This week’s reading: John 4:5-42
“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
—The Woman at the Well, to Jesus (John 4:9)
This week we read the story of Jesus’s encounter of the woman at the well. Some of the questions in this passage are explicit–they emerge in the dialogue between Jesus and the woman. Later in the story, we read about some questions people do not have the courage to ask Jesus, or even each other. But the whole passage starts with this question from the woman.
It starts with a woman who could not understand why someone like Jesus would ask for help from—or even speak to—someone like her.
Who would never expect you to ask for help? Even more dramatically, who would never expect you to even speak to them?