As she made her way to the well, once again knowing she would be there alone, she knew it was best to go in the heat of the day, so the only condemnation she would be faced with would be her own.
The good women, with good marriages, good men and good lives would be at home that time of the day, doing whatever it was they did, those women whose lives may not be perfect either, but who were loved and admired, by their man and their community, and who had already made their trip for water early in the day, surrounded by other contented women just like themselves.
But not this woman. This woman walked to the well encumbered by, and surrounded with, her own history. Her alone-ness. Her rejections. Her memories, maybe initially some good ones. Maybe she remembered the first bloom of love before the reality hit and she was reminded that she had been rejected, over and over again, in love and commitment. She, if she was like us, wondered what it was about her that kept her from being worthy.
She had never learned to live alone in the confidence that it was okay to be alone. Her culture told her that wasn’t true. It takes great courage to go against culture when forming our opinions about ourselves. She had moved on from the first rejection and went forward, at first hopefully, that her next experience would bring a lasting love and acceptance. Was it the second time when hope started to diminish, the fifth when hope died? We don’t know.
What we know is that she gave up the demands that she be married. She settled for less, as a live in lover, rather than face each day waking up in shame alone and each night sleeping the same way. What she had left that she could count on, what provided for her, for her basic human need, was her water pot. Without it she couldn’t carry the life-giving water that satisfied the craving and the need we all have, and the thing we cannot live without.
What the narrator doesn’t tell us, but had to be true, was that this woman walked to the well in the center of the town with a broken heart. How do we know? We know because she was defensive. When she encountered Jesus, she asked Him why He was talking to her. She asked Him why He would want water from her. She was not only a Samaritan, a natural enemy of the Jews, both culturally and religiously, but she knew what she thought Jesus didn’t know. She was convinced that she wasn’t worthy to be considered for a conversation, or even to serve a cup of cold water. She just wasn’t worthy, in her own eyes, and, she thought if He knew, she wouldn’t be in His either.
As the conversation went on, Jesus, who had made a great effort to encounter this woman, brought her to the place where she had to reveal the brokenness and the shame when she said to Him, “I have no husband”. Remember that in that culture, a woman who was not a widow but had no husband, was less than. Women, for the most part, in Western culture still feel that way. We still compare our lives of “have not’s” to those who “have” … and we deem ourselves less than.
I know what I’m about to type may make me unpopular. I’m okay with that. But, I don’t want to wound. I just want to make this plain, in as much love and gentleness as I can. Living with someone outside the covenant of marriage is really just a continuous series of one night stands between the same two people. It is a settling on the part of both parties for an imitation of commitment. It is a self-acceptance of a “less than” situation, evidence that we believe we are not ever going to do better, but this is better than being alone. It is a band-aid for a broken heart for one; perhaps only a convenience for the other.
And in this historical, true narrative from John Chapter 4, we see this woman set free from her past and her present shame once she encountered Jesus. How was she made free? Because when she asked Jesus for the living water, first Jesus let her know this: That He knew when He encountered her that she had no husband, that she had given up her hopes and settled for a relationship without the covenant promises of marriage. And still He spoke with her. Still He revealed His identity to her. Still He revealed His purpose and offered her opportunity to serve Him, to trade what she had for what He came to give her.
In our narrative, what happened when Jesus kindly confronted the woman with the truth of her situation, when He said “You’ve been married five times and the man you’re living with now is not your husband”?
She left her water pot and ran back to tell the others in the city that Jesus was the Christ. For her, we can only wonder the emotions that motivated her. What we know is that as ashamed as she had been coming to the well, assuring her solitude in her timing, she was as much eager to run toward people with the news that she had encountered the Christ.
The truth in an encounter with Jesus is still the same. Jesus read the scroll in front of the religious people, those same people who hated the Samaritans. “He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, … ” Isaiah 61:1
If healing of the broken-hearted was important enough to God Himself that it was a stated purpose of Jesus, we can stop being defensive. We can stop living in shame. We can acknowledge, laying aside all our toughness and determination to survive “in spite of”, and we can tell Jesus, “Please, heal my broken heart”.
The Healer has come.
For His Glory 