God’s Love Poured Out in Conversation

Jesus and his disciples are returning home from celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem. On their way, they stop to visit John in the wilderness of Judea and participate in baptizing people who come to them for purification. 

The Gospel relates that John also was baptizing at some springs where the water was abundant, and some of his followers come to him worried that Jesus’ disciples are baptizing more people than they are. 

John’s response to his fretting and competitive followers sets up today’s story of Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well. John reminds them that his role is to prepare the way, and he builds on the ancient metaphor of God as a bridegroom to describe himself [quote] as, “the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him [and] rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice.”

The Old Testament prophets often identify the people of Israel as God’s bride. The marriage metaphor highlights the bond between them and symbolizes God’s love and joy in their covenant (e.g. Is 62:5). In rejoicing over the arrival of the bridegroom, John recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. John proclaims that his joy is fulfilled as the wedding day arrives—but just who in this allegory is the bride?

There is a strong trope in Hebrew Scripture of spouses meeting at wells: Abraham and his second wife, Keturah; his son, Isaac, and Rebekah; their son Jacob and his wife Rachel, and later Moses and Zipporah. When those who had grown up hearing the Torah heard Jesus asking a woman for water, their ears would have perked up—this was a pattern they recognized, and with the disciples in the story, they would have been astonished—and probably pretty uncomfortable—about Jesus in this situation.

Like Moses and Jacob, Jesus arrives at the well having fled escalating tensions. In Jerusalem, he had cleansed the Temple of vendors, and in Judea, Pharisees join John’s followers in grumbling about the number of people coming to Jesus to be baptized. Wearied by the discord, Jesus is heading for home by the most direct road, which runs through hostile territory. 

Samaritans and Jews shared the Torah and traced their ancestors to the ancient Israelites, but different experiences of conquest led them to diverge culturally and religiously, resulting in mutual enmity. 

Today’s lesson begins with Jesus tired out by his journey in a place where he isn’t welcome. He is weary from his pilgrimage, weary from friction on many fronts early in his ministry, weary from walking through the dry and barren wilderness, and as the sun comes to its zenith, he sits down by the ancient well. He is tired and he is thirsty. Fully human in his need for water. Fully divine in what we come to see of his outpouring of love. 

The Samaritan woman, too, has come for water, and her story suggests that she, too, arrives worn out by her life’s journey. Like the disciples, she is surprised by this Jewish man at the well asking for a drink. She responds with a question that launches them into the longest conversation we hear Jesus have; the longest conversation recorded in Scriptures.

Her first question is why he overlooks their differences—she knows that as a Samaritan she would be seen as unclean—but Jesus evades this concern to speak on another level as he offers her something he calls living water. She retorts with more questions: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 

I love this woman for her courageous questions, for naming what they share in common—their ancestor Jacob—for her fortitude, her skeptical stance toward this strange man, the way she engages him in theological arguments, and her perseverance in seeking to understand.

How, without a bucket, do you propose to give me water?  

In her questions, we hear echoes of the Exodus as the Israelites murmured against Moses, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” What could they possibly have thought as Moses stood there in front of the rock at Masseh and Meribah?  Moses, you have no bucket; how do you propose to get water from a rock?

This is struggle to see how God will come through is an all-too-familiar story. How often, when are tired from the journey, do we find it hard to continue holding out hope that we will receive what we need to sustain us. 

When Jesus speaks of living water—which in Greek can mean both water that gushes from a spring and also water that gives life—he moves the woman from the literal level of meaning to the spiritual. What is so striking is that when he offers this living water that gushes up to eternal life, and she accepts, he straightaway names the wound that has most pained her. She asks for living water, and he asks about her husband.

Traditional readings have often shamed her, but we find no condemnation in the words of the Evangelist or Jesus. This is no story of “go and sin no more”. Women at this time did not have the legal power to end marriages, and Jesus does not chastise her for the relationships that have ended. There are any number of reasons for her past. Maybe she was repeatedly widowed and passed along among her dead husband’s brothers, according to the “Levirate marriage” practice of the day. Or maybe she was abandoned for infertility or a disability or all that comes with a history of being mistreated. We just don’t know. 

The lack of specificity, like the lack of a name, allows readers from all sorts of backgrounds to identify with her more easily. Whatever the cause, her dignity has been compromised, and surely, she has felt abandoned time and again. What we can be certain of is that she has experienced deep pain and grief. This cannot be the life she’d hoped for.  

And now, at high noon, here she stands with Jesus, both weary from their journeys, and he sees her. He sees how she hurts and what she yearns for. And in their conversation, she also sees him. She is so moved by him that she returns to the city calling out, “Come and see” this man who had seen her. And once again, we get one of her questions that betray her perceptiveness: might this be the Messiah? 

This woman becomes the first evangelist to bring others to recognize Jesus as the Savior.  

As we find throughout the Gospels, Jesus puts a new spin on the old stories of the Hebrew Bible. In the old stories, meetings at wells led to marriages, and the metaphor of a bride referred to Israel. Here, Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman symbolizes an expansion of God’s mission to all nations and people of all backgrounds. A new kind of covenant is being forged.

This is a God whose grace and gifts we don’t always recognize right away. 

To return for a moment to John’s followers. Their misguided competitive focus hits close to home. How often are we as the church focused on numbers more than on considering what God is accomplishing among us. On how God is moving in every person who comes in search of something greater than themselves. On how God is moving to draw all people to himself and to bring about reconciliation. On how God is moving in people whom we rather avoid.  

This a God who welcomes questions from skeptics. A God who comes to us in our unresolved pain and yearning. A God who has come to journey alongside us in our tiredness. A God who pours out his healing love on all who will stay in a conversation with him, even when they’re not at all sure where it might be heading.