmed her suspicions that this clairvoyant Jewish traveler was not a spy but the savior of the world. The woman who ten paragraphs earlier refused to draw a pitcher of water now dropped her pitcher, ran into the city and started telling her friends about the Messiah. Wow. Later in the chapter we find out that because of her witness many more in the town came to believe in Jesus. I prefer to think of it in terms such as, “because of Jesus’ perfect love for the woman at the well, many people came to believe in Him.” So this was the beginning of my fascination with this passage of scripture.

Borat. The time has come to either be BBQ’d as a sacrilegious heretic or lauded as a guy who can find the incredible love of Christ displayed in the most unlikely of places. Your call. For those unfamiliar with Borat here’s a brief synopsis. Sacha Baron Cohen cooked up an epic prank in the form of a movie. He pretended to be a native of Kazakhstan making a documentary of American culture and made his way across the country in this guise while keeping a video journal. However, his goal was to catch Americans in the act of exhibiting their natural prejudices and use it as a really ribald form of social commentary. It is crude, it is disgusting, it displays all that is amoral and wrong with the world and it is hilarious. It also is a bit sobering because it shows the decidedly un-Christlike nature of a few Christians. So what does it have to do with the woman at the well? Simple. She is in the movie.

Borat went to a tutor on manners with the culminating exercise with the tutor being a formal dinner. During the dinner Borat made every attempt to crack the genteel nature of the other attendees which include a pastor and his wife. During the dinner all of the attendees made slightly bigoted comments under the guise of social propriety but at the end Borat invited in the woman at the well to be his dinner guest. When she arrived the dinner was abruptly cut short on account of her arrival. In limited defense of the pastor and his wife I will say the woman at the well was in the guise of an extravagantly dressed prostitute. However I didn’t see any attempt by anyone at the table, all of whom called themselves Christians, try to exert any Christ-like love toward her. I don’t see Jesus walking away from that situation. In fact in a similar situation when Jesus was questioned about his choice of companions and their lifestyles he responded, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.” (Matthew 9:12). The Jesus of the Bible that I read poured out love on the unlovable. The tax collectors, widows, the poor, the unclean, the lepers, the ‘sinners’, the… Samaritans. When presented with someone that was beyond the pale – someone so low on the social ladder that the religious would feel the need to leave the room when they entered – Jesus stepped up and offered forgiveness and love. In the movie the only person that treated the woman at the well as a human being was Borat. It’s a sad state of affairs that the man that inadvertently (in my mind) playing the role of Jesus is portrayed as one of the most amoral of all while the religious folks, the church leaders, the good Christians in the film slunk away from what could have been one of their most dynamic and Christian of their lives. Jesus passed no judgment on the woman at the well. He showed her love and offered her eternal life. He did not fear her because she was a woman or because she was a Samaritan, rather he entered the situation with his purpose set firmly in his mind: Win her with love. Love the unlovable.

The last reason I am writing this little note is very personal. In my life I have met quite a few women at the well and I have only done marginally well at being like Christ. After thoroughly roasting the Christians in the movie Borat for their lack of Christ-like love I cannot in good conscience continue without admitting my own failings in the same subject. I try to love the unlovable but my problem is that many times I fell in love with them. Rarely did I simply walk away but too often I found myself too close and in many cases my love of Christ turned into the love of the flesh. But once again I digress.

I’ve had a little more free time lately and in my devotions and prayers I continue to return to thoughts of the women at the well in my life. These are women with whom I have worked, attended school, and met in various organizations. Facebook has brought a few of them back into my life and reminded me of others that are long lost. It is for you, the women at the well in my life, that this letter is ultimately written. I will not put your names here. I will not tag you in this note. You know who you are. You are the confident ones; the smart ones; the pretty ones; the ones who know how to get what you want; the ones that have your whole life planned out and are moving forward towards those goals but… you are also the ones with the broken hearts. Somewhere along the way someone or someones have broken your heart and hardened you to others that love you. For many of you it’s a vicious cycle that repeats itself all too often and your hope for the future is dimmed by the fear of more heartbreak. You are the modern-day women at the well and I am telling you that Jesus is there, waiting for you.

So the last reason I’m writing this letter is to bring an arms-length offer of hope and the love of Christ to the women at the well in my life. Pick up the Bible. Read John chapter four – and John chapter three, also. Take a look at the offer that Jesus makes in those chapters and try to put aside your fears and accept it. Jesus knows your hurts; your histories; the stupid things you’ve done; the poor decisions you’ve made; the times your heart got broken; the times you gave your heart away only to not get it back; the times you’ve been used; the times you’ve been abused. He knows it all but if you look carefully at John chapter four you’ll see that he doesn’t care about those things. He cares about you. Let down your guard a bit. When he asks you to draw some water from the well feel free to question him and when he starts prying into your soul and peeling back the layers of hurt, let him. He is the great physician. He loves you and if you let him he can change your life. For God so loved the woman at the well…

To everyone that reads this note: Please do me a favor and pass this on to the women at the well in your life. If you are uncomfortable passing it directly to a woman at the well, then post it in the notes section of your facebook account. Maybe you will get a response or maybe you’ll touch a life without knowing it.