My husband and I just returned from Hawaii, celebrating twenty-five years of marriage. We’re in a new season now that our girls are growing up — a reacquainting, really. Learning each other again. Given the relentless pace of raising three daughters, caring for aging parents, and working full-time jobs, our time together has run low for quite a while now. Somewhere over the Pacific we took a deep breath, looked up and essentially said to each other: “Hey there! How have you been for the past 20 years?”
Which brought me to a sad awareness – due to the pace of life, even the people we are most bound to, most loved by, don’t fully know us…and we are often out of touch with some of the deepest most important parts of ourselves too.
I spent the whole trip almost constantly in, on, or beside flowing water —which could also be interpreted “living water” – same ancient Greek word – like Jesus mentions in our gospel today…a phrase I have always found rather cryptic…
But since having the luxury of time, to truly watch and ponder how flowing water, patient and persistent, finds its way even through solid rock. Slowly. Quietly. It reminded me of the persistence of God’s love for us, whether we are aware of it or not. How Jesus’ steady love wears down our barriers, even the massive barricades that this wounded woman has spent a lifetime building up.
What we hear in today’s gospel is the story of a hardened woman becoming open, being transformed by Jesus’ steadfast and highly unconventional behavior. The social math of this scene is significant. Jewish men did not speak to women in public — not even their wives. And Jews did not speak to Samaritans, full stop. Centuries of ethnic and religious contempt ran between them. She had every reason to expect to be ignored. Or worse. And Jesus speaks first — and not only that, but he also asks her for something. A drink of water. Sharing a common cup? Absolute anathema. Nonetheless, he puts himself in a posture of need and invites her into conversation.
We don’t always notice how consistently Jesus breaks the rules. Odd that we’ve built a religion in his name with so many of them.
We don’t know why she had five husbands. Perhaps she was a young girl married off early, then widowed and passed from brother to brother as custom demanded. Perhaps she was cast aside for failing to produce children. In a world where women had no economic agency — no ability to own property, no way to survive without male sponsorship — five marriages are almost certainly a story of survival. Of loss. Of being passed along. She is a woman who has some wounds and been through some things.
What we do know is that she came to the well at noon. Alone. The other women came in the cool of the morning — together, with their conversation and their belonging. She chose the scorching midday heat because it was kinder than the silence that fell when she arrived. Kinder than the averted eyes, the whispers. She had learned that it is safer to manage what gets seen.
Not so different from our world, really — where we are scrolled past, half-listened-to, known mostly by our productivity, our roles, our usefulness. Where if we carry a complicated story, we are deemed “too much” and are talked about rather than talked to.
We can imagine her lost in her thoughts, the heat pressing down, sweat stinging her eyes, looking up and quietly cursing when sees another person at the well…then taking a deep breath, and steeling herself for what is to come.
Jesus certainly recognized her desire to avoid conversation, but he reaches out to her anyway and proceeds to have the longest conversation recorded in all four Gospels. This is the longest exchange Jesus has with anyone in the bible. Not with Peter. Not with Nicodemus. With her.
At first, she hits him with a little snark…”You, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan WOMAN for a drink? Oh, you are going to give me flowing water? You don’t even have a bucket” You think you are better than Jacob? The conversation is deep – she shows herself to be no theological lightweight…and finally she relents and says, okay…sure, give me this living water.
And Jesus doesn’t tiptoe around the obvious. He knows why she is there at noon and goes straight to her wound. The thing she came there to keep hidden. The part of her story she had learned to carry alone….He asks her about her husband.
In essence he says: if you want the living water I offer that will quench your deepest thirst, it begins with honesty — the unvarnished truth of who you are: your wounds, your beauty, your shame, your gifts. All of it.
We have so often read this as accusation. But the text actually doesn’t justify this at all: Jesus doesn’t flinch, isn’t surprised and doesn’t lecture or withhold his generosity a bit…He simply names what is true — and keeps going. Because God is not in the exposing. God is in the loving…in the intimacy of being fully known and finding, to our astonishment, that we are still held.
Water, by its nature, always seeks the lowest place. And the living water Jesus offers works the same way — it moves toward whatever in us is most broken, most hidden, most in need. The living water Jesus offers finds the Samaritan woman’s lowest point – where her deepest wound, shame, and thirst lies. Not for water. But to be known and loved for exactly who she is.
Theologian James Alison says faith is not about giving intellectual assent to a set of beliefs or theological propositions, but rather it is relaxing — relaxing in the love and presence of God – the way we relax in the presence of someone we are certain is fond of us. When we know someone truly likes us, we laugh easier, we are more spontaneous, softer, and less defended. We are not afraid of judgment, so there is no reason for pretense, to pretend anything.
Which sounds lovely but is some rather heavy lifting for most of us — because we have learned, from life and sometimes from the church itself, that it is safer to manage what gets seen. So, we end up living cramped, in a finely polished and curated version of ourselves…and sometimes we even present this edited draft to God, which is just so silly.
The truth that Jesus is affirming is that our frailty is not a flaw in our design. It IS the design. Like the Japanese art form called Kintsugi – the broken pottery repaired with gold so that the cracks become the most beautiful part. We are not broken things pretending to be whole. We are whole things that include beautiful brokenness.
We all have a noon hour. The version of ourselves we manage carefully — the relationship that fell apart, the season we’re not proud of, the loss we haven’t spoken out loud, the doubt we’re embarrassed by.
But Jesus sees it all. And being fully known doesn’t end the conversation — it’s where our spiritual lives finally get real. God can’t find us where we think we should be. God can only find us where we actually are.
This is what we keep getting wrong about God — we treat him like a visitor we have to tidy up for. We sweep the floors, hide the mess, present our most polished selves. And in doing so, we put ourselves just out of reach of the only thing that can actually quench our thirst.
And yet we keep reaching for the things that hold our masks in place — the coping mechanisms, the carefully constructed walls, the habits and achievements we use to keep ourselves from being too fully known. They feel like protection. But they are also the very things that keep us from the love we are most hungry for.
Vulnerability demands courage. And it is exactly what we are being invited into. It is, in fact, where our deepest flourishing lives.
There is something the spiritual life keeps whispering that we resist believing: we don’t minister from our strengths. We minister from our wounds. The places in us that have been broken open are exactly the places where compassion flows out — where we recognize each other, where we stop performing and start connecting. The wound is not the obstacle to the work. The wound is the work.
The Woman at the well becomes the first evangelist in John’s gospel. Not despite her complicated story. Because of it. Because being fully known didn’t diminish her — it freed her.
And that’s the invitation for all of us. Not to be fixed before we show up. Just to be honest enough to let the water find us where we actually are…to hit our deepest wound.
In closing, Robert Michel once wrote “We need to open ourselves in such a way that sometime — perhaps not today, but sometime — we are able to hear God say to us: I love you. Before we hear those words, nothing is ever completely right with us — but after we hear them, something will be right with us at a very deep level.”