John 4:7-26 (part one) "Scandalous"

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”  (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?  Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” 
 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,  but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
“Please, sir,” the woman said, “give me this water! Then I’ll never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to come here to get water.”
 “Go and get your husband,” Jesus told her.
 “I don’t have a husband,” the woman replied.
Jesus said, “You’re right! You don’t have a husband—  for you have had five husbands, and you aren’t even married to the man you’re living with now. You certainly spoke the truth!”
 “Sir,” the woman said, “you must be a prophet.  So tell me, why is it that you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place of worship, while we Samaritans claim it is here at Mount Gerizim, where our ancestors worshiped?”
 Jesus replied, “Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship, while we Jews know all about him, for salvation comes through the Jews.  But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way.  For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The woman said, “I know the Messiah is coming—the one who is called Christ. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus told her, “I Am the Messiah!”

There are so many layers of good things in this story from John 4.  I'm not even sure exactly how to approach writing my thoughts about them without it turning into a sermon (and nobody really wants that).  So I think I'm just going to do several short posts going back and forth over various parts of the bigger passage, highlighting different things.

The audacity of Jesus to even talked to this woman.  First, she was a woman.  Proper Jewish men did not talk to women in public.  Scandalous.  Even more scandalous was that she was a Samaritan.  As she herself pointed out, Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.  There is a reason for that -especially among righteous Jews.

The short version of Jewish history is that after the Babylonians conquered Israel and carried away many of the strongest and prettiest and brightest into captivity in Babylon, they sent people from other lands they had conquered to repopulate Israel.  These new people in the land, of course, brought with them all of their foreign gods.  The Jews who remained began intermarrying with the foreigners and worshiping their gods, while still affirming the one true God.  The result was that neither their bloodlines nor their religion remained purely Jewish.  On the other hand, the Jews who had been sent into exile and captivity, refused to intermarry and continued to worship God.  After 70 years (as told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah) the exiled Jews returned to Israel to find these impure half-breeds claiming to be Jews.  These half-breeds were the Samaritans.

So in this story, we find this Samaritan woman arriving at the well in the middle of the day -the heat of the day.  Other women from the town all came early in the morning before it got too hot.  They came together; there was comradery and fellowship and chatter -and no doubt gossip.  Almost by definition, this woman alone in the heat of the day means she was an outcast.  Maybe she preferred  the heat and dust and loneliness to the gossip because maybe too much of the gossip was about her.  In fact, we find out later that she had been married to five different men and that she was currently living with another man to whom she was not married.

This lonely outcast Samaritan that everybody knew to be a loose woman is who Jesus struck up a conversation with.  This is, in fact, the first person to whom Jesus revealed that He was the Messiah.  She was a Samaritan, but He talked to her anyway.  She was an outcast, but He treated her with dignity and respect.  He certainly knew who she was and He knew what she had done- He was not naive; but He talked to her anyway.  It's almost as if Jesus doesn't mind being a friend to sinners.  Lucky for us.