Presbyterian Outlook: Surprises at the well by Kenneth E. Bailey (Requires free registration.)
Often the task of exegesis is to rescue truth from familiarity. The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is known, but its amazing surprises often are overlooked. A few of them are particularly noteworthy.
1. Dominical mission: Go in need of those you hope to serve. On arriving at the well, the disciples set off to the nearby town to buy food. The story assumes that they took with them the soft leather bucket that was necessary equipment for any traveling band in the first century.
It appears that Jesus deliberately emptied himself to the point that he would sincerely need help from whoever came to the well with a bucket. He knew he was in Samaria and that women usually carried the domestic water supply from the well. It was noon and, thereby, hot. An outcast woman appeared and Jesus broke a taboo that a millennium later I observed throughout my decades in the Middle East. Strange men do not talk to local women in public in any conservative area of the Middle East even today. This stricture was reinforced by the coming of Islam, not created by it. The rabbis held to the same standard.
Jesus initiates his contact with the woman by asking for help, not by offering it. The self-emptying required is sobering. In this story mission begins with “I need help,” not with “I am here to offer help.”
2. Christology: The gift of God — a person! ...
3. The effect of the gift: Thirst permanently quenched. ...
4. The effect: A spring for others. Consumer religion is “all about me.” ...
5. The back door: Religion as escape from God. ...
6. Worship: No special real estate required....
7. Revelation: I am identifies himself.
... The woman becomes the first female preacher of Christian history as she invites her village to make its own discovery by going to the stranger beside the well who is willing to break caste and drink from her “polluted” bucket. In the process, she becomes a spring for others.
The one who empties self is able to empower us to become a source of life for others. May it be so this Easter.
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