The Woman at the Well

Scripture: Exodus 17:1-7  • Psalm 95  • Romans 5:1-11  • John 4:5-42

Want to know who Jesus is? What God is like? What truth and honesty look like? How about strength and hope in times of weakness and vulnerability? Human dignity? What real grace is? One of the best, if not the best, source for this is the story of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. 

Samaritans were considered anathema by the Jews. The Samaritans were a blend of all kinds of people—made up of Israelites who were not exiled when the Northern Kingdom was destroyed in 722 BCE—of various different nationalities whom the Assyrians had resettled in the area. The Assyrians did this as an attempt to ensure that Israel’s national dream could not come true. And a Jew speaking with a Samaritan, and a woman, was taboo at the time.

Debie Thomas' account of "The Woman at the Well," leaves me with a sense of wonder and astonishment at her incites, and at the same time grounded in the realities of Jesus' time, and our time today.  She is well worth reading. Reading her, I experience something I can only describe as the wonder a child experiences, or a light bulb turning on. For me, it is the same feeling as discovering a nuanced meaning in parsing an original language.