This is the passage about the woman in the well, but to explain the cartoons I have to explain that the brunette is Skye, the sister of the redhead (Sam), who is married to the chap with the beard (Zed), and Skye is a disaster, liberal type, while Sam is an engineer.
The woman at the well was drawing her water in the heat of the day because she was being shunned by all the girls in the village. She was bad news. Good men would not speak to her.
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
(John 4:16-26 ESV)
I’m using Chris Muir’s Day by Day to make a point. I did not sit at the well, and the gym I go to we chose because it is full of older people with families. It is not full of girls who are using it to troll for the Zeds of this world. (And the women in the gym are generally more motivated and nicer than those who have problem hair, problem glasses, and a BMI over 30 who snark on twitter and try to write codes of conduct).
But a woman is a moral agent. She has to have brains, she has to have a spine. She has to accept the consequences of what she does. She cannot play some kind of card to avoid dealing with these things.
And you cannot use clever words or theology to get out of these things. Note that the Woman at the well was not ignorant, and could ask questions: and Christ drops a broad hint that the temple and priesthood are soon to disappear.
One final comment. Jesus respected the hierarchy of the country. He was not wanting to teach a woman without her husband present, in case he was accused of impropriety or worse. It is not that he did not teach women, nor that women did not follow him. It is that he expected that they would be adults, and be faithful to the vows they had made.
And in this time, as in the time of Christ, when divorce is freely available –some Rabbis then would provide a get (certificate of divorce) for any reason — the need for, as Chris Muir puts it — enough brains to stay with the person whom you vowed your life to is paramount. For otherwise you will be divorced. Your children will suffer, and your fortune dissipate.
Christ confronts not merely the woman at the well, but us all.
I think Christ goes far further than you state in her interaction with the woman. He breaks all the cultural rules, looks to her to be honest and then uses her to spread the Gospel among those who are supposedly outside the club. No doubt she is challenged about her living arrangements, and rightly so given the culture of the day irrespective of right and wrong as we understand it, but I think Christ picks her out because she is of Christ even though she doesn’t know what that is at that point. She is a daughter of Abraham in the spiritual sense and I suspect that had she not been, Christ would not have spoken to her in this fashion. Its a fantastic dialogue with Christ’s questions being so direct, brief and searching while setting her free to do good things.
It reminds me of other magnificent interactions such as the woman looking for a crumb from the Master’s table and the demon possessed man who was delivered by having the spirits put into the herd of swine. Christ knows exactly what is happening and the nature of those to whom He’s speaking. Nothing is wasted.
Agreed. Technically, he should not have spoken to a Samaritan. Or a woman. Or a woman with a notorious reputation. But by speaking with her he does not approve of what she has done.