Another encounter leading to a commission today. It's one of my favourite stories of a woman meeting Jesus.
The flow of the conversation by that well is as fresh as the living water promised by the Christ. It goes roughly like this:
Jesus: Give me a drink.
Woman: Are you out of your mind?
Jesus: Well, true... if only you knew, you would have asked me for living water.
Woman: Are you mad? How would you get such water?
Jesus: I mean water which will satisfy you for ever.
Woman: I want that!
Jesus: Go call your husband.
Woman: Haven't got one.
Jesus: Correct. You've had five; and the present guy you're not married to.
Woman: You must be a prophet. I can talk religion.
Jesus: Forget religion; God's looking for a people of the Spirit now.
Woman: I guess Messiah will sort all this out.
Jesus: That's me!
Woman: Wait there, I've got to go and tell people!
Dim disciples: Time to eat.
Jesus: More important things than eating are going on here.
Rest of the town: We believe that He really is the Saviour of the whole world!!!
The deep irony of all this wonderful spiritual stuff going on and the disciples plodding in with their packed lunch hang ups while Jesus ignores all social, religious and gender conventions to engage an apparently hopeless outcast, is just mind boggling. The woman at the well has the longest recorded conversation with Jesus, and is thereby a worthy faithful female at this seemingly long halfway point in Lent.
There's a whiff of Eastern promise in the air...the hot desert sun, the tent, the attentive Master, the hope of something better for a slave-girl nobody. Then it all goes horribly wrong....
It's always in the desert where God finds us and it was the same for Hagar. She was an Egyptian; a slave; young; beautiful. Finding yourself pregnant by the mistress's husband is never a good living/working arrangement and female bullying is a horrible reality. She flees to the wilderness in despair. There's nothing like a pregnancy to remind you of the frailty of human life. Things happen to you beyond your control. Another being is brought into the world and they are your responsibility. You worry about the mess you are brining the child into. It's very probable that God doesn't exist and we must make our own way alone.
But then hope. A spring of water in the desert. This is where God finds Hagar and asks perhaps the oldest question of all: 'Where have you come from and where are you going?' (Genesis 16:8.)
It's not Existentialism after all!
Someone sees and Someone cares.
At the spring of water, there's a promise of blessing for the new life swimming within her. Hagar names the well 'Beer-lahai-roi' - 'the well of the Living One who sees me.'
God sees and finds a desperate, pregnant woman and she responds in a beautiful act of divine re-naming.
It's all in the eyes...
