By Carla Williams
This is part of a Team Expansion story series looking at relationships in the Bible and what they tell us about God’s heart.
Where is the story?
John 4: 1-42
Remind me what happened.
Jesus stopped at a well in much-despised Samaria. He was exhausted, and his disciples went on to find some food. While he was there, a woman came to get water, and Jesus asked her for a drink. She was shocked because he was a man and a Jew – both valid reasons not to speak to a woman who was a Samaritan. This led to a conversation about living water and her five husbands.
She allowed that maybe when the Messiah came He could explain everything. Surprise! She was speaking to Him.
What does this tell me about God?
Granted, this interaction doesn’t represent a romantic relationship, but it certainly was the most sincere, transparent, vulnerable connection this woman would ever have with another person. She, who was with her sixth man, had probably never experienced this level of authentic affection.
Jesus pointed out that she’d had five husbands and was with yet another man. He doesn’t say it accusingly. It’s gentle, knowing. He understood the journey she had been on to find acceptance and love and approval.
We don’t know any of the details surrounding this woman’s life. The Bible doesn’t tell us if she’d made a series of sinful choices or if men around her had used her and subsequently discarded her. We don’t know if she’d been widowed, abandoned, abused, or infected with wanderlust. It might have been a bit of everything. Or none of those things.
What we do know is that she was alone. And she was thirsty.
Jesus didn’t ask her for a drink because he was parched. He asked because He knew her. He knew her journey, her disappointment, her loneliness. And, most importantly, He knew she was ready to hear the Truth. He knew she had been waiting for the living water He was about to offer her.
Their conversation led to revelations about her history, and to spiritual things, and ultimately to her belief in Jesus as the Messiah.
This interaction shows a perfect glimpse of God’s heart for the lonely. He wasn’t bound by social etiquette, age-old grudges, or tiers of hierarchy. There is no caste system with God. No one is untouchable. No one is beyond His reach. She was the last person anyone would have expected to inherit the Kingdom of God, and yet she was exactly the person He chose to give it to.
God loves those lonely ones. He seeks them out. He engages them. He invites them to something more amazing than they could have ever imagined.
And He doesn’t leave them alone.
After their conversation, the woman rushed back to her town to tell all the people about Jesus. They returned with her eager to meet the man who knew so much about her. He stayed for two days in that town, and when He left, the woman had new friends.
She arrived at the well alone. But a miraculously timed encounter with the Messiah would set her forevermore on a course of community.
