Not a Game of "Gotcha"

There's usually a story, a series of events, behind every major lightbulb moment someone has. Please allow me to share a new insight about the "Woman at the Well", who meets Jesus in John chapter 4, and how it came to me.

Since I was a young child, I heard the story of the woman at the well in Sunday School. Jesus took the time to talk with her, even though there was extreme hostility between the ethnic groups they each belonged to. Jesus was a Jew, and this woman was a Samaritan.

As I got older, more layers were added to this woman. Much is made of her arrival at the well at noon. It is inferred that she was trying to avoid other people at the well, a kind of social hub in her day. She was described as someone who kept changing the subject, trying to dodge Jesus' attempts to bring her a living hope. And, the takeaway emphasized is that Jesus got her to face her especially immoral past as a woman who had been married five times.

The commentaries and study Bibles I have consulted seem to see this story as a game of "Gotcha", in which Jesus gets the upper hand and finds this woman out.

In 1964, Dr. Eric Berne wrote a book called Games People Play. He was a psychiatrist who specialized in "transactional analysis", an outgrowth of Freudian and Jungian thought. In this book, he describes dozens of patterns or games people use in relating to each other. One of them is "Now I've Got You, You ..." I am leaving out the offensive term he puts at the end.

As I reread Berne's book last spring, it struck me that Berne was documenting the plethora of ways pastimes and games act as "substitutes for the real living of real intimacy"[1]. And then I thought, we have been misreading this story as an interaction initiated by a man like our broken selves. If anyone knew the real living of real intimacy, it was Jesus Christ. This was not a conversation in which Jesus is trying to trick someone or come out on top or shame someone. Indeed, any other conversation Jesus had with other women and men do not carry this dynamic at all.

What are we misreading here?

And, now I go back to a book I read last summer, Misreading Scripture With Individualist Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James (pseudonym for security reasons). It helps the reader realize that when Jesus is talking with a woman at a well in Sychar, Samaria, they are conversing in a collectivist culture. In this culture, women are not independent agents. They rarely own property. They rarely have a say in matters of marriage. They can be shunned for things they cannot control, such as medical conditions or barrenness. If something goes wrong in her life, the community can make up a story about how she deserved it.

So, if this woman came to the well at noon to avoid the stares of others, it did not mean she deserved them.

When Jesus asks this woman to call her husband and return, he is not trying to trick her. He asks her to call her husband because of the cultural norms. It would be appropriate for her husband and her to learn from Jesus together, so the community would not ascribe ill intentions to a foreign visitor.

When the woman says she does not have a husband, Jesus' words to her should be taken at face value. He commends her for being honest. She has told the truth, if not the whole truth. Does she owe a stranger the whole truth, especially if it's a truth that is mingled with pain? Richards and James write, "Her previous five marriages were likely ended by a combination of widowhood and divorce" [2]. They add, "...divorce was more commonly initiated by the husband" [3]. She has been through a lot. Jesus is not being sarcastic, and he is not adding onto her suffering. A group of women in Afghanistan hearing this story for the first time grasped this too! [4]

Next, she identifies him as a prophet. She wonders if she has to worship in Jerusalem to properly worship God. It was a long distance. What if the man in her life would not allow her to go there?

And here we continue to see a pastoral Jesus letting her know that the attitude of the heart is more crucial to worship than the physical location.

When we read this account hearing Jesus as a loving and guileless communicator, we discover a better takeaway--Jesus' simple request for a drink of water led to a woman discovering the Messiah, and she invited the town to come and hear this prophet. Jesus extended his stay because so many mortals were eager to hear the good news of a Kingdom that was being extended beyond gendered, ethnic and national borders.

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

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[1] Eric Berne (1964) Games People Play.

[2] E. Randolph Richards and Richard James (2020) Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, page 56.

[3] Source above, page 57.

[4] This anecdote was shared in a online professional development (Edvance) gathering entitled Education as Hospitality by Dr. David I. Smith in October, 2021.