The Woman With No Name

John 4:1-25

The Woman With no Name

There are four messages;

1.    Christ is the Messiah

2.    Love your fellow man

3.    Old self is to be buried

4.     I believe there is another message also -- sin is sin and it is our burden to struggle and overcome and to master sin.

Jesus seems to find those that have strayed away from the good life that God wants for us. All through the Bible, we find little people that through God’s grace become important players in Bible history and become part of a larger story. One of those figures is the woman at the well and she has fascinated me.

What is curious about the woman at the well is, she is drawing water at noon, the hottest part of the day when most women were drawing their water in the cool of the day. This tells me she was alienated from her community. She was the lowest of the low.

I am reminded of several people I have known in my life that sort of fit into the life of the Samaritan woman. They affected my life greatly and I can only hope that our meeting was of some benefit in their lives. One fellow was a church member and he was not cut from the same bolt of cloth that the others came from. He was very content with his life and did not have great ambitions nor did he pretend to. He did have a great heart.

The other person I am reminded of is an Indian girl that I chanced to meet over twenty years ago. I am not going go through the details, which is an interesting story in itself. It was her life that gave me something to think about how we treat others that are different and I still think of her to this day.

She was an Indian and she came from a reservation in Montana where Indian people have been stereotyped by the European people that lived around them. She detested life on the reservation and wanted to be more than what she could possibly be living in a mindset or worldview of just being Indian. What she did took courage and really showed her determination. She enlisted in the Air Force with the idea that she could get help for a college education. She served her country and left after four years to find that she was now rejected by her own people because she had lived in the white man’s world to long.

When I met her, she was in college studying to be a veterinarian. As some of you may know you have to be smarter than the average person going into medicine to be accepted for a slot in Veterinarian College. Now her worry was that if she succeeded and graduated, how would she ever be able to practice with ranchers that looked down on the Indian. It was sad listening to her and she cried thinking that she had made some very bad decisions. 

I remember telling her that God has a place for everyone in this world. If she succeeded and got her degree, she would have to become the best veterinarian she could possibly be to prove herself and that she would possibly have to leave that area for another area that would accept her heritage. I never heard from her again and I have often wondered if she succeeded.

I also think about Donny, a young man who alienated himself from his wife and five children, his family and his community. He chose to leave and follow Christ as he thought that the fruits he was in search of were not where he was. His wife is a believer but she chose to live a life that is most familiar.

I think about old Jim, a retired farmer in the middle of North Dakota. He walked around with a spiral notebook tucked under his belt like a shield for his tummy. I spent three or four hours with him by chance in a small town café. Talked about things that most small town people never even think about and he told me wonderful stories. He would write in his notebook as we were talking and I asked him what he was writing. He said when people said things that interested him he would write them down. When we finally said good-bye, he asked me to come over to his old pickup truck. He opened the lid on the metal toolbox behind the cab and dug through a pile of books and finally pulled out one and said, I want you to have this as a gift. I don’t remember the title of the book but I found North Dakota Jim a more memorable story than the book.

After he left, I was curious and went back into the café and asked the woman behind the cash register if she knew Jim. Yes she new Jim and everybody thought he was crazy.

I think about Rodger another young man who was pigeonholed in school as someone who was not smart enough. A young man whose step father had no time for him and an alcoholic. He never fit in. He died mysteriously in car fire parked at a scenic overlook.

I think of the woman with no name and how her life would make a very interesting movie, married to five different men and now living unmarried with another. We would go through her life seeing her as a beautiful young girl who is very desirable, getting married for the first time to a trader whose camel train is hijacked and he is murdered.  Then she marries again to a man who is wretched character and because he cannot totally control her, puts her out of his house and divorces her. Again, she marries because she is so desirable to men, and again she is put out possibly because she cannot deliver a child to this man. She marries a fourth time an older man for protection and to be cared for and he dies. After the last marriage, she is just no longer of value as a wife and lives with another man just to survive.

