Final... for now...Thoughts on the Woman at the Well

Is it really the job of the Church to build bridges “to” culture or is it the calling of the Church to be the bridge to God that Jesus has already built with His blood? In this moment at the well, is Jesus really building a bridge of compassionate conversation to the woman or is He building a bridge for the woman to cross over to Him? Perhaps the outward appearance of the “well-event” is of Jesus, God-Incarnate, coming to the woman. But in the story itself Jesus is already AT the well. The focal point of this story is, in fact, the focal point of the entire story of history: Jesus.

The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is not as much a descriptive example of how we are to build bridges to where people are so that we might meet them on their common ground. Because the story is not about us... the story is about Jesus. The truth, often overlooked, is that Jesus is the primary subject of the evangel and not us. We are the object of His love. He is the focal point of the Good News and we are the recipients of that love. When we get that then we might begin to mine the deepest treasures of the “well-event”. The danger of the wrong view of “evangelical bridge-building” is two-fold: 1. Failure to realize that when we build bridges the traffic can, and certainly will, cross in both directions (hat tip to R.C.S.) and 2. Missing the point that the woman did not encounter a man at the well who had heard about here and spoke to her in a compassionate way … she met God incarnate at the well who knew her at the deepest level of her heart and showed compassion to her anyway. The main point of the story is not who Jesus met but who the woman met.
And is certainly not primarily about how Jesus met the woman, but rather “who the woman met” at the well. Because she met God at the well. The fact that she met God at the well gives meaning to the contents of the true well. The well from which the living water flows.

When the story becomes something else, even slightly, we weaken the very evangel that we state we desire to share before we have even shared it and thereby dilute it of its deepest gift: Jesus and the bridge He built to the world on the Cross.

As we prepare to enter the second week of Lent, my prayer is that our focus will be on Christ's bridge of love already built and that we might in our compassionate conversations with others simply point them to the bridge already built.

IHN
mark+