John 4:5-42

The story of the woman at the well is Jesus’ longest conversation with one person in the Gospels. In this story, the woman erects barriers. She finds countless things that get between her and Jesus. Let’s look at the barriers that she erected and see if they are not ones that we also erect.

First, this woman erected a barrier of prejudice. Jews and Samaritans held deep animosity against one another. They had long standing hatreds. The woman said, “Why are you, a Jew, asking me to get you a drink?” The animosity she expressed was characteristic of the relationships between Jews and Samaritans. Expressing this animosity she created a barrier to Jesus. She couldn’t understand him. The poet Maya Angelou wrote, “Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible” (All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes [Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987], 155). That’s exactly what she was doing. She was distorting the past and making the present inaccessible. She couldn’t meet Jesus because she brought prejudice into the relationship.

What about the individuals or the groups toward which we harbor prejudice? It may be an individual or a group of people you reject because of the color of their skin or their religion or their way of life. God came to the Samaritan woman in the form of someone against whom she was deeply prejudiced. God may come to us in the same way. If we are to experience Jesus, we will have to look into the eyes and into the face of an individual or group against whom we harbor prejudice.

Another barrier the woman erected was social custom. In that time, Jewish men and any type of woman didn’t interact in public. A good, upstanding, righteous, Jewish male would only talk to his mother, wife, or 60 daughters—never to any other women. The Samaritan woman embraced the same cultural biases. It was a scandal for a Jewish man to talk to a strange woman. Today, we could use an ability to be so scandalized!

Social customs can separate us from people, also. How many of us know a person who is poor? Do you know a poor person as a real human being, knowing what their life has been like, knowing the names of their children? In our society, we segregate by economic status. Middle-class people only know middle-class people. Rich people only know rich people, and poor people only poor people. Social custom keeps us apart. Do you know someone who is desperately poor? Jesus came to the woman as someone social customs made a stranger. Jesus may come to us as a stranger.

A third barrier was that Jesus was an outsider for the Samaritan woman. Generally, Jews did not travel through Samaria. Most traveling Jews went out of their way to avoid Samaritans. To the woman, Jesus was an outsider to her community, an outsider to her way of life, and an outsider to her personal experience. That made it hard for her to take Jesus seriously.

Jesus is often an outsider to our lives. We’d like to make over Jesus into a middle-class American, but he’s not. He’s different from us. Jesus is deeply and profoundly different. His values and ambitions, the way he conducted his life, the things Jesus cared about, and the people for whom he cared, are all very different from us. He is an outsider to our way of life. If we choose to follow Jesus we will discover ourselves being different from our neighbors. Dare we associate with, become close to, or follow this outsider?

Finally, the woman was reluctant to be honest with Jesus. Jesus said, “Go fetch your husband” and she replied, “I have no husband.” Jesus knew the truth. She had been married five times and was not married to the man she was with. She didn’t want Jesus to know the truth. She would interact with him on the surface, but the real depth of her life experience—all the pain, all the trouble, all the mistakes, and all the heartaches of her life—she was trying to keep to herself. She was holding Jesus at arm’s length.

We do it too. We dress up and get all pretty for worship. But how do we relate to Jesus when we get home from work and we’re mad and frustrated and tired and beat up? Do we connect with Jesus then? Are we open with God and Christ about the messy parts of our lives; about the parts of our lives that aren’t pretty, that aren’t pious? We can pray when we’re feeling pious, but can we relate to Christ when life’s a mess and when we’re a mess? Can we open these parts of our lives to Jesus? The Samaritan woman found it difficult and so do we.

Despite all the barriers this is a story with a happy ending. This woman eventually connected. She went back to her village and said, “I have met this wonderful, amazing man. Come meet him!” She becomes the first evangelist. She is the first to run and tell someone about Jesus. The story says the whole community came and many believed because of her.

It can work that way for us also. We are kept from Jesus by prejudices, social customs, fear of outsiders, and reluctance to expose the messy realities of our lives. We can get past those things and allow Jesus to be here, right in front of us. We can share what we have experienced with others and it can change everything. My hope and my prayer is that we can get past the barriers that get between us and Jesus. Then there’s hope that even now we will meet Jesus too.