Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-august-19-2024
John 4:27-30, 39-42
The Disciples Rejoin Jesus
27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
Many Samaritans Believe
39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.
42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
Today’s reading is the end of John’s account of an encounter Jesus had with a Samaritan woman at a well outside the village of Sychar. In the first part of the story, Jesus was resting by the well while his disciples went into the nearby town to buy food. When a lone woman appeared in the heat of mid-day, Jesus asked her for a drink. The woman expressed surprise (and maybe some bitterness), because most observant Jews avoided any sort of contact with Samaritans, whom they regarded as ‘ritually unclean.’
But in the conversation that followed, Jesus told the woman he could give her “living water,” which he said would satisfy a deep thirst within her and would overflow her into the lives of others. And as you might remember, Jesus also revealed that he knew details of her previous life, including that she had been married five times. As they spoke, the woman concluded that Jesus was a prophet – by which she meant that he spoke for God. And the woman began to come to the conclusion that he might actually be the Messiah that both Jews and Samaritans were waiting for.
Now, in today’s part of the story, the woman leaves Jesus at the well and hurries off to her village. She leaves her water jar, which shows how excited she was – a water jar would have been a pretty important possession in her world. And when she gets back to town, the woman spreads the word about her conversation with Jesus and invites others to come and meet him. She doesn’t exactly tell people that Jesus is the Messiah, but she definitely suggests that possibility.
(As I have in the past, I’m leaving out the verses in this story that describe a conversation between the disciples and Jesus about the idea of doing God’s work as “spiritual food.” It’s an interesting conversation, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story of the Samaritan woman.)
The New Testament scholars say it’s significant that Jesus met the woman at the well around noon. In hot-weather cultures, women go to the well first thing in the morning, in the coolest part of the day. But this Samaritan woman might have been there in the heat of the day to avoid the other women. As someone who had been married five times and was living with a man she wasn’t married to, she probably wanted to avoid the gossip and judgment that might be directed at someone with such an unusual marital history.
So when you think about it, this woman would have been regarded as the ultimate outsider. To religious Jewish readers of John’s gospel, she was an outsider because she was a Samaritan – and because women had second-class status. And it seems that she was regarded as an outsider by the other Samaritans of her the village.
If that’s the case – and it certainly makes sense – it’s even more interesting that the people of the village would follow the woman out to the well because she claimed to have met the Messiah there. What would make them do that? Don’t you think she must have been communicating a powerful sense of excitement when she came rushing back to town without her water jar? Something about her demeanor persuaded people to set aside their suspicion of her and follow her out to meet Jesus.
Whatever the reason, the text says that the people of the town are so moved by his teaching that they talk him into spending two more days with them. By the time Jesus resumes his journey to Galilee, the people of the village have come to believe that he really is “the Savior of the world.”
It seems to me there are two important lessons we’re meant to take away from this story. First of all, this Samaritan woman becomes the first evangelist in the Gospel of John – the first one to tell others about Jesus and about his meaning to the world. This woman would have seemed like the most unlikely person imaginable to become a successful evangelist. She was a Samaritan, she was a woman, and apparently she was regarded as morally suspicious. So it seems that we’re meant to be reminded that God sometimes uses really surprising people to be effective witnesses.
The other lesson this story holds for us has to do with how the woman told people about Jesus. There’s no sign this woman had any particular theological knowledge, other than knowing that a Messiah would come at some point. She just told the others about her own experience with Jesus, and asked the question that experience had raised in her own mind – “Could this be the Christ?” Her excitement led the others to come and meet Jesus, and he did the rest.
Most of us who are followers of Jesus feel like we’re not really the kind of people who can be particularly effective in telling others about him. But this woman had several strikes against her, and she still brought a whole town to know Jesus.
Most of us are probably capable of doing what she did. We don’t need to be able to spout a lot of theology – we just need to tell what we have seen and experienced in Jesus. We can just point to Jesus, to his teachings, and to all the care and compassion that has been inspired by those teachings, and ask the same question this woman asked: “Could this be the Messiah?”
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the example of this woman evangelist, who overcame prejudice and suspicion to bear powerful witness and bring a whole town to know you in Jesus. Let her example inspire us to bear witness to our neighbors, so they might know you in him too. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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