Looking For Love

 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
          “I have no husband,” she replied.
          Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
          “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” 
          “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
        The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
         Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.” (John  4:16-26)

        If the whole of the conversation is included here, Jesus threw in another non-sequitur. He offers her living water. She asks for it. He says “go get your husband”? There could be a cultural aspect here. He could have been trying to avoid having the Samaritans question His ethics in converting her to a new faith. I suspect, however, that He was again pushing aside the superficial.
         He could have gone for the win, told her to believe in Him and walked away. Later, He tells the Jews that He is the Living Water and walks away. Instead, He made it personal and dug a little deeper. She asked for the Living Water so she wouldn’t have to go to the well to draw. What was the problem with going to the well? Why was she doing it in the heat of the day instead of early morning or evening like the rest of the women of Sychar? She’d had five husbands. She was living with someone to whom she was not married. The women of the town were likely the reason she was there at that hour. 
         We’ve no way to tell whether all the husbands divorced her. She might have been widowed, divorced, or both. Some would suggest that we should pity her. Some, that we should condemn her as a loose woman. In our society, we’re likely to be told that we shouldn’t shame her. She’s the victim. The only thing she’s done is looked for love, and everyone deserves love. She made a mistake. Well, she may have made five mistakes. She might have been looking for love, but clearly, she was looking in all the wrong places. At some point, she needed to take responsibility and change her strategy.
         She pushes away from the issue, either with honesty or with sarcasm. “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.” She returns to the safe issue: religious politics. The Jews say, we say. 
         Jesus lets her change the issue, possibly because she’s not really changing it. The Samaritans, like the woman, were looking for love, and for God, in all the wrong places. He does not say, as some today suggest, that the Samaritans were right to seek God wherever they choose. The Samaritan idea of God was wrong. Worshipping the god of her choice was not going to result in Living Water any more than the next guy she let into her life would provide her with the love she sought.
         We all tend to look for love and for God in all the wrong places. Our society insists that it doesn’t matter which god we worship. Jesus didn’t agree.