WOMAN AT THE WELL
Lessons from the woman at the well | Global Sisters Report
First, this woman is faced with a request from a stranger. He is a man and she is a woman; of course he might expect her to give him a drink. But, like Mary of Nazareth, she neither complies with the request nor refuses it before asking her own questions. The woman’s willingness to engage the stranger in conversation — a conversation that she shapes as much he — leads the two of them deeper and deeper into a relationship.
IN all likelihood, none of this would have transpired had she mutely obeyed or stridently refused the man’s initial request. By determining to have her questions satisfied, she finds herself with new questions and unimaginable satisfactions. Women need the same kind of daring today. We must be prepared to ask our own questions of those who expect certain patterns of behavior of uS.
The second lesson is that the woman at the well allows the relationship to change her. The symbol of this transformation, as Sandra Schneiders has identified it, is the abandoned water jar. The Samaritan woman has moved from being caught up in the daily struggle for water to an existential plane where she can forget the vessel that is all important to a woman’s life in her time. No less than the disciples, who abandon their fishing nets, this woman has undergone a metanoia — that great shift of imagination which turns priorities upside down and inside out.
Despite interpretations to the contrary, the woman at the well is not the only one to change. The Johannine text reveals important alterations in Jesus himself. He who was tired and thirsty at the beginning of the exchange, never receives a drink and never again asks for one. He who was presumably also hungry — since the disciples went off in search of food — declines their offer of something to eat after his conversation with this woman, claiming that he has food they know not of. He, who at the beginning of the story is merely passing through Samaria, says after meeting this representative of her people, “These Samaritans’ fields are ripe. It’s harvest time!” In allowing herself to be changed, this unusual woman has also changed the stranger
The lesson here concerns the power of true dialog, which has the potential for transforming each of the partners as they come to deeper and deeper understandings of the other. Women of the church ought, then, seek and accept opportunities for dialog related to important ecclesial issues.
third lesson we can draw out is this: The Samaritan woman takes responsibility for her own people. Once she has tasted the truth of the stranger’s words, she runs to her townspeople to share what she has learned. However we interpret the famous lines about the five husbands, she does not think herself unworthy to be the one to tell the good news. And she is fearless in claiming her own power to recognize the one to come, in letting her own experience be the criterion for inviting others to come and see. That experience is familiar to the mystics of all ages: He told me all about myself, he knows me inside and out.