My mom calls me “fiercely independent.”
And the example she likes to use is of the time when I was five years old and waiting for her to pick me up after school. She picked me up every day. My only responsibility was to walk out to her and get in the car. Except on this particular day, she wasn’t there. And I figured since she wasn’t there, she must want me to walk home.
So, off I went.
I was five.
Home was about four blocks down and one block over.
Mom caught up to me about halfway there.
I don’t remember her being angry, just frightened and confused. Why had I decided to walk home? Wasn’t I afraid?
Nope.
Fiercely independent.
In today’s Gospel reading (John 4:5-42), we meet another “fiercely independent” woman, the Samaritan at the well. Jesus stops there to rest and asks her for some water. But instead of complying as one might expect a subservient woman of the time period to do immediately, she balks.
Why is this strange man speaking to her? He is a Jew. She is a Samaritan.
And when he starts speaking of living water, she’s not buying it. She’s no pushover. You can almost see her rolling her eyes. Please … this man is going to give me water that’s going to make me never thirst again? He didn’t even bring a bucket to the well.
But Jesus persists. And it’s only when he reveals intimate details of her life, her previous five husbands, the fact that the man she lives with is not her husband that she finally sees him for what he is.
What’s fascinating is that it is NOT Jesus’s discussion of living water that sways her; it is his knowledge of her that convinces her of who he is.
She runs back to the city and declares to anyone who will listen, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”
She believes him because he knows her.
He knows her inside and out.
And so she believes and then brings others to him, so that they too might see and hear and believe.
I had my own moment at the well this past year. So many times we hear “Do you know God?” or “Do you know Jesus?” But the real question we’re missing is this:
Do you know that He knows you? Do you know that God knows you better than you know yourself? That He knows things (both good and bad) you are too afraid to admit to yourself because you’re too afraid of how that knowledge will change you?
I had been sitting at my own metaphorical well for many, many years, minding my own business, drinking from a well that wasn’t filling me in the slightest, but then I took a chance, like the Samaritan woman did by speaking to Jesus in the first place. I took a chance. I tried a new church on Easter and God spoke to me and I realized just how lost I had been.
And ever since then, I’ve done what the Samaritan woman did. I’ve shared what I’ve learned with anyone who will listen.
I am the Samaritan woman.
And so are you.
We have all spent time at the well.
