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Lent 3 The woman who came to the well.
Most of us like surprises. Clergymen have to accept they're going to be taken by surprise very often. I can tell you stories of surprises in trains, planes, supermarkets, and places where there's nobody around. But not today. Today I want to look at Jesus being taken by surprise.
He had been preaching to crowds. Encouraging them to turn over a new leaf of life with God. It was hard work. He was exhausted. There was a big response, and the Jewish authorities were cross about it. They were all for arresting him. Jesus decided to leave and go back to Galilee by a roundabout way, through Samaria. So Jesus and the disciples arrived at a little town called Sychar. The disciples went into the town to buy food. Jesus sat by the well outside the town gate.
It was mid-day. Scorching hot. He was shattered.

Eventually a woman appeared with a water pot on her shoulder. Jesus asked her for a drink. She was a bit thrown. Here was a strange man asking for a drink, and he was a Jew to boot. This was a tricky situation for her. There was a gender problem. Men and women didn't meet together in public places. But behind that problem, there was something else - the fact that Jews and Samaritans didn’t speak to each other. Jews regarded Samaritans as second-class citizens.

Jesus was not fazed. He saw a bigger problem. What was she doing coming to draw water at this time of day? Most people would be at home, keeping cool. Jesus saw a social problem and a domestic one.
He was very perceptive. He realised the woman only came out when her neighbours were indoors. She was snubbed by them. They probably despised her and called her names. In conversation, Jesus discovered that she had lived with five husbands, and she now had another man.

You can imagine the neighbourhood gossip! Her life must have been pretty awful. Socially persecuted. Then there was religious persecution too. Samaritans came from the Jewish national family, but they had reasons for keeping to themselves and were regarded as living below the salt. This woman was intelligent. She had grown up with traditional Jewish ways, but she had chosen to live with the breakaway Samaritans. Because of her domestic arrangements, they despised her and gave her a rough time.
So here you have a picture of a middle-class woman caught in a web of social and religious persecution. She was desperate, weighed down by the indignity of it all, feeling broken and helpless. She was probably asking herself where God was in all this. So, what did Jesus do?
Well, he didn't jump in with a lot of good advice. He didn't say perhaps you should do this or that; leave the man you are living with; get on better terms with your neighbours.
None of that.

Jesus knew that she was capable of sorting this out for herself. She was an intelligent woman. She had some spiritual understanding. But her eyes were fixed, as it were, on the wrong things. She was always looking to see whether the neighbours had spotted her or keeping her head down in case she heard what names they were calling her. Her eyes were fixed on her troubles and on her seeming weaknesses. Jesus wanted to change her perspectives and to lift her inner resources. So he continued with an ordinary, down-to -earth conversation.
As they talked about the well and the water, and the water that quenched your thirst and renewed you for ever, the woman was picking up the fact that Jesus didn't judge her, but rather that He saw her as a person of real value. She felt the vibes of his concern for the way she felt; that he understood; that he shared the agony and distress of her life. She realised that in this man, who knew how she felt, there was the strength and power to see things differently. Almost without knowing it, a change was happening within her. She could see other horizons; she felt able to reach them; she could see a different kind of life ahead.
At the end of the encounter Jesus sends her home. She no longer listens to the jibes and the criticisms. She has found someone who values her as a person. Someone who believes in her. Someone who, almost incidentally, has convinced her that whilst her circumstances may not change, she can rise above them and beyond them. She has found spiritual resources she thought she didn't have.
When she gets home, she tells her neighbours that she has met the Christ, the longed-for Messiah they are all looking for. We're not told how many took her word for that. But some of them accepted her. They came out to see Jesus and make up their own minds. St. John tells us they must have seen a big change in her. They saw the overflowing love and power of God.

Jesus never tells us what to do. We know well enough what needs to be done. When we talk to Him in prayer, as we would talk to a friend, He gives us sufficient of His love and power and ability to get on and do it for ourselves.
That's the way of Jesus. He will never, never, let you down.