Changing Her Story

Sometimes there is a lot going on in a simple conversation.

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’—  although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized— he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’ - John 4:1-15

The woman Jesus encounters at the well waits until midday to draw water, rather than come in the morning when all the other women would be there. She wants to avoid them. 

She is not afraid to approach when a man is sitting there by himself, although it was frowned upon for a man and woman to be alone together, even out in the open.

So there is a lot going on here in this encounter, even before a word is spoken.  And she is not afraid to speak of it, asking how he, a Jew, would ask something of a Samaritan woman.

John makes it clear that the disciples are no where nearby.  They are truly alone.

If this was a scene in an Elizabethan novel, the reader would be on the edge of her seat, anticipating the tension between the two, wondering what will happen.

Maybe that is how the listener at the time of John heard this.  What's going to happen next?

What the woman reveals when she asks for his living water is that she doesn't want to have to come back every day for water from this well.  She is ready to give that up and live a normal life, where she doesn't have to be the talk of the town.

And that is exactly what is going to happen.  She will let the town know of her encounter with this man and they will come to believe her.

Yes, she will still be talked about, but in a different and more positive way.  The man knew everything about me, she will say.  That is an admission of her lifestyle.

Anyone who comes to Jesus changes their story and with it, who they become.

Now there is a clue in the beginning of this story that tells us we can all be instruments of change for God's children.  The disciples were out baptizing.  His followers were bringing people to Christ.

We can do the same.  We can help people see the world differently, enjoy the living water that is for them, so they won't need to be ashamed and embarrassed ever again.

This is what we do when we shine like Jesus, accepting all as if they are him.

More to come...