At the very end of the movie, we see a man approaching the well and asking for a drink from her own utensils. Then question becomes, was Jesus seeking this woman because he already knew her history, or, was the woman seeking God, she knew the Messiah was coming, and Jesus heard her plea, her struggle with life, her desperation? For me, John wrote this little chapter of life opened ended so that we can use our imaginations to fill in some of the blanks. The woman by the evidence given; is chosen by God to struggle with life and become a very important player in a story of seeking living water.

The woman at the well however, is briefly mentioned and not heard from again. Several very important messages came from this meeting, the first one is, “I am He, the one speaking to you”, to this woman of low virtue, Jesus claimed to her what he had not to the disciples. That is very powerful. In these verses, we discover that Jesus declares for the first time who he really is, and this is to a person that the Jews consider beneath them, a mongrel because she is a Samaritan, and a woman is looked down upon by her own people, she is alienated.

Contained in this conversation with this woman. Jesus shows that he loves all sinners. Some would say that asking for a drink of water from this Samarian woman shows how we should be more tolerant of other cultures and races. There is a difference between tolerance and love.

The other message is that Jesus is telling us is that no matter what or how great our sins were in the past, we can find grace through living water or the Holy Spirit.

Another message that Jesus is expressing is that this woman is living a sinful life. Jesus was being intolerant of her lifestyle. Again we see the intolerance of sinful living in John 8 and the story of the adulterer who about to be stoned. Jesus admonishes in a loving way in verse eleven, to go and sin no more.  Again, I wonder, is that statement a mistranslation or was something left out? Jesus knew the temptation of sin. He knew that we sin daily. Maybe Jesus is saying, “take control of your life and your passions”. God knows her behavior is destructive and will only lead to more pain.

In these verses, we do not really see an outright admonishment and it causes me to wonder why this story in John seems to be incomplete. It is frustrating that the Bible is so short on details. We needed Paul Harvey back then to prod for the Rest of the Story.

Is Jesus bringing up the five husbands and the man she is living with to shame her or is it Jesus showing her that what He knows is that no ordinary man could know and He is the prophet the Samaritans were well aware of? I think it is both. In a loving way, Jesus is admonishing her that her former life is sinful. Life is about the struggle with sin. Without sin, how would we know that we are alive? It is sin that adds depth to our lives. Sin gives dimension, meaning and gives us power to become the masters over sin. This may a radical thought for most who try to avoid sin at all costs and the reality is that sin is unavoidable. Even though I may not act out my sins, they are in my head and every day I wrestle with those sins so that they do not control me. Denying those sins that are in my mind would be very dangerous for myself and could harm those that love me.

If Jesus was preaching today he would be a bigot, an extremist and judgmental. Because Jesus took a stand against sin, He is still being crucified today. Our children and grandchildren are living in a new norm that surrounds every day despite how many times they go to church, Sunday school or read the Bible. It comes through new technology video games, television and the Internet, which most likely influences their lives more than their parents or school. We are living in a world of epicurean paganism and it leaves its mark on every soul.

If Christ’s message to these women were true in His day, why would those messages be not true today? There is one more thing that can be taken from John 4, the woman left the well and became a follower of Yeshua. She was not transformed into a Christian but a genuine follower of Christ. She ran to tell the community of the wonderful news – The Messiah is here and He is NOW!

As Jesus followers or disciples, we never know when that meeting with another soul who needs compassion, understanding and just a simple act of knowing love. In that brief moment of time, we can give the love back and tell that other thirsty soul of the living water that Christ gives.

 We are living in a new age and a new norm where tolerance is the main message of the culture when justice should be the theme of societal change. There was a time when John 3:16 was the most quoted verse in the Bible. Today the most quoted verse is Matthew 7:1, Judge not lest ye shall be judged, which is totally taken out of context. However, this is the way of the world and we are being transformed by the world and we crave even more of what the world offers. If we take what Jesus offers, the living water, then we will only crave what is just and good – living water will change us on the inside.

Without sinners and God’s grace, heaven would be empty.