Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he."
Whenever I read the account in John of the woman at the well, I always read it too fast, like it would have taken just a few minutes. And, certainly, it wasn’t a long encounter (I suppose brushes with Life in our midst don’t have to be long, for they last a lifetime). But the more I thought about it, the more it’s like my own encounters with Jesus – with this wild God who is so good it hurts, who loves me so much it takes His life… and mine. Wow! I love this!
Picture what it must have been like for her. She came during the noon hour when the sun was scorching, because as hot as it was, it was not as searing or burning as was the scorn from the other village women. She was not respectable at all. In that time, to live with someone you were not married to was shamed, and to have been married as many times as she had was shunned. No doubt she was lonely, and you can almost see in her tired eyes the dreariness and weariness of trying to find solace from her hurt. The man she lived with she didn’t love; he just kept her company, even if it wasn’t all that good of company to keep. He no doubt didn’t return her love; he only kept the bed warm, even though with an unfamiliar heat. She can’t even remember if she’d met his parents, and –where was he from again?
All this she carries as she saunters and stumbles her way, alone, in disgrace, to the water hole. There’s not much for her to do anymore, and certainly her chances of finding anyone to love –heck, even not despise her—were slim, and shrinking fast. So, in the midday sun of her daily duty she came as she had always come.
Except today, someone else was there. Before she had arrived, he had been sitting there, waiting like the Father to a prodigal son who didn’t know he was even heading home. I can’t imagine her shock to find anyone there that afternoon, more less a man, and even more than that, a Jew in a Samaritan world. What was he doing here? Surely, if he knew who she was, he would mock her as they all do, scoff, and turn his back, walking away. Well, the water awaits and the sun is pounding, so she reaches for the water.
Watching her closely with deep eyes and an excited smile, the man asks (and you can almost hear his playfulness, his joy at what kind of discovery she would soon make) “Will you give me a drink?” Who was this man talking to her? Where was he from? Didn’t he know better than to talk to her? Did she have to explain the social and cultural implications of Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman… and if only he knew…
But he pressed on, piercing something in her with his next words, with his forced movement towards her even though he shouldn’t even be here. Her own thirst was evident from her cracked lips and scorched soul. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
Of course that was the line. Now she knew he didn’t have a clue where he was. This was Jacob’s well, for heaven’s sake. Was he so arrogant to think he was greater than him? Even this woman, as shameful her life had been, had an inheritance here, for this well belonged to Jacob himself. How dare him.
Still pressing, still gazing intently at this adulterer, this outsider, this ragamuffin, the man reveals even more, something even crazier than his last statement, something wilder than his eyes burning through the coats and hats this woman had learned to put on and take off against the world’s weather. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirst again,” he spoke. “But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” Finally, she took her eyes off her bucket and directed them into his. “The water I give him,” he continued, “will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
There was an awkward silence, a silence that inevitably happens when someone encounters this man and his words that tear through flesh into cut into the heart. But this woman would not be touched. She had learned her defenses. Cynicism was her bedfellow. In a mocking tone that surprised her by the similarity it had to her own accusers’ torments, she blurted, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
With a smile now fading slightly, with creases on his brow as he considered other identities this woman had taken on, the hurts and lies she had accepted as truth, he leaned forward ever-so-slightly, and in almost a whisper, said, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
She had been here before. Many times. Without missing a beat, and with an aire of defiance to protect her from the coming gasps that would surely come as they always did when she admitted where she was, she said, “I have no husband.”
He knew. But he needed to let her know that he did, and it didn’t phase him. He knew it all, down to the very last hair on her head. And it didn’t phase him. Because greater than her sin, was her identity as the Created, created for Himself. In the next coming years, and in the lives of His disciples to come, He would show by His life and death, and then by the Spirit, that He did not come to condemn, but to give life, and to give it in abundance. He came to offer Himself as the Living Water to souls made only for that.
Just like we so often do when the Truth fillets us open, she points in the distance and aims the conversation at religion in order to take it off herself and her desperate need for Someone to love her. “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” But, oh, she didn’t know the meaning of the word worship. Not yet. As the old wedding vows go, “with my body, I thee worship,” God stood there, heart pounding in love toward his bride, anticipating the moment when she would know what real worship was about. “A time is coming,” he said, and the next words he emphasized with his hand almost pounding at his heart, “and has now come,” (and the angels in heaven rejoice with that statement, Jesus’s joy pouring forth), “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
And now, with the bucket long sat aside, with a face drawn in an expression of anticipation born from a heart just learning to desire and dream again, she wondered –but what was she thinking? –but still she wondered… But would he come? Would he really come like they had said he would? The Messiah was supposed to come, but –and what was this man? Who was he, standing here, offering something she had never tasted of before and rarely, especially now, allowed herself to long for? There was something so strange, and yet so… so… so right and true and living in what he was saying. “I know,” she said, embarrassed by even thinking that – what IF it was true at this instant – this could be Him, “I know that Messiah called Christ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” With that last statement, she half-wondered if maybe his explanations would sound something like what she had just heard. Not answers, but a deep calling; a drawing; an offering; a living encounter….
I just can’t get over what happens to people when they encounter the Living God, the earth-shaking, doctrine-shattering, reason-exploding, fiercely redeeming, Life-giving God of the Bible. The woman totally forgot why she had come in the first place to the well. She left her jar, left her shame, and ran to tell all her accusers what she had encountered. Could it be? Could it really be the Christ? In a matter of twenty minutes, this woman changed from a loose, desperate village woman to a passionate missionary who cared nothing of her own skin. She had been met by Someone, and this Someone offered her a taste of the Living Water that would leave her thirsting only for more of that Life.
That’s the God I want to encounter. No – bigger than this. Bigger than what I can conceive. I tremble at the thought that God would demand what He did of Abraham, after giving him everything he had wanted, promising him the stars. It scares me to think of what God allowed to happen to Job, and what he wanted from the heart of Jonah. It makes me weep to think that, in the words of my wife, the same God who carved out the Grand Canyon knit me together in my mother’s womb and hems me in, before and behind me. I want to encounter a God that would pour His life into me, and then call me to follow him to a cross. I want to experience the Life that blows away death, the community of fellowship and suffering that brings purpose clearer than the sky on a scorching day. I want to know the Truth that sets free, really free, not that false freedom I try to convince myself is what I really want. I want the Life, the real, abundant Life for which Jesus, with the joy set before Him, endured the cross and scorned its shame.
I want to drink deeply of the Living Water.
For more, read Oswald Chamber's thoughts on the "
Impoverished Ministry of Jesus."
