Woman at the Well - Part 2

Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water.

The gospel makes a point of saying the story takes place at noon. In those times, a woman coming to draw well alone at noon is suspicious. Most women collected water in the morning when it was cool, with other women for company. This well is also half a mile from Sychar where she lives - there had to be one closer. The message that she was not welcome at her own well is not in the text, but it doesn't have to be. We can imagine the open glares, the smothered laughter, the children hustled away. Under the law, she isn't just a bad example, she is contagion.

Jesus asks her for a drink of water, just flat-out asks her. Being spoken to by a strange man in a public place, in broad daylight, would have startled any woman. He doesn't have his own bucket, so he must drink from hers, probably made from animal skins. How sensuous that sounds to my modern sensibilities. Members of John's community hearing this story would also be primed for romance. Strangers meeting at the town well was the plot of many Jewish stories of romance and marriage - Rebecca and Isaac, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and, well, Mrs. Moses, I guess. This meeting would have scared the bejeebers out of people.

You can hear them asking, "Doesn't he know who she is?" In fact, he does, and tells her all about her five ex-husbands and current lover. The Gospel makes Jesus pull these facts out of the air. But William Barclay, in his classic series for home Bible study, suspects that we are getting an abbreviated version of this exchange, something like "minutes from a committee meeting". Barclay wonders if she doesn't see the piercing kindness in his eyes and pours out her heart to him.

I like this reading better, and not just because it's more plausible. It makes kindness the point, without the help of psychic powers. It asks more of me, in reaching out to people my culture teaches me to shun. Like the young man in my congregation arrested for sending child pornography to an undercover FBI agent. Having his house and car shown on the TV news makes him about as outcast as you can get. And hard for me to love. His mother is one of the kindest people in our church; she doesn't know what to make of this, but she loves her son. Because I love her, perhaps I can love him, too. I wonder if that's why Jesus is so lovable in the gospels.