Often the task of exegesis is to rescue truth from familiarity. The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is known, but its amazing surprises often are overlooked. A few of them are particularly noteworthy.
1. Dominical mission: Go in need of those you hope to serve. On arriving at the well, the disciples set off to the nearby town to buy food. The story assumes that they took with them the soft leather bucket that was necessary equipment for any traveling band in the first century.
It appears that Jesus deliberately emptied himself to the point that he would sincerely need help from whoever came to the well with a bucket. He knew he was in Samaria and that women usually carried the domestic water supply from the well. It was noon and, thereby, hot. An outcast woman appeared and Jesus broke a taboo that a millennium later I observed throughout my decades in the Middle East. Strange men do not talk to local women in public in any conservative area of the Middle East even today. This stricture was reinforced by the coming of Islam, not created by it. The rabbis held to the same standard.
Jesus initiates his contact with the woman by asking for help, not by offering it. The self-emptying required is sobering. In this story mission begins with “I need help,” not with “I am here to offer help.”
2. Christology: The gift of God — a person! As the story unfolds, “the gift of God” is clearly a person and not a book. This new reality also appears in the first of the Servant Songs in Isaiah where God speaks concerning the coming, mysterious suffering servant who will bring his Torah (Is. 42:4.) the reader, knowing the writing prophets, would have been familiar with such a divine gift. The text continues, however, as God tells the servant, I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.
A covenant is generally understood to be a carefully constructed verbiage that can be reduced to writing and agreed upon. The result is words on paper that finalize and record the covenant. In Isaiah, the covenant is a person. In like manner, Jesus tells the woman that the gift of God is a person talking and acting, not a verbal message recorded by a prophet. This distinction will continue to be critical in the Church’s continuing conversation with Islam in the 21st century. Jesus is our Quran.
3. The effect of the gift: Thirst permanently quenched. Jesus refuses to debate with the woman the question of who owns the well, the Samaritans or the Jews. He focuses instead on life-giving water that conquers time. His water will quench thirst too deep for words. Augustine understood.
4. The effect: A spring for others. Consumer religion is “all about me.” Yes, I will join a church if it lifts my depression, takes care of my children after school, lowers crime, and helps me make friends in the community. Jesus tells the woman of a gift of water that becomes a spring for others. No spring flows for its own benefit, but for the benefit of the thirsty who come to its waters. Lesslie Newbigin has reminded us repeatedly that the Church is an organization whose purpose is to serve those who are not its members. The woman is offered the privilege of becoming a spring for others.
5. The back door: Religion as escape from God. The woman is challenged to “tell her man.” Jesus has “quit preaching and gone to meddling.” The woman tries to escape his exposure of her self-destructive lifestyle by hiding in “religion.” She challenges Jesus to a theological debate she is confident he will not be able to refuse: Where is the site of true worship — Samaria or Jerusalem? Jews and Samaritans had fought over this one for centuries. Religion can be fashioned into a thick blanket under which one can hide from God. Often the most strident voices in religious debate are people with deep unsolved personal problems. They plaster over their interior, life-crippling realities with “religion.” Their name is Legion.
6. Worship: No special real estate required. This is one of the greatest surprises of this story — the “de-Zionizing” of the tradition. Jesus answers the woman’s question about the right place for true worship with a denial of the Zionist equation. Jesus is not ready to affirm God’s unique presence in any particular building. God dwells everywhere and true worship is newly defined as worship “in spirit and in truth.” With such an equation the believer is obliged to struggle to find, to maintain, and to resolve the tension between two poles: Hold fast to what is good, and Do not quench the Spirit (I Thess.5:19.)
7. Revelation: I am identifies himself. In this dialogue, Jesus voices the awesome phrase, I am. What was not revealed to the learned Nicodemus in the previous chapter is openly affirmed to the simple Gentile woman of Samaria. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus reveals himself as I am to the disciples in the boat in the midst of a storm as he quiets the waves. He makes the same startling revelation to the outside world when he declares to the high priest at his trial, I am. He does not choose a moment of great power, when he is feeding the 5,000 or healing the sick before great crowds. This revelation comes when he is abandoned, chained, accused, and about to die. At that moment of greatest weakness he asks us to identify with him, as Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams has so ably pointed out in Christ on Trial.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, touches on the same theme when he talks of our “entering into the Messianic suffering of God in Christ.” In the story before us, a lone stranger invites this unnamed woman to accept that he is the presence of the great I am among the people. The I am is no longer present in a burning bush but in a person.
The woman becomes the first female preacher of Christian history as she invites her village to make its own discovery by going to the stranger beside the well who is willing to break caste and drink from her “polluted” bucket. In the process, she becomes a spring for others.
The one who empties self is able to empower us to become a source of life for others. May it be so this Easter.
Kenneth E. Bailey is an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament Studies living in New Wilmington, Pa.
