(The Nationalist, 18 February 2005)
One of the most beautiful Gospel stories is about a meeting between Jesus and a woman at a well. Jesus was an ordinary man, tired, thirsty, and looking for a place to sit down on a hot day, someone easy to relate to, not intimidating. The woman was divorced five times, an outcast. (In Jesus’ time, it was men, not women, who divorced.)
Rejected, she became cynical, with a defensive shell of flippancy, protecting herself against hurt by adopting a tough “I know it all” posture. Jesus asked her for a drink of water, one of those basic requests that no one refuses. To ask a person for help is to pay them a compliment; an act of trust in them. You don’t ask if you expect to be refused. But the woman brushed him off, making a joke of his request.
Beneath the tough posture, she was hurt. She had come to the well at midday, when no one would be there, probably to avoid hearing nasty digs and comments. She would have been the butt of jokes: ‘They say practice makes perfect – but not with Mrs. Pick ‘n Mix!’ She would have been seen as a failure, and she probably felt one, too.
Jesus offered her help, but she told him, in effect, that she didn’t need it. He then asked her to call her husband. That broke through the mask, and changed her defensiveness to receptiveness.
We all have secrets in our life and we like them to stay that way. We would feel uneasy in the presence of someone who knew our inmost thoughts. Imagine, though, being in the presence of someone who knew you fully, warts and all, and still accepted you anyway. That was what the woman found in Jesus.
It wasn’t only Jesus who was thirsty; she was thirsty – not for water, but for respect and acceptance. From Jesus she experienced them, and it was a liberation for her, an unburdening. When he told her who he was and she saw that he accepted her, her response was to go and tell everyone. She went back to tell the news to the very people she had been avoiding.
Jesus didn’t ask her to clean up her morals before he accepted her. He accepted her unconditionally. Good morals follow when a person experiences unconditional love. She came in emptiness, a bit like the empty bucket in her hand. She moved from pretended self-sufficiency to a recognition of her need. The experience of acceptance by Jesus enabled her to become once again part of the community that had rejected her.