This was no accident, no serendipitous meeting. This was not happenstance or chance. Jesus did not “just happen” across the woman drawing water from the well in the heat of the day. Not at all. This was planned. Ordained. This was on purpose—an appointment, a date, scheduled in advance. Of course, only one of the two participants here knew about the appointment. But then, only one needed to know.
No one came through Samaria on their way to anywhere; not if they could help it. Jews did not interact with Samaritans, descendants of those who stayed behind when Assyria carried off most of the Jews into captivity centuries before. These were the Serbs and Muslims in modern day Bosnia, or the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Italy. These were the Blue and the Gray of the American Civil War. Jews needing to pass through Samaria would instead take the long way around, just to avoid contact with their unclean relatives. Jesus, though, is a different sort of Jew, and He has an appointment in Samaria. It’s scheduled for noon, and it promises to be a life changing meeting (John 4:1-29).
The woman arrives, right on time for a meeting she didn’t know she was having. She is surprised to see a man waiting there by well, and even more surprised to see that he is a Jew. At least, she thinks to herself, he’s not from around here and not likely to know about me. She ignores him and begins the arduous task of drawing up water to get her through the next few hours until she has to return for more. Jesus watches her in silence for a while and then calls the meeting to order.
“Would you mind drawing some water for me? I’m a bit thirsty.”
She responds a bit testily, “How is it that you, a Jewish man, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for water?”
She understands very well that this kind of interaction just doesn’t happen. She knows better than most the power of social norms and class restrictions. She has learned, as many of us have learned, to avoid others if she wants to avoid reminders of her own failures and unworthiness. But it is too late now, the conversation has been joined, and her life is about to change forever. By the time they are through, Jesus has revealed himself officially as the Messiah for the first time (to a Samaritan living in open sin!) and announced his ministry in manner he had refrained from doing before. He has identified and acknowledged her sin—and her shame—and shown her a way out. She, the guilt-ridden woman who crept to the well in the middle of the day to avoid others now races back to town tell as many others as she could about this man who had told her everything about herself, who KNEW everything about her, and still wanted to sit and talk with her.
This is what moves me: that meeting was a surprise for the woman who needed that meeting more than she knew. She didn’t schedule it. She didn’t ask for it. She didn’t initiate any of it. Had normal behaviors and protocols been followed, that meeting could have never happened. But Jesus, on his way to Galilee, took the shortcut (on purpose) no self-respecting Jew would ever take, and met up (on purpose) with a lost soul in the place of her shame (on purpose). And that’s the key, really. Jesus was more other-respecting than he was concerned about self. I’d like to learn to be that way, as well.
Maybe, like me, you’d also like to invite Jesus into your places of shame, to come to your heat-of-the-day well. Maybe we’d like to hear him tell us all the things about ourselves that we already know and despise and hide from all the perfect people who intimidate us into solitude and silence. And then we’d like to hear him promise us Water that Lives and tell us even though he knows all about us, he wanted to meet with us anyway—even to the point of going well out of his way and traveling to a land where no self-respecting God would ever travel. On purpose. Just to talk to us. Wouldn’t that be awesome. Wouldn’t we have a story to tell?
But that’s a meeting we cannot arrange. No one comes to the Father unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). Jesus will come to us and find us, if he hasn’t already. And he will know us completely and love us anyway. And you and I will be changed from fearful into fearless, from faithless into faithful, from shamed into shining. And we will tell our story—forgive me, HIS story—in all the places we were previously to ashamed to enter. Or he has already found us and we are already telling that story. Either way, we have all been at that well waiting for an encounter with the Lord, an on-purpose meeting planned from eternity by the King.
