The Woman at the Well

The Woman at the Well


I went to a conference this past week. The same routine happens everywhere: you meet old acquaintances, you say, “How are you?” and they tell you how they are fine, and how great things are going at their church. It’s superficial and exhausting.

I was reminded of a girl in college. She was bouncy and blond and whenever I said, “How are you?” in passing, she’d respond, “WONDERFUL!!” On bad days, I wanted to punch her.

I did have lunch with one friend in the middle of the conference. She told me the truth about her life, about the struggles that she has in her marriage and how her husband almost left her because she was working so hard. We were in the middle of a busy conference room full of people, but the rest of the room seemed to melt away, leaving just two of us, having a real conversation.

That’s the kind of conversation that Jesus had with the Samaritan woman. A real conversation, about the truth.

Jesus was exhausted. It took three days to walk from Judea to Galilee through Samaria. He was thirsty. He sat down beside a well to rest. And she came, carrying her water jar.

How can I explain what Jesus did? We don’t have the social boundaries that they did back then. We can’t understand the incredible step that he took in speaking to a Samaritan woman. We cannot comprehend how radical this was, how absolutely crazy.

It would be like a woman of fundamentalist Islamic faith, taking off her veil and going to speak with a strange man on the street.

It would be like a Brahmin, scholar in India, deciding to kneel in the mud and have a conversation with an untouchable.

It would be like two gang members, whose gangs are at war with one another in the inner city, sitting down to coffee together.

You didn’t speak to women in Jesus’ time. And you certainly didn’t speak to Samaritans. They were dirty, foreign, and not loved by God.

Jesus doesn't just speak to her. He asks her for a drink. He is willing to take his lips and touch them to her water jar.

It was like borrowing the Styrofoam coffee cup that belongs to a sickly homeless man.

Or asking a man with AIDS lesions to change your bandaid.

It was that dirty. Jesus did a dangerous, repulsive thing.


We never hear this woman's name. But I picture her as an extravert, a chatterbox, and she was bold. I don't know how she got so bold. Most women would have scurried about, getting the rabbi a drink, wondering why he spoke to her. Most women would have been silent, but this woman blurts out,

Why the heck are you talking to me?

And a conversation begins.

The woman does not understand a word that Jesus is saying. He talks about living water. He talks about resurrection and it all goes over her head. She is thinking about how nice it would be not to have to fetch water, not to be thirsty all the time.

Jesus asks her to fetch her husband.

And she tells the truth.

She doesn’t go get some man. She doesn’t run away and hide. She tells the truth.

I have no husband.

This was admitting that she was a total failure as a woman. Women lived only to please men and bear children.

What happened to her? Did her husbands die? Did they cast her out (they could do that for any reason at all)? Now she was living with a man who was not her husband, being defiled by a man who would not take her hand.

She tells Jesus.

Remember how people introduce themselves in Alcoholics Anonymous? Hi. My name is Ted. I am an alcoholic.

You must tell the truth to begin a real conversation.

Of all the people in the Gospel of John, Jesus reveals himself to this woman first.

Not to the scholars.
Not to the disciples.
To a woman who didn’t understand a word he said. A woman who had little intellect and no status, because she told him who she really was. She showed him her scars.

In the Garden of Eden, when we separated from God, the first thing that we did was to hide.

If you want to know God, you must stop hiding. You must stand, naked before Jesus. You must be honest.

I know that you have a hole inside you. Something that you cannot master by yourself, something that makes your life less than perfect. I know this because you are human.

Tell the truth to God.

Only then will you begin to understand how Christ saves.

Temptation

After Jesus was baptized by John, he went to the wilderness, where he was tempted…


Britney Spears has everything: great looks, talent, more money than some small countries…She has everything that we think we need. And she is miserable.

Heath Ledger just died at 28. His recipe for death? Great looks, incredible talent and lots of money. Despite having “it all” he couldn’t sleep at night so he started taking drugs. And he took too much.

It strikes me that human beings are like my dog, Benjamin. Ben is a dumb chocolate lab. If I gave him a 15 pound bag of dog food, he would gorge himself to death. He would eat until he died. That dog has no idea to say when.

When it comes to issues of money, good looks, power, we don’t know how to say when. We think that we will be happy if we could just get the fat off our thighs, or the wrinkles off our eyes. If only we had more money, more influence, if only people noticed us.

We look to the celebrities as if they are minor gods. We call them “the stars,” as if they are lights for us to see by. But look at them. They are miserable.


At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, before he did anything else, he went to the desert. I’ve been to the Sinai desert. I never knew what quiet was until I went there. There was no wind, no birds, no traffic, no roads. I felt like I was on the moon. There was total silence, like a blanket, it envelops you. All there is to hear is your own mind, your own thoughts, your temptations.

What are temptations? They are the inner urges that draw us from God. Jesus had three archetypal temptations, but most of us have more like 25. Jesus said no to his temptations. Most of us buy right into them and live according to their advice, until we realize that our lives aren’t working.

What are your temptations? Since I work and I have three small boys, one of mine is this (and it’s a good one)

Poor me! I work SO hard. No one works as hard as I do!

My aunt is a shopaholic. She has spoken one of her temptations aloud to me, and she still buys into it. Her temptation says

It’s not fair! Why is life so unfair to me?

She verbalized this temptation on the road to her mother’s. She had been evicted from her apartment because of her immense debt (caused by all her shopping). She had a friend build a wooden trailer that she stuffed full of all her knickknacks. And the trailer was so stuffed that it literally blew up on the highway. So she called my mother and she said:

It's not fair! Why is life so unfair to me?

Or the friend of mine who truly believes that all the men who love her will leave her. And so they do leave her, and she gets sucked deeper into the vortex of her own temptation.

What are your temptations? Do they tell you that you are not good enough? Do they tell you that you are stupid? Do they tell you that it’s OK to drink alcohol even though your dad drank himself to death?

Jesus faced his temptations. He went to a quiet place so that he could hear them. He looked at them in the stark light of the desert, where nothing can hide. He saw how stupid they were. And he rejected them.

The best think to do with temptation is to take it out and look at it. Write it down. Speak it out loud. Tell someone about it. Bring it into the light. You will realize that it is just plain dumb. And it will begin to loose its power over you. Oh, it will return. Most temptations are repetitive, built on years of obsession. But when it comes back, if you have looked it straight in the face, you will be able to recognize it quickly. You will not be so taken in.

If only my friend could realize the stupidity of believing that all men who love her leave her. If only she could see that believing something so negative only serves to bring that very reality to pass. She could be so incredible. She could be happy. If only she could let go of this belief.

If only my aunt could realize that things and stuff can’t make her truly full, she might begin to truly live.

Jesus had to recognize his own temptation before he could help anyone else. No wonder it happened at the beginning of his ministry. It was a necessary thing to do. We must get out of the muck of our self-centeredness if we are ever to truly live. We cannot really help anyone else until we figure out our own selves.

The last thing that the tempter wants is for you to realize who you truly are: a child of God, beloved, and capable of infinite possibilities.