The Samaritan Woman - heartbreaker or broken?

John 4:4-42 The Samaritan Woman

I was recently introduced to Sheila Gregoire (to her work, not to the woman herself sadly), an amazing writer and women's rights advocate, particularly in the church sphere. She wrote a fascinating piece about Queen Vashti (read it here) and it blew my mind. She was hopelessly positioned as the villain of the piece rather than the disrespected sex slave she ultimately was. It got me thinking about other times when women have been misrepresented in bible accounts. Bathsheba is one (she was not on the roof ok!) but the other one I recently discovered was the Samaritan woman at the well.

I have to be honest and say this one hit me in the gut because I have believed those misrepresentations of this woman. She has been held up as the woman who had 'many husbands' and was currently living 'in sin' with a man who was not her husband. The implication being that she had left these men one failed marriage after the other. We are taught that she was a terribly sinful woman who gave into her lusts. Jesus saw right through her attempts to redirect his line of questioning and used her to evangelise to her community. Another wonderful story of redemption. This is the story I have been sold over and over from various pulpits and I am sorry now to say that I accepted it without question. The story is still one of redemption (because we are all sinners and need a redeemer) but the Samaritan woman was not the antagonist in this story, she was the victim having to do the best she could in the society she lived in. Jesus not only 'saw' her but elevated her, and her response was to serve immediately and joyfully as an evangelist.

Firstly though we need to set the scene and for this we need to look at what the laws were around marriage and divorce in the first century. At this time, according to Mosaic law wives were able to be divorced for any reason by the husband. Divorce was not the prerogative of a woman in those times. As our story starts in John 4, the Pharisees point out that Moses said a divorce could be granted to a man for any reason. As usual they were trying to trip him up, it seemed to be their primary sport.

Thankfully for us, one of Jesus's primary sports was to use these pharasaical interactions to remind them that God was even more holy than they believed. Just not in the way they thought.

So Jesus countered this observation with the reason the law had to be established in the first place and reminded them that divorce was not something to be taken lightly. In fact we know that God hates (and yes he uses those terms) divorce (Malachi 2:16). Human hearts are hard and those laws were set for the people in a time of rebellion after they came out of Egypt. The hardness of their hearts resulted in them wandering for 40 years in the desert. 

But, he doesn't answer them directly, instead pointing them back to the Genesis blueprint, when a man was to leave his family and become one with the woman. This was incredibly counterculture even at the time of writing the ancient texts, flipping on it's head the idea that women were commodities. So he reminds them of these facts from the scriptures, laying out in no uncertain terms the implications of divorce outside of the conditions set.

The disciples (bless their hearts) show themselves up in the next verses as the products of the times they were born in. Man was 'king' and free to have and discard a wife as he saw fit.. "If this is the situation between a man and a wife it is better not to marry" they declare! Righteous indignation in defence of the ancient scriptures compelling them to spill out those foolish words. If a man cannot easily free himself of his wife then why bother marrying?

It was just as easy for men to access sexual gratification in the 1st century so if they can't free themselves from a wife who doesn't please them, then why tie themselves in the first place?

We can't stomp on the disciples too hard in this situation. They were indeed men of their time and they were on one heck of a learning curve. They were still relatively early on in their training and Jesus was laying down some fundamentals, really hacking away at some deeply held and core beliefs about humanity. In fact, in the next portion of this chapter he tells the disciples that the kingdom of heaven belonged to small children (Matt 19:13-14). Children in the first century were circling the bottom of the pile along with women and the poor or disabled. These men had already been squabbling over who would be the greatest (Luke 9:46) and yet here was Jesus saying that they needed to make themselves like children, the most humble and helpless of all society. It really must have been a wild ride to walk with Jesus in those times.

Back to the Samaritan woman. This woman had had five husbands. But how and why? This wasn't Corinth, where women of wealth and means might be in a position to assert divorce either. The reality is likely to be far more tragic. 

She was probably married young, traditionally around 13 or 14 years old and most likely to a much older man. He may have died and there was every chance then that she was then married to her husband's brother or another male in the family in order to keep the family name of the first husband and produce him an heir (Deuteronomy 25:5-6, see also the story of Ruth and Boaz where Boaz acted as the 'kinsman redeemer' for Ruth and Naomi). There was no Ruth-esque romantic ending for this woman though and she ended up having had five husbands, with ever decreasing status as a woman in a society which valued a woman by her ability to produce an heir. The man she currently lived with was also not her husband and there is little to no chance that she had any choice in that matter either. It would have been exist like that or die. Without the protection of a man she would be in an extremely precarious position.

She was a woman who lived with shame, she had no friends, no social status. She didn't even draw water with the other women at dawn, preferring instead to avoid the gossip and draw water at the height of heat in the day when she could guarantee solitude. What an existence.

So her response to Jesus in John 4 is probably one of incredulity. She knew that not only was she a Samaritan, but a woman forced to draw water in solitude. But here he was, talking to her. The exchange which followed was extraordinary and we see the very first time in chronological scripture that Jesus reveals himself as the Christ to a person. He didn't choose established teachers or preachers or even his own disciples, he chose a woman, but not just any woman, the most oppressed, the most unjustly shamed person he possibly could find and a Samaritan to boot.

I've always heard this story as a story of redemption but through an appallingly shallow lens of a sexually sinful woman with a string of broken hearts and marriages behind her. The reality is far more incredible.