Jesus is Waiting

Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well. This is a long Gospel reading, at least in terms of our present-day attention span for Holy Scripture. And it is a long conversation between Jesus and the woman. I read recently that this is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone anywhere in the Gospels—and that includes his accusers, his mother Mary and all of the disciples. Now we can presume that Jesus had conversations that didn’t make it into the Gospels, but all the same, John gives a great deal of weight and importance to this particular encounter between an unnamed Samaritan woman and Jesus.

John does not give the woman her name, but there is still quite a lot that we know about her. I would like to borrow some words from Barbara Brown Taylor to describe her.

"She was an outsider…. She was a triple outsider. In the first place she was a Samaritan, which made her a half-breed and full pagan as far as the purists were concerned.

"She was also, of course, a woman. In Jesus’ time, women were not what you would call liberated. They were not even allowed to worship with men, whose morning devotions included the prayer, ‘Thank God I am not a woman.’

Women had no place in public life. They were not to be seen or heard, especially not by holy men, who did not speak to their own wives in public. One group of pious men was known as ‘the bruised and bleeding Pharisees’ because they closed their eyes when they saw a woman coming down the street, even if it meant walking into a wall and breaking their noses.

"She was a Samaritan and a woman, but that was not all. She was also a fallen woman. Respectable women made their trips to the well in the morning, when they could greet one another and talk about the news. But this woman was one of the people they talked about, and the fact that she showed up at noon was a sure sign that she was not welcome at their morning social hour. As Jesus soon deduced, she had been married as many times as Elizabeth Taylor and was living in sin at the moment, which made it all around less painful for her to go to the well alone, after the others had gone" [The Christian Century, February 12, 2008].

This is the person who finds Jesus waiting for her.

As a Samaritan, she was different. Have you ever felt different? Different from the crowd? Maybe even at the same time you were running with a crowd harbored some personal secret or nurtured some insecurity that made you feel different from the others… isolated and alone? She was different.

As a woman in that day, she was marginalized. Have you ever felt marginalized? Shunned or looked down upon by others, the object of other people’s exclusion? Whether the cause be race or gender or sexual orientation or economic status or physical awkwardness on the playground or intellectual ability… have you ever known what it feels like when other people label and treat you as less valuable than they are? She was marginalized.

And she was a sinner, trapped in an inescapable web of sin. Like being in the bottom of a dark pit with no way out. Her past, her life, her choices put her there. And now she was trapped in sin. Have you ever felt that way… trapped unable to escape things done and left undone in your life? A sinner.

This triple outsider is the person who finds Jesus waiting for her. Jesus was not waiting for some specially chosen, spiritually strong, pure and saintly person. He was waiting particularly for the sinful Samaritan woman.

And although she was still a Samaritan, she was not isolated or alone at the well that day. Jesus was waiting for her. She was still a woman, but she was not shunned that day; Jesus asked her for a drink of water and engaged her in an earnest and personal conversation. And to her, still living in sin, he said, "I am he," the Messiah.

There is one more important thing we know about this unnamed person at the well. She was thirsty. Her body was thirsty and her soul was thirsty. Have you ever been soul-thirsty? Known a yearning in your soul that no amount of bottled water can quench? Listlessly searching, desperately thirsting after some meaning, some purpose, some substance to life beyond what the world offers? Do you know, like the Samaritan woman, what it feels like to have a thirsty soul? Jesus offered her living water. Living water that he said will become—for the soul-thirsty—a spring of water gushing up within them to eternal life.

If you have ever felt within yourself different, isolated or alone, Jesus is waiting to meet you and be with you at the well.

If you have ever been marginalized or devalued by other people, Jesus is waiting to share time, a glass of water and conversation with you.

If you have ever sinned and felt trapped by your sin, Jesus died for you. That’s Paul in the passage we heard from Romans this morning. "Christ died for the ungodly." "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us."

Have you ever felt soul-thirsty? Jesus offers you living water.

And what does Jesus mean by living water? What is John the Evangelist talking about when he recounts this story about Jesus and draws upon the image of living water? Living water means two things in Scripture [Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII – The Anchor Bible Commentary]. It means the revealing of God, and it means the gift of the Spirit. The revealing of God. The living water that Jesus offers the woman is the revelation to her personally of the living God. Jesus, through his person or his teaching or his touch or his preaching and proclamation, brings God to the Samaritan woman, makes God real for her, reveals the presence and nature of God. Jesus offers that same living water today. Jesus’ words in Holy Scripture and his presence with us in prayer and worship and offered at his table reveal the living God to us. And living water as the gift of the Spirit. Jesus gives the woman at the well the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in her own life, and the thirst of her soul is quenched.

The encounter with Jesus at the well is an overwhelming experience for the woman. She is known by and welcomed by the living God. Her soul is refreshed by the Holy Spirit. She is so transformed by life that she simply cannot contain herself and rushes off joyfully to share her good news, the good news, presumably with some of the very people who had previously shunned her. Her joy overflows.

At the beginning of this Gospel story the woman at the well feels isolated, marginalized, trapped in sin and soul-thirsty. If you cannot identify in some way with the woman at the well, you are not being honest with yourself this Lent. If you can identify with her, then know that Jesus is waiting for you at the well… waiting for you, offering an encounter with the living God and the gift of living water, gushing up to refresh and renew your thirsty soul.