As a young child, I heard John 4’s account of the woman at the well in Sunday School. Jesus took the time to talk with her, even though there was extreme hostility between the ethnic groups to which they each belonged. Jesus was a Jew, and this woman was a Samaritan.
As I got older, more layers were added to this woman. Much was made of her arrival at the well at noon. It was inferred that she was trying to avoid other people at the well, a kind of social hub in her day. She was described as someone who kept changing the subject, trying to dodge Jesus’ attempts to bring her a living hope.
The takeaway emphasized was that Jesus got her to face her especially immoral past as a woman who had been married five times.
The commentaries and study Bibles I have consulted seem to view this story as a game of “Gotcha!” Jesus gets the upper hand and exposes this woman as a blatant sinner.
In 1964, Dr. Eric Berne wrote a book called Games People Play. He was a psychiatrist who specialized in “transactional analysis,” an outgrowth of Freudian and Jungian thought. In this book, he describes dozens of patterns or games people use in relating to each other. One of them is “Now I’ve Got You, You S.O.B.” I apologize for this offensive term.
As I recently reread Berne’s book, it struck me that Berne was documenting the plethora of ways that relational pastimes and games act as “substitutes for the real living of real intimacy”[1].
Then it dawned on me that I’ve been misreading this story as an interaction initiated by a man like our broken selves. Have I been watching too many police dramas? If anyone knew the real living of real intimacy, it was Jesus Christ. This was not a conversation in which Jesus is trying to trick someone into confessing or to come out on top or to shame someone. Indeed, any other conversation Jesus had with ordinary women and men did not include this dynamic at all.
What are we misreading here?
Now I turn to the book, Misreading Scripture With Individualist Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James (a pseudonym for security reasons). It points out to the reader that when Jesus is talking with a woman at a well in Sychar, Samaria, they are conversing in a collectivist culture. In this culture, women are not independent agents. They rarely own property. They rarely have a say in matters of marriage. They can be shunned for things they cannot control, such as medical conditions or barrenness. If something goes wrong in a woman’s life, the community can make up a story about how she deserved it.
So, if this woman came to the well at noon to avoid the stares of others, it did not mean she deserved them.
When Jesus asks this woman to call her husband and return, he is not trying to trick her. He asks her to call her husband because of the cultural norms. It would be appropriate for her husband and her to learn from Jesus together, so the community would not ascribe ill intentions to a foreign visitor.
When the woman says she does not have a husband, Jesus’ words to her should be taken at face value. He commends her for being honest. She has told the truth, if not the whole truth. Does she owe a stranger the whole truth, especially if it’s a truth that is mingled with pain?
Richards and James write, “Her previous five marriages were likely ended by a combination of widowhood and divorce” [2]. They add, “…divorce was more commonly initiated by the husband” [3]. She has been through a lot. Jesus is not being sarcastic, and he is not adding onto her suffering. A group of women in Afghanistan hearing this story for the first time grasped this too! [4]
Next, she identifies him as a prophet. She wonders if she has to worship in Jerusalem to properly worship God. It was a long distance. She may have wondered: What if the man in her life would not allow her to go there?
And here we continue to see a pastoral Jesus letting her know that the attitude of the heart is more crucial to worship than the physical location.
When we hear Jesus as a loving and guileless communicator, we discover a different takeaway–Jesus’ simple request for a drink of water led to a woman discovering the Messiah, and she invited the town to come and hear this prophet. Jesus extended his stay because so many mortals were eager to hear the good news of a Kingdom that was being extended beyond gendered, ethnic, and national borders.
Many mortals may still be eager to hear such good news.
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[1] Eric Berne (1964) Games People Play.
[2] E. Randolph Richards and Richard James (2020) Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, page 56.
[3] Source above, page 57.
[4] This anecdote was shared in an online professional development gathering entitled “Education as Hospitality” led by Dr. David I. Smith in October, 2021.
