This one’s for my fellow evangelical church kids… but if that’s not you, read on anyway.  There’s some good stuff in here.  

Let’s have a drink… at a well in Samaria… with a woman of questionable moral stature. I know I’m not the only one who grew up with the impression that the Woman at the Well who encountered Jesus in John chapter 4 was a VERY sinful and promiscuous woman.  This was the most common picture painted of her when we were told her story in Sunday school, or when she was the central figure in a sermon.  After all, she had had FIVE husbands!! (Gasp of shock and horror!)  Since divorce was a terrible and forbidden occurrence in the evangelical church of my childhood, I assumed this Samaritan woman was a pretty bad sinner since she had done it five times.  Wasn’t it lovely, though, that Jesus cared to speak to her anyway, merciful as He is?  

Hold up. 

Ya’ll, I think we’ve been looking at this all wrong.

Thanks to my daughter, who shared a video with me by Amity Grace, I’m thinking about this story in a different way.  I’m a little embarrassed, truthfully, that I haven’t realized this until now, because how many times have I reminded myself and other people how important historical context is when we read the Bible?  The answer is: many.  But somehow the historical context didn’t click on this one until today.  Maybe because I needed this especially today and was especially ready to understand, and you know…perfect timing and all.

Anyway, here’s the thing:  The Woman at the Well had had 5 husbands, leading most of the men standing behind wooden pulpits in Baptist churches in the south to assume she’d been divorced 5 times.  But historical context tells us… wait for it… WOMEN COULD NOT ASK FOR DIVORCE AT THAT TIME.  According to the law they lived under, men could divorce their wives for pretty much any reason.  Women, however, were currency, possessions of their fathers and then of the men to whom their fathers gave them, usually in exchange for a price.  Please just let that sink in for a moment.  There’s no way the Woman at the Well just got divorced because she wanted out of her marriage to be with another man or something.  This wasn’t a “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” type situation. That wasn’t a thing at that time.  Her husbands would have had to divorce her and it would have had to have been of his doing or his idea.  There is also the possibility, which no one ever mentioned to me in my early learning of this story, that she was widowed multiple times.  The woman who came to the well that day had been abandoned repeatedly, or she had been bereaved repeatedly.  Or both.  

Can you feel the realization dawning?  Is your heart about to burst, like mine is?  Because, I know that feeling, ya’ll.  I know what it is to be abandoned by a husband.  More than once, actually.  I know what it’s like when the one you chose chooses someone or something else.  I know what it’s like to be visited by death and left without people who loved and protected me.  The feeling of being a bit of an outcast because of my marital history is familiar to me, as is the feeling of being pitied and avoided because the grief that is in my life is too much for most to tolerate observing without turning away.  I know the kind of brokenness carried by the woman who walked up to that well, and I know she probably would have rather carried on her work in silence, alone with her pain, but Jesus didn’t leave her like that.  He did the unthinkable, in more ways than one.  Not only did He start the conversation with her, a woman, but He asked her to give Him water, when tradition dictated he not share dishes with her Samaritan kind.  He extended utter acceptance to her.  Then, He identified Himself to her as the Messiah.  This wasn’t something Jesus ever really said aloud, and His first recorded verbal revelation of Himself as Messiah was gifted to an abandoned, grieving, outcast woman.  He took the rarest of jewels, information not freely said even to His closest disciples, and laid it in front of this woman who would have been in great emotional pain and would have experienced severe trauma.  

Here’s what this tells me:  First, it tells me just how radically Jesus loved and honored women.  His actions here discard patriarchal traditions and honor this woman as a person of value.  Jesus did this repeatedly with women, often trusting them with information and privilege no one else would have extended in that day.  Society’s treatment of women, and even more, the church’s treatment of women was not Jesus’ way.  The way this helps me understand why the things I’ve felt God had for me to do haven’t always lined up with what the church said was a woman’s place brings me a beautiful peace about my role in God’s work.  

Next, the way Jesus administered the greatest truth to someone in the deepest pain is so important.  Like a fast acting trauma surgeon would rush to take drastic action to save a shattered victim, He went straight for the biggest and most profoundly healing truth:  His own position as Messiah.  The guys who hung out with Jesus every day didn’t get to hear this from His mouth, but this woman, in her deep pain whatever may have caused it, didn’t have the ability to hang around and absorb what one could learn through traveling side by side with Jesus.  She also was, as I have been myself, in the kind of pain and grief that makes one ready, desperate, even, for the comfort of His truth and the safety of who He is. 

And perhaps most beautiful to me, it wasn’t about her sin. It was about healing her pain! She needed His acceptance, as proved by His actions, which He extended to her first.  Then she needed to hear His words, His answer to her pain, and He said all of the truth to her in a direct and clear way.  All this time, I’ve been judging Well Woman and equating her with her supposed sin, and I’ve missed her trauma and pain and how Jesus presented Himself as the Answer to and Healer of those.

Sometimes I forget how He has done that for me.  Though it has forever shifted my perspective and daily approach to my faith, I don’t always keep in conscious remembrance how I’ve felt an awareness of God with me as I lay on the bathroom floor, realizing the end of a marriage, or as I dropped to my knees involuntarily because I couldn’t stand after hearing my sister tell me our brother was dead.  I forget sometimes how He walked with me into Al-Anon meetings and held me through accepting that alcoholism would end another marriage.  The truth is, some of the most seismic shifts in my faith and ability to understand spiritual things came after God let me feel the intensity of His love in the darkest, most repulsive or devastating places.  He accepted me when I felt rejected, held me together Himself when I fell apart, and then spoke to me of His deepest truths, just like he did for our Samaritan woman. 

I needed this fresh perspective today.  I needed to think about that Woman at the Well, not as the bad lady I imagined her to be as a child, but as a woman much like me.  The way Jesus interacted with Her is so like the way He’s interacted with me, and the conscious realization of this is so profoundly comforting, so wonderful to a former Southern Baptist girl such as myself.  I just had to share it, and if you’ve read this far, I hope it comforts you, too.  How about a drink of water?