The wit of Jesus when he encounters the woman at the well

Part of the genius of John’s gospel, for all its theological depth and complexity, is the way he sums up the whole of the Christian message in disarmingly simple stories. Though they differ in detail, they each depict a situation in which ordinary people are saved from whatever weighs them down or holds them back, by their encounter with Jesus.

 

The woman taken in adultery, for instance, is saved not only from stoning but also from judgmental censure: instead, she finds forgiveness and is able to forge a new future. The helpless cripple can walk again and, as a consequence, is able to care for himself not only materially but spiritually. The man born blind, in next week’s gospel, sees for the first time and thereby recovers not only his sight but his faith. And the wedding feast at Cana reaches its cheering climax when Jesus changes water for purification into wine for celebration, thereby saving not only the party but the bride’s father’s embarrassment.

 

But of all these stories, this exquisitely turned account of Jesus’ chance meeting with a feisty Samaritan woman is one of the most vivid. At the heart of the story is the breaking down of barriers of various kinds: the barrier of ignorance, the barrier of religious intolerance, the barrier of racism, the barrier of sexual prejudice (and prudishness), but most important of all, the barrier of the past and past mistakes.

 

The scene itself speaks volumes. Jesus meets the woman at Jacob’s well, in the noonday sun. Nobody normally drew water at that time of day, but given the woman’s marital status – or lack of it – she was doubtless avoiding the disapproval of the village gossips who, like all sensible people, came to the well in the cool of the morning and the early evening.

 

The reference Jesus makes to her five husbands and his quip that the man she was living with now was not one of them, is one of the best examples of our Lord’s dry wit and sense of irony. (I knew a friar who would reassure the congregation that his sermon was going to be brief, by saying: “As the woman at the well used to say to her husbands, ‘I won’t keep you long’”.)

 

Again, Jesus wasn’t helping his own reputation by being alone with this multi-married woman. Even if her domestic arrangements hadn’t been so colourful, it would have been considered unacceptable for an unmarried man to be alone with any woman, except his close relatives. But even more, no observant Jew would have dreamt of having a conversation, let alone share a drinking cup, with a Samaritan woman. To Jews, Samaritans were heretics. In fact, they were worse: they were despised as quislings. In the distant past, they’d collaborated, married, and even had children with their Assyrian conquerors. And now, by the time of Jesus, the attitude of Jews to Samaritans was blatantly racist. Samaritans, in Jewish eyes, could do no right: they had the wrong liturgy, the wrong theology and, patently, inferior morals. All that wrongness was summed up in their having built a Temple in the wrong place. (When it came to real estate, then as now, location mattered, especially where Temples were concerned.)

 

This whole episode is a wonderful example of Jesus’ obvious preference for the kind of persons supposedly ‘nice’ people love to look down on, albeit in ways thinly concealed by condescension. This encounter is yet another example of how it was (and still is) precisely people in trouble who understood Jesus more easily than the untroubled. The complicated family arrangements of this five-times divorced, co-habiting, Samaritan woman, don’t provoke in Jesus censorious stricture, but gently challenging humour.

 

Unlike the Pharisees then, and all Pharisees since, including Christian ‘Pharisees’, Jesus refuses to focus attention exclusively on the tribulations of the flesh or make them the scapegoat for all our other problems. The point of this remarkable story is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of our salvation, except not knowing our need of it. That same assurance is given to all of us, whatever our past. This, then, is a wonderfully encouraging story of hope and a much-needed reminder that the Christian gospel isn’t primarily a set of moralising proscriptions.

 

Moral integrity is, of course, integral to our lives, by definition, but the only measure of true goodness is God Himself, who is, of course, Love Itself. And love, which certainly creates duties and obligations in our lives, was never itself created by obligation and duty. The story also reminds us – and this is especially important during Lent - that the Christian gospel isn’t primarily about discipline and detachment, as conventionally understood. Detachment isn’t primarily not owning anything, but rather not being owned by any thing. And discipline isn’t primarily selfrestraint, but the ordering of our lives towards the ultimate good, Goodness Itself. Self-discipline is not the same as virtue, properly understood. To live virtuously is to flourish humanly.

 

What the Christian life means, primarily, is living and being ‘in Christ’: and that’s not a matter of effort or merit, but sheer gift. It means allowing his life to be bodied forth in ours; it means living with the life he shares with us, his life, so that we see, speak and love, as he does. St Paul expresses it exquisitely: “I live”, he says, “now not I, but Christ lives in me”. What does that look like, in practice? An old friend’s prayer, found after his death in a battered missal that had accompanied him through the dark days of the Second World War, answers that perfectly: “Lord, so act in me, that all I do is done also by Thee.”