I don’t know if this is as popular an act as it used to be, but I’m sure you’ve all seen someone who gets up in front of a crowd of people and at least pretends to be able to read people’s minds. They pick a volunteer out of the audience, and then the mind-reader, who supposedly has never seen this person before, tells him or her all sorts of things that it would be impossible for a stranger to know. Sometime it’s pretty vague — for example, the mind-reader says that the volunteer has a troubled relationship. And of course that’s an easy one — who doesn’t have at least one troubled relationship? But other times this mind-reader tells the person specifics, lots of specifics, about secrets that really no stranger could possibly know. And if we’re honest, while it might be entertaining happening to someone else, this is something none of us would like to have happen to us. Let’s think for a moment about why.
If we are honest with ourselves, we all have lots of things we don’t want other people knowing about us. We have a top layer that we don’t like people getting behind, behind the person we like to show to other people. And it’s not just other people we don’t like to get underneath that top layer — sometimes there are things about ourselves that we don’t like to remember, our failings, our thoughts, things we do that make us disappointed in ourselves. We create a lot of distraction and things to do in our lives that keep that inner layer of ourselves fairly well covered up, and even keep us from looking too closely at what’s there.
In this gospel today we might be tempted to say that what Jesus is doing here is something like mind-reading. He seems to know things about this woman at the well that she is shocked that a stranger would know. She’s amazed that Jesus can seemingly read her mind — but here’s the real point: Let’s not be distracted by thinking that what is going on here is simply a magic trick. What Jesus is doing here for her is much bigger. The longer the two of them talk, the more the difference between them falls away, they are not Jew and Samaritan talking, or male and female talking, those huge differences that should prevent them from communicating at all, all of them fall away as this conversation goes on. Everything that separates them falls away, until the Samaritan women realizes that this accepting, compassionate man she has been talking with, the one who knows everything about her, doesn’t seem to mind that she is a woman and a Samaritan and a person who has failed so often in life. He is also the one who wants to take away all her thirst forever.
Having that outside layer of yourself stripped away sounds like it might be painful. But what we all forget, over and over, is that with God we can actually trust and put down our guard, and there’s nothing more liberating than to realize that there isn’t any need to be anyone other than ourselves, truly ourselves. With Jesus we are not our job, our relationships, our successes, our failures, our distractions, our many projects, not any of those things that are on the top layer of who we are. With Jesus we can be the person behind all that, the insecure one, the hurting one, the one who feels guilty for something, the one who wants desperately to feel loved by someone, especially by that God we sometimes have such a hard time picturing.
God is not shocked by the existence of that flawed person inside each of us. What Jesus shows us here is that he is willing to be in a long relationship with us, the kind of relationship where the fact that someone knows everything about us is what enables us to just stop pretending for once. With Jesus we can depend on mercy and just keep talking, asking questions, asking for help. It might seem as if Jesus would be the last person you could relax talking to, and yet he is the one being in this universe who truly understands our weakness and embraces it. God isn’t put off by someone who doesn’t know any other words to say in prayer except “I can’t do this alone any more.” That is sometimes where our conversation with God finds its real starting point.
We are about halfway through Lent, and if we haven’t focused on anything in particular yet, maybe we can start here with this discovery that Jesus is someone who is ready to talk. No matter what kind of shape we think we are in, the greatest barrier to having a relationship with him is always our own sense that we somehow are not ready, not worthy, not focused, not people who would even be aware if God sat down next to us at the town well. Sometimes we’re discouraged when we try to pray, because the first person we meet when we pray isn’t God, unfortunately, it’s ourselves, all our thoughts, our worries, the trivial things that occupy our mind. And yet even with all that going on, God wants us there, talking, keeping the conversation going even when we find it hard to get beneath that top layer of ourselves.
There’s a real rebirth in realizing that God’s mercy can overlook everything, see right through our weakness and way beyond them. This woman at the well at the end of this story is a new person, or maybe it’s more correct to say that she has been given freedom, she’s been given that water, a source of life that can’t ever be taken away. It came through a conversation with Jesus that keeps going, a conversation that is much easier than we often make it. The secret of that relationship is to sit down and keep talking.