Broken But Blessed

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” – John 4:5-7 
 
The woman at Jacob’s well is by all indications a broken woman, but she is blessed by an encounter she has with Jesus that day. Jesus, worn out by the trip, sat down at the well around noon, and he meets a woman who came to draw water.  
 
Typically, women came to draw water early in the morning before it got too hot, but this woman comes at high noon because she didn’t want to encounter the other women in the community who would have been at the well and who would have been gossiping about her life circumstances.  
 
See, she’s had 5 husbands and the one she’s with now is not her own. That’s not because she is a loose woman as many commentators assume. It’s because men in that patriarchal society were able to put away their wives for any reason, leaving them socially and economically vulnerable. And because they oftentimes left without giving the woman papers of release, she is legally regarded as still married.  
 
This woman’s life has been turned upside down by a broken legal and religious system that based her value upon the man she is connected with, and so she goes from man to man trying to find someone who will love her and treat her the way she deserves. She’s not some loose woman. She’s a woman who has been repeatedly shunned, rejected, and let down. And she didn’t want to come to that well in the morning with a bunch of gossiping, self-righteous religious folks who were going to look down on her rather than lift her up.  
 
So she comes at noon at the hottest hour of the day because her sense of self-esteem, her self-confidence, and her self-worth have been destroyed by the circumstances of her life. But oh, what a difference a day makes. That day, she had an encounter with another man who turned her life around. Sometimes that’s all it takes, after years of ridicule, one day, one encounter can turn things around.  
 
In the center of all of this brokenness—there to meet the broken woman, defeated by broken relationships carried out in the context of a broken culture—is Jesus with a word of grace to speak over all of the broken pieces in her life. He reminds her then, and He reminds us today, that we may be broken, but we’re still blessed.