What It Looks Like to Respect a Woman

"A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.'" 

The woman said to him, 'Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.' Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.' The woman said to him, 'Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.'" (From John 4)

He never should have talked to her.

She was a woman, and it was well understood that a man never talked to a woman alone. To do so outside of a family context, then to drink after her? Scandalous. Not only that, but her ethnic background would have induced marked hostility between their communities. For both of these reasons, she would not have been permitted to engage in what the Jewish people defined as true worship. She would have been considered impure. Whether her five husbands had come and gone from her life by way of divorce or death, even her own community would have seen her either as a rebellious sinner or cursed. Probably both, since she was living with a man who was not her husband. 

She could not have had more strikes against her if she had tried.

Which is probably why she was at the well in the middle of the day. It would have been unbearably hot, reason for most everyone else to avoid hauling water at that time. I imagine she was highly accustomed to being shamed and excluded, and maybe she hoped to avoid the sharp glances and muttered remarks from the other women for just one day. Instead, she encountered a man who would slowly dismantle every single reason for her shame and exclusion. 

He engaged her, extending her respect and dignity as an intelligent human being. 

He invited her into radical inclusion, revealing his divinity and inviting her into a worship even truer than the temple worship from which she would have been barred. 

He extended her the most radical kind of grace. Grace that acknowledged her broken past while inviting her into a better story. Grace that allowed her to become a mouthpiece for Jesus' divine identity...a role that, in that culture, should have been reserved for a man because no one believed a woman's testimony. But Jesus believed her. Jesus accepted her without condition or merit. Jesus included her in a radical new community of worship. Jesus engaged her when no other man, not even a man from her own community, would. Jesus dismantled her shame and replaced it with dignity. Jesus stood against the rules of culture, religion, and social convention to redefine her worth and identity. 

If you want to know what it looks like to respect a woman, Jesus captured it pretty well.