Scripture lends us a window into this woman’s background. When we first meet her, she is unnamed, divorced, and displaced. Her life was so conflicted on so many fronts that no one imagined she could ever minister. Understanding this, she first shared the gospel as questions and suggestions.
Maybe like our friend, you too have felt the judgement of others to such an extreme, that your statements too have remained hints and questions. Forgive them. People who would tie you to your past … have yet to experience a revelation of God’s mercy and the power of rebirth.
Before she took on the name “enlightened one,” Photina was known to us only by an ethnic designation. We met her when we listened in on her private interchange with Jesus. She is our friend the Samaritan woman. How amazing that the woman who formerly had five husbands would one day labor alongside her five sisters. I love this, because in the Bible, the number five symbolizes grace. And in her case, she experienced grace upon grace.
I’ve always loved this woman. For years I’ve seen her as a woman of great capacity. She was a deep well living a shallow life. The hardships she experienced and the realities of her choices had dug a deep, dark, dry hollow within her. The enemy of her soul meant for this to be a perpetually broken place that isolated her and buried her dreams.
Old wells will leave you thirsty time and time again. Ultimately, only God can quench our thirst. These ancient wells were subject to failure because their source was intimately attached to earthbound conditions. At any given moment an enemy could slip in and lace a well with poison or fill it with dirt, or a long-lasting drought could dry it up.
Like an old well, the law could be easily poisoned by human statutes or buried in the earth of man-made rituals and rules. The Samaritans adhered to only the first five books of the Torah and worshipped at their own mountain. They lived in but a shadow of the law, and yet the Jews proved that even in the law in its entirety cannot give us the life we long for.
These ancient wells of laws and patriarchs were given to us for the purpose of punctuating our desperate need for the living water of the Holy Spirit. The law requires a location and a place of worship. The law places God just beyond our reach. Therefore, the worship of God remains an observance, rather than a life source. Under the law there is visitation rather than habitation. The law is where he can be seen from a distance but not touched. The law maintains a Mount Sinai dynamic where we can behold God but not be held by him.
When our sanctuary of worship is around us rather than within us, we run the risk of remaining outsiders. This encounter between the Samaritan woman and Jesus broke so many legal parameters. This woman had broken the law and was living with a man. Even in our more liberal church today, she would be considered to be “living in sin.” And yet Jesus saw beyond her shameful outside and spoke straight into her broken heart.
The law always requires more of you than it can give. Living water cannot be contained or even weighed, for it is liquid LIGHT. The same is not true for dead water. If you want more than a drink at Jacob’s well, you will need a container. What you take home with you is limited to what you can carry. Dead water is not light; it is heavy.
And you would have to make this journey again and again and again! Jesus speaks of a thirst that is perpetual and insatiable. As a daughter of the Middle East growing up in a dry arid land, this woman has known thirst all her life. There is no well, deep enough or water cool enough to satiate her desperate need for love, affirmation, and companionship. Her soul is desperately dehydrated. Time and time again she had been deceived by what she hoped would quench her craving and refresh her soul. Her longings are valid, but like so many of us, she kept looking for the right thing in all the wrong places.
NEXT UP: Jesus does not marginalize her longings, nor will he scoff at yours.