Woman at the Well, part 2 - John 4:16-18

I was thinking about the concept of “living water” last night and I had some thoughts about not only that but also about the Samaritan woman. The Church put out a really awesome video that we watched for family home evening last night that is basically encouraging everyone to be more Christ-like during the Christmas season this year. It’s actually more in depth than that but that’s the short explanation that I’m going with for right now. There’s the physical aspect of life, and really that’s anything from our bodies to the people around us, a very temporal or “natural man” existence, it’s feeding the physical appetites. Then there’s the other aspect of life, the non-physical, and that’s our personality, our happiness, our friends, our family, the foods we love, the music that we like, the people we love, the animals we love, the weather we enjoy, any feeling, to include sadness, despair, anything that separates us from purely instinctual living. It’s not so much that we have to accept the “living water” into our lives, because it’s already there, the spiritual aspect is already there. So I guess the question is whether or not you embrace the water, or if you try to ignore it and pretend it’s not there. I guess water really is a good analogy for the spirit, because a fresh water source is incredible, you need it to live, but it can also be beautiful, refreshing, it brings life, civilizations have always been based around the water source. But water can also be dirty and bring pain, disease and death because it can become stagnant, breed mosquitos, and make you sick and die. I guess we sometimes become so dead inside, our “water” such a dirty stagnant pool, that the idea of life and happiness and healing can be so scary and hopeful.

The woman asks Jesus “Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.” She wants this water source to make her temporal life easier, so she doesn’t have to come all the way to the well and pull up water and haul it back in order to get a drink. To make her understand what he really means he tells her “Go, call thy husband, and come hither.” She plays demur and answers, “I have no husband.” She’s talking to a stranger, she doesn’t know who he is, and having no husband myself, I know the impact that that statement could have. She is implying that she’s either a widow or a spinster, that’s the most logical and common explanation, and it conjures a sense of sympathy, or innocence. If the Lord had said, “Thou hast well said, I have no husband for thy husband is dead,” or “thou has had no husband,” that would have been adequate guess work on his part, but no one would have ever guessed what the actual history there was because Jesus answers her, “Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.”

I have always considered her skanky for having had 5 husbands and living with a man who is not her husband, not that I have room to talk, but the more I thought about her story the more I had other ideas. If a woman in our society had gone through 5 husbands and was currently living with a man who was not her husband, there would have been gossip and probably shunning. Today’s society it probably wouldn’t be husbands, but boyfriends, or baby daddies, so it’s not super rare but still uncommon, and there is a huge negative stigma that goes along with that. In fact, that’s what I’ll consider this in today’s terms, a woman with 5 different baby daddies and living with another man, because that seems like it’s a similar situation with how she is treated. So that’s it, we’ll equate this with a woman with 5 baby daddies and a live in boyfriend, because the 5 husband thing back then was probably really outrageous.

It occurred to me while I was thinking about this that what gets a woman to the point where she has 5 ex-husbands, and lives with a man? It was during an old general conference talk that I listened to this morning where the speaker basically said that he wished every woman, young or old, knew how precious she was to the Savior, that she was a daughter of God. It occurred to me then that she probably suffered the same way back then that women do now. I doubt that sexual assault and child molestation was less frequent during that time compared to today, and looking at her behavior as an adult, I would venture to guess that she had been sexually assaulted as a child. Again this is just my speculation, but I know what it’s like to go from man to man hoping to find what she’s been looking for as a child, basically, she has daddy issues. My guess is that she was molested as a child either by her father or a male relative that the family protected. Maybe I’m way off base here, but I don’t think I am.

This is really interesting because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how Jesus heals abuse and rape that affects so many people especially young girls and women. I remember thinking that there wasn’t any direct teachings about that in the scriptures other than the general stuff, and it’s a life changing occurrence, it will ruin your life, it changes who you are and that’s one of the questions that I’ve always had about the atonement. As a man, what was it like when, during the atonement, the Savior experienced his first rape. If fear is the opposite of faith and if Jesus had perfect faith, then it stands to reason that he had never experienced fear before in his mortal life, and I wonder what it was like for him to experience rape during the atonement. Maybe I’m over thinking this, maybe I’m just making stuff up, but that’s really what I feel the account of the Samaritan woman is about, it’s about a woman who’s was ruined as a child by sexual assault, and the Savior comes to her, and offers her healing and life and hope. How interesting, I’m going to have to think about this.