Lenten Reading Reflection Week 2 – The Well
Hello friends.
Try dropping two activities into your week. First, watch “The Well,” accessible to everyone here on YouTube. Transporting us across time and miles, this short video deposits us at the historic site of Jacob’s well. You remember the basics of what happened there in NT times—from Sunday School, or maybe drawing on a 60’s folk music memory of “Jesus/Met the Woman/ At the Well/ And He told her/Everything/ She’d ever done!”
After the video, turn to the Scriptural account in John 4:1-42: Is this a much more complex and revolutionary message than you remembered? I now have greater appreciation for this Gospel’s theological import; I am grateful for what this improbable relationship reveals.
Detailed background in this chapter of River Through the Desert prompted some other musings. There is nothing at all unusual about a woman being at the well, doing “women’s work.” But where was everyone else? Wells – or, the proverbial “watering holes,” if you wish – were a community gathering place for sharing news and conversation. Why just these two on hand?
For Jesus, Jacob’s Well marked a rest stop on his journey from Judea to Galilee. Since his disciples were off getting them some food, Jesus might have expected some moments of peace – in this region, no one in their right mind lugged water in the glaring sun and insufferable heat of midday. Yet, here came the Samaritan woman. Perhaps she was following her own peculiar routine, choosing midday on purpose for some solitude of her own, away from the possibility of irritating taunts from the madding crowd? Her initial response to the verbal advances of this unfamiliar Jewish man (an interloper?) suggests not passivity but remarkable self-possession, including no sense of obligation for self-disclosure of her status as adulteress.
Each had to take on the risk – Jesus first – of ignoring conventions, boundaries and prejudices, to allow the well to become the setting for an amazing encounter. From that first mundane exchange about drawing water, the conversations and Q&A take us wildly off piste, with Jesus disclosing existential truths not only about the Samaritan woman, but revelations about Himself of truly Biblical proportions.
As for the Samaritan woman, she was transformed in her own eyes, and one must infer in the eyes of others – becoming in time an effective evangelist to the truth of the Messiah’s coming.
Praying that we may all be open to encountering the truth of Jesus’ coming in the company of unfamiliar folks and in unexpected times and places!
Mary R