John 4:5-42
Reruns of Gunsmoke play on our TV nightly. Matt Dillion, Doc Adams, Chester and Kitty share their life in Dodge night after weekday night. Last night, a white man brought his Native American wife to stay at the hotel and Dodge became a hotbed of intolerance – eventually capturing the woman and abusing her to scare her away.
Through circumstances she did not control, this woman became the outcast of Dodge practically overnight. Spite, gossip, preconceived notions of a people group, cultural ideas separating us from them – all this led to her capture.
From what many Bible scholars teach, the Samaritans and Jews at the time of Jesus would know this Gunsmoke script by heart. They didn’t get along, they suspected the other one of multiple social, cultural and religious shortcomings, they certainly did not trust each other.
Then within the Samaritan community, the woman at the well becomes a microcosm of the same script. From all we know, spite, gossip, preconceived notions about the value of a woman and cultural ideas of how God “punished” women who sinned made her an outcast – or at the least caused her to seek solitude while performing her daily household tasks.
Then Jesus shows up, breaking into her solitary routine and engaging her around water. While all the talk of husbands has been coupled with various interpretations, one connects with me: the stigma of barrenness (Thank you, Leeanne and Karoline Lewis). Since only men could divorce wives, if she had 5, it is possible the men divorced her because she could not produce an heir (or boys to help with the work), and because no man would have her, she ended up living in her relative’s home – a disgrace to the family.
The reason I like the idea of barrenness being the primary driver of this interaction between the woman and Jesus is this:
They are in a desert landscape. She is outside of town drawing water in the noon day heat, likely because she, like the desert around her, is “barren.” She encounters Jesus who tells her about living waters, continuously flowing. In my mind’s eye, I see how she pictures the desert come to life with the rains and then God whispers, “I will turn the parched earth of your life into fertile fields ripe with harvest.”
Then she gains new boldness and she enters her town and becomes the first evangelist to the good news of Jesus. To use a later trope: she goes into the field already "ripe," and she harvests the bounty. She has seen and heard and felt the water pour through her like a fresh cup down her parched throat. She must tell others.
In this progression of the theme, we’ve circled back around to a variation on hunger. We are human, we hunger and we thirst. Jesus is not only about eternal life, but also about the life of the world. He knows the barren places, the dry lands screaming for relief in all of our lives and he is the Living Water, pouring himself out onto the dry land and barren places to bring them to life.
May the practice of barrenness, of living in the desert lead you to the Living Water.
Photo by Elmendorf, Dwight Lathrop - camera crusade through the Holy Land C. Scribner's Sons New York 1912, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8537411
