“The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’”

— John 4:17

Oh how I love this text! I confess I’m a little jealous of those of you who get to preach it this week. In my congregation, our worship team chose a series off the lectionary this year, and I am missing some of my old favorites.

The challenge with this passage is that it is so rich, so layered, so multifaceted that I never quite know where to begin. Do I focus on the woman at the well as the first evangelist in John’s Gospel? Do I compare and contrast her with Nicodemus? Do I talk about Jesus as God-in-the-flesh, present with her so that worship is no longer tied to a particular mountain? Do I focus on her faith (I know that Messiah is coming)?

In recent years I’ve heard many sermons attempting to rehabilitate this woman’s reputation. And perhaps that work is needed. For centuries, maybe even millennia, she has been remembered primarily as a woman defined by sexual sin. The assumptions pile up quickly: she had five husbands, she is living with a man now, she must have been morally suspect. She comes to the well at noon, so surely she must be avoiding the other women of the village. Shame, scandal, exile! We have often read all of that into the story.

But the truth is, the text never actually says those things.

We simply do not know the circumstances of her life. We do not know whether she was widowed, abandoned, divorced, or surviving in a world where women had little control over their marital fate. And women, it turns out, are perfectly capable of committing sins that are not sexual in nature. I hope this is not a shock to you or to your congregation. Speaking as a woman myself, I can tell you that I’m quite good at coveting. I’ve never blasphemed the Holy Spirit, but I have been known to blaspheme in general. And I confess I sometimes struggle to love my neighbor as I should, to forgive when forgiveness is hard, and occasionally to keep the Sabbath as faithfully as I ought.

This text is wonderfully polyvalent, rich with layers of meaning, and the woman herself is just as complex. She can be many things at once: a seeker with questions, a faithful practitioner of her tradition, a woman who has endured much, a conversation partner for Jesus, and ultimately the first evangelist in John’s Gospel.

It is almost as if the gospel, and the people who encounter it, are not simple or one-note.

The gospel meets each of us exactly where we are: in our questions and our convictions, in our brokenness and our bravery, in our longing and our becoming. It does not flatten us into a single story or reduce us to a single label. Instead, it honors the complexity of our lives, speaking differently to each heart while drawing us all toward the same living water.

Perhaps that is the good news of this story. Not that we must arrive fully formed to encounter Christ, but that Christ arrives to us, again and again, in the midst of who we already are.

Beloved, as you proclaim the word this week, I pray you have eyes to see holy ground in unexpected places, ears to hear grace in difficult questions, and the courage to trust that God will meet each person exactly where they are.