Lent Devotions: Pressing on the Bruise
The following devotion was featured in Unfinished, Church Anew’s Lent in a Box series for 2023. Learn more about the resources here.
Pressing on the Bruise
Rev. Natalia Terfa
John 4:5-42
5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir,give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27 Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28 Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.
31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.36 The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
The story of the Woman at the Well has always felt like poking at a bruise. Painful and vulnerable. She is an outsider three times over. She’s a Samaritan (1), a woman (2), and she has a less than stellar reputation (3). I could take a long, long time to talk about why that last point isn’t quite right - but to keep it short I’ll just remind you that in this time a woman could not initiate divorce on her own and likely had very little say over her own marital status, so calling her a “fallen” woman is to miss the point entirely. Despite all that, it is still likely she was divorced and/or widowed a few times over. Because she avoided the well at the time when most women and children would visit, it meant that she was excluded from the communal act of drawing water.
Like I said, she was an outsider.
Jesus does what no one else has done for her and with her in a long time - he engages with her.
He doesn’t look away, doesn’t walk away, doesn’t pretend he doesn’t see her.
He sees her and tells her he knows all of her story.
He presses on the bruise.
This painful moment is why I have always struggled with this story, but it is also the reason I have learned to love it.
Because it is here that Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, stands with the outsider to end all outsiders, at high noon, all pretense stripped away, and offers her living water. Not forgiveness, since there’s nothing to forgive, but offers her life and life abundant. Life that cannot be taken away like a husband or a reputation.
This is my story and your story too.
Jesus meets us right where we are, in the bright light of the noonday sun, and lays us bare, everything good and bad, honorable and awful. And then the Messiah, the one who saves, hands us living water: life that cannot be washed away, erased, or lost.
Prayer
O God, you are the water of life. Help us trust that wherever we are thirsty, you will find us, gather us in, and return us to life with you. Amen.
