8. He Sees the Unseen

So Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting on the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” John 4:6-7

Everything about this story is completely wrong. Jesus wasn’t supposed to be in Samaria, He wasn’t supposed to be talking to a woman and He really wasn’t supposed to be talking to a Samaritan woman. And that’s not even the worst part. Jesus drank out of her cup! Her! A filthy Samaritan woman! While the rest of the respectable Jews were following the well-worn path around Samaria, John 4:4 tells us that “Jesus had to pass through Samaria.” Why? Sure, it was the shortest path to Galilee, where He was headed, but no one went through there. His disciples would never have been caught dead in Samaria. But, Jesus had to go there. Partly because He was seeking out an overlooked woman, and partly to call an entire outcast people group back into the family of God.

The Jews and the Samaritans had a long, complicated conflict that had its roots in the time of exile centuries earlier. The Jews saw the Samaritans as half-breeds, traitors and people who had corrupted the holy scriptures. And women? Women were seen as property and their highest purpose was to bring honor to their husbands by birthing sons. The Jewish Rabbis who lived before Jesus had established that women were not to be trusted, they gave rise to shame and reproach, and daughters were a disaster and a liability. A respectable Jewish Rabbi wouldn’t even speak to his own wife in public. And here we find Jesus, in the middle of the despised land, talking to a member of the despised gender.

The first thing Jesus does is something completely human, but something that completely shocks the woman. He is thirsty and He asks her for a drink. Middle Eastern wells didn’t have buckets, people carried their own leather buckets that they could roll up and take with them. By asking to drink from her bucket, Jesus showed deep vulnerability and dignified the woman. He is the God of all Creation, there were an unlimited number of ways He could have used His power to get water from the bottom of the well. Instead, He humbled Himself and asked for help from an outcast woman, helping to empower her by seeing that she had something to offer rather than always being the one in need of other people’s charity. And Jesus was always doing this. He was never the guy with the big house and all the cool stuff who ministered from a position of wealth and power. He was the poor guy who was always in need of someone else’s hospitality. The God of all Creation showed up on the scene humble and vulnerable so He could show us how to need each other and build healthy communities where we depend deeply on one another.

Rather than engaging in small talk, Jesus and the woman have a long and deeply theological conversation. And while we don’t have the space here to discuss all the details of the theology, there are a few points we don’t want to miss. First, we need to understand what it means that the woman had been married five times and was now living with a man who wasn’t her husband. In the Middle East, it would have been extremely rare for a woman to be granted a divorce, let alone five divorces. Men, on the other hand, could divorce their wives if they “no longer found them favorable.” One reason a woman was “unfavorable” was if she was barren. A woman who couldn’t have children was seen as a curse and that curse would have been extended to her husband. We aren’t given the details of why the woman had been through so many marriages—she may have been widowed, or barren, maybe her babies were stillborn—and man after man had sent her packing. Also, it was impossible for a woman to survive on her own as a widow and even more so as a divorced woman. So she was most likely making survival decisions out of desperation. It is interesting to note that Jesus didn’t tell her to “sin no more” as he did with another woman caught in adultery. And we don’t see the woman repent before Jesus. There is no doubt that the situation she is in is a source of deep shame, but we don’t know from the text if the source of her shame is sin or a heartbreaking and powerless situation. What we do know is that Jesus saw her and got right to the heart of it. He told her that He knew all about her sad story, she didn’t have to hide it from Him.

Not only was He willing to engage with her in the shame of her past, Jesus invited her into a beautiful new place of honor in her community and in the Kingdom of God. He revealed to her—the woman with three strikes against her—that He was the Messiah. This was huge. She was the first person He revealed this to. And then, even crazier, He sent her, a woman, out to go tell the people of her community that the Messiah had come. John 4:39 tells us that, “Many Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman’s testimony.”

Jesus asked the woman for a drink, and in turn, He offered her the living water of new life. Then, He showed her how the living water would become a spring flowing out of her life to the people around her. He’s still doing the same thing today. He continually crosses into the shameful areas of our culture and our lives to let us know that He’s near and He sees us. And if we will let Him, He will satisfy our deepest longings and cause rivers of living water to flow out of our lives to the hurting people around us.