Missio Dei: WK3 - THU
PRESENCE ACROSS THE LINE
John 4:7, 9-10 (NLT) “Soon a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Please give me a drink.’ She said to Jesus, ‘You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?’... Jesus replied, ‘If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.’”
I grew up playing rugby, and every year our school played our great rivals in what was, by the end, less a game than a running confrontation. It would start as rugby and deteriorate. Tempers flaring on the field, parents from both sides screaming at each other along the touchline. One year the game was particularly bruising. By the final whistle everyone was spent and raw. We walked off the field without the usual handshakes, which was a way of saying how the afternoon had gone. I had nearly reached the clubhouse entrance when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around. It was my opposite number, the player who had been across from me all afternoon, and he had crossed the invisible no man’s land between the two teams, jogging over before I got inside. He put his hand out. I took it. Something in the afternoon changed in that moment, not undone, but changed.
Jesus is in Samaria, which a respectable Jewish rabbi would have avoided. Speaking to a woman in public was socially irregular. She was a Samaritan, which meant centuries of ethnic and religious hostility between their communities. And she was drawing water alone at noon rather than with the other women in the cool of the morning, which tells you something about her standing among her own people. Jesus crosses every one of these lines in a single conversation. He doesn’t ask for permission. He simply begins, with a request that places him in the position of need rather than authority: Give me a drink. The one who made the water asks a marginalized foreign woman to serve him.
This is the logic of incarnational presence. Jesus enters her world, geographically, relationally, socially, before he speaks into it. He asks before he offers. He receives before he gives. And in that movement of genuine, vulnerable presence, something opens up. She asks questions. He answers. By the end of the conversation, she is running back to her village saying: come and see the man who told me everything I ever did.
She became the first evangelist in John’s Gospel because someone was willing to cross the no man’s land and actually sit at the well with her. Not to manage her from a safe theological distance, but to sit with her and talk. The lines that divide us do not surprise Jesus. He has been crossing them since Samaria. He is still crossing them. And he invites us to follow.
John 4:7, 9-10 (NLT) “Soon a Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Please give me a drink.’ She said to Jesus, ‘You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?’... Jesus replied, ‘If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.’”
I grew up playing rugby, and every year our school played our great rivals in what was, by the end, less a game than a running confrontation. It would start as rugby and deteriorate. Tempers flaring on the field, parents from both sides screaming at each other along the touchline. One year the game was particularly bruising. By the final whistle everyone was spent and raw. We walked off the field without the usual handshakes, which was a way of saying how the afternoon had gone. I had nearly reached the clubhouse entrance when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around. It was my opposite number, the player who had been across from me all afternoon, and he had crossed the invisible no man’s land between the two teams, jogging over before I got inside. He put his hand out. I took it. Something in the afternoon changed in that moment, not undone, but changed.
Jesus is in Samaria, which a respectable Jewish rabbi would have avoided. Speaking to a woman in public was socially irregular. She was a Samaritan, which meant centuries of ethnic and religious hostility between their communities. And she was drawing water alone at noon rather than with the other women in the cool of the morning, which tells you something about her standing among her own people. Jesus crosses every one of these lines in a single conversation. He doesn’t ask for permission. He simply begins, with a request that places him in the position of need rather than authority: Give me a drink. The one who made the water asks a marginalized foreign woman to serve him.
This is the logic of incarnational presence. Jesus enters her world, geographically, relationally, socially, before he speaks into it. He asks before he offers. He receives before he gives. And in that movement of genuine, vulnerable presence, something opens up. She asks questions. He answers. By the end of the conversation, she is running back to her village saying: come and see the man who told me everything I ever did.
She became the first evangelist in John’s Gospel because someone was willing to cross the no man’s land and actually sit at the well with her. Not to manage her from a safe theological distance, but to sit with her and talk. The lines that divide us do not surprise Jesus. He has been crossing them since Samaria. He is still crossing them. And he invites us to follow.
- What lines or barriers are hardest for you to cross relationally?
- How does Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman challenge your assumptions about people?
- Where might God be inviting you to practice vulnerable presence instead of distant judgment?
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