Resisting Our Legacy

I am writing this in early January but am back-posting it to be closer to the rest of this story. I just heard a talk yesterday from a speaker who reviewed this story and brought out some wonderful insights I had not noticed yet. I want to capture them and include them with all the other things I have been learning from this most compelling narrative.

Notice that this woman went through five steps trying to protect herself from letting Jesus have access to the deep pockets of pain inside that she had been carrying around for many years. She had given up on trusting men after losing five husbands in a society where only the man could ask for a divorce. After three divorces a woman was considered an outcast anyway and so after the fifth relationship she found herself dependent on a man who would support her but would not even offer her the courtesy of a marriage offer.

She came to the well at a time when she was sure no other women would be around to ask questions. The well in that day was the place to hang out, to catch up on all the news and gossip, the place where relationships were made and strained, where people interacted the most, where the real social life of the women in particular took place. This is the last thing this woman wanted to encounter so she picked the least likely time of day to take care of getting the water she needed for the household in which she felt trapped.

This woman had built up layer upon layer of walls around her heart to keep out anyone who might get anywhere near the deep pain that her spirit constantly suffered. She was so ashamed and fearful of anyone accessing her heart that she made sure she had multiple defenses to keep everyone away. It was this kind of deeply wounded, defensive victim that Jesus chose to demonstrate the effectiveness of the power of God to heal and to bring new life. As she fronted each defensive maneuver Jesus dealt with each one and unlocked each layer as she continued her attempts to keep Him at bay.

The first layer she threw up was the wall of prejudice. I have touched on this in a number of places as I have looked at this story and it was the first defense she utilized that normally would stop a conversation dead in its tracks or at least ignite a good diversionary discussion. But Jesus never once in His whole life engaged in the spirit of prejudice and so this tactic had no effect in even slowing Him down.

The next defensive shield that she resorted to was the issue of pedigree. I had not noticed it in this way before, but this woman was actually trying to insinuate that the Jews were not nearly such hot stuff as they strutted around claiming to be. Though the Jews looked down their noses at the Samaritan's as dogs, the Samaritans may have had similar feelings about the Jews. This woman was tapping into this hostility against Jews based on pedigree – ancestry, as a means of stirring up a controversy that might sidetrack Jesus from getting any closer to her heart. In her statement, “You are not better, are you?” she was trying to put Jesus into His place as a Jew who she expected would think that He was better than Samaritans. But again, Jesus had no interest whatsoever in estimating value based on who a person's family was or what their ancestors may have been or done. He only saw people through heaven's eyes and that is radically different than the way we generally view each other.

The third defensive shield that this woman attempted to use was superficiality. In her answer to the startling request by Jesus bringing up the subject of her marital situation that she absolutely had no interest in discussing, she answered in a way that was technically correct but intentionally misleading. She would not stoop to directly lying about her situation but neither did she want to allow Jesus any further into her private affairs. So she hoped to stop this conversation from getting any more uncomfortable by simply dismissing His request as irrelevant. “That question is settled. I don't have a husband. Let's just leave it at that.”

But that ploy fell flat too as Jesus suddenly revealed that He already knew far more about her that she ever wanted anyone to know. After He exposed His intimate knowledge of her real situation that would imply He could sense all the associated pain and shame surrounding it, she quickly resorted to her forth defensive tactic of religiosity. This was now getting to be a desperate grasp at anything to keep this stranger from continuing on His obvious quest to access deep reservoirs of pain and fear in her heart and so she desperately tried to divert His attention to the hot-button religious controversies of their day.

This diversionary tactic is a very familiar one to people who are desperate to mask over the pain in their soul and keep everyone's attention solely on religious controversies. This type appear to be very sincere and can keep a religious argument going on endlessly in a supposed quest for truth. They become experts in theory, can quote at great length proof-texts and logic and quotations, but they are terrified to face the real truth that their own hearts are bankrupt and broken and are afraid of allowing anyone to see what is really inside.

But again, Jesus easily dealt with this diversion and answered the question in such a way that she could not keep the argument sustained. He did not resort to any of the standard comebacks that everyone had used in the past and instead used the opportunity to reveal to her the true nature of God's attitude towards His children.

Finally this woman was down to her last gasp effort to keep Jesus from stepping through the doorway into the secret places of her heart she had so desperately tried to keep from Him. Her last attempt was to use the ploy of procrastination. Without being able to think of a good reason why His answer to her religious question might be wrong so she could keep the argument going, she simply shoved the whole discussion aside with the rationale that really no one could know the correct answers to all these anyway. All the arguments and philosophies circulating around only caused conflicts between various groups and the best thing was simply to defer all of that discussion until the looked-for Messiah showed up with the authority necessary to settle all these disputes. Only He would be smart enough to figure out what arguments had not been able to resolve.

She finally thought she had hit on the ultimate diversion that would be secure enough to guarantee that Jesus could not advance any farther into her private affairs. She was sure that the chances of her encountering the real Messiah were pretty much nil and so this tactic seemed to be a fool-proof defense to keep this stranger from moving any closer; now she could get back home and into her emotional hiding place again. But to her utter amazement this last attempt actually set herself up to face the most startling and life-changing choice of her whole life. Jesus' answer to this last question was an overwhelming affirmative, that in fact He was the very one she thought she could use as her excuse to keep hiding.

With this last excuse suddenly becoming the trap which she had set herself and had now fallen into, she had no more defenses to use to keep Him away from her except outright unbelief. But by this time her heart had been so touched by His kindness and her spirit had been so impressed with His compassion that she no longer wanted to hide from Him. She was beginning to realize that instead of being afraid of Him she wanted to embrace His love fully and let Him have full access to bring into her soul the healing and life and living water that He had just promised to give her.

All of her perspective was now turned on its head. Everything in her world: her fears, her shame, her relationships, her self-worth, her pictures of God – everything was suddenly transformed to be radically new and fresh and alive as this living water infiltrated every fiber of her being. She was so thrilled with this new water that she quite literally exchanged her own waterpot for the internal water that was so much more life-giving and had now begun to spring up from deep within her own heart.

She was so full of this refreshing water already that she had to rush into town to let it pour out all over everyone else who had previously been the sources of all of her pain. She went straight to the men of the town (the ones who likely knew her the best) and shared with them that their power over her sense of identity had now lost all of its effect on her and that Someone else had come into her life who was far more effective in imparting worth and identity to her life than any of them could ever dream of doing.

There is one more very significant point that I had also missed in this story. It has to do with the reference right in the beginning about this land being given to Joseph as an inheritance. What I had not seen before was that the location of this property was the very area where Joseph himself had endured the most traumatic events in his life as a young boy. It was this very place where his own brothers had sold him off as a slave and failed to protect him. This betrayal of his heart by his own family members was not unlike the experience that this woman had endured in her own life. Yet it was this very plot of land, this place where all of the ugliness and pain had started in Joseph's life that Jacob gave to him as his legacy.

And isn't that just what God tends to do with all of us. We think we have to run away from the scenes of our worst nightmares, from the places and people where our worst abuse has wounded our spirits and damaged our hearts seemingly beyond repair. And yet God brings us back to those places and memories, He pushes past our comfort zones, dismantles all of our defenses and excuses layer after layer and suddenly surprises us with an inheritance that turns our worst pain into our greatest legacy. That's what He did with Joseph. That's what He did for this woman of Sychar. And that is what He is doing with you and me.