I just realized that I’m the Samaritan woman at the well. Or basically in a similar situation.
If we use her as an archetype, her story becomes very relevant to many, if not most, of us. Societies are built and run on shared myths; whether they’re from religious frameworks, social frameworks, or just plain arbitrary rules made law by whomever happens to be at the top at the time.
And it’s inevitable that societies function this way. To maintain order, motivate people to work cooperatively, and keep a gaggle of thousands, or even millions, of individuals from each living by their own code of values, some standardized system of rules is kind of necessary.
Fair enough. I get it.
But what happens when we start to think that the rules are fundamental to our nature rather than what they really are, an attempt to keep people living, working, and playing well together? Or, in a more pessimistic version, keep everyone controlled?
Here’s the problem: after a while, all these guidelines start to lose their initial purpose of simply keeping order and become a legalistic quagmire that drowns our freedom and individuality. We start living by the letter of the law instead of its spirit. And maybe it’s time we start thinking more about who we really are and who our neighbors are; as actual people, not just social credit scores.
The Habit of Reduction
We humans have this ridiculous habit of picking out one detail about someone, one moment in their life or one label, and deciding that’s the whole story. It’s like taking a single thread and thinking you know the whole fabric. And yeah, that’s absolutely bonkers when you really think about it. But we do it. You do it. I do it (ugh). But we really must step back and quit thinking like that, even when we’re not thinking. We must start making the effort to really see people.
I have this great idea for a party: a room full of strangers, finger foods, wine, and one rule: you can’t ask or tell your name, occupation, or educational or social background. Cool right?! Then those people would really get to know one another without all the social bias. It’s a social and cultural “nudity.” That’s when you really get to know someone.
Walking a Mile (For Real)
Another way to look at it is that old saying about not judging someone until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. In other words, you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life, and you don’t know the full measure of who they are just because society says, “Well, that person doesn’t fit our mold.”
And of course, we’ve got Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream always echoing in the background, that vision where people are judged by the content of their character instead of these arbitrary social norms, whether that’s the color of their skin or the mistakes they’ve made or the box society tries to put them in.
The Samaritan woman? She was the wrong ethnicity. The wrong gender. Had the wrong romantic history. She came to the well at noon (the hottest part of the day) because she was avoiding the other women who came in the cooler morning hours. She knew what they thought of her. She’d internalized all those labels society had stamped on her forehead.
And then Jesus shows up and does the unthinkable: he sees her. Not the labels. Not the “social credit score”. Not the reputation. He sees the actual human being and treats her like her story matters.
The Question We’re Not Asking
Here’s what gets me: how many people do we come across every day who are standing at their own wells, avoiding the crowd, carrying the weight of every label society has slapped on them?
The person with the criminal record trying to get a job. The divorced parent being judged at church. The immigrant trying to live in a culture that sees them as a threat. The teenager who doesn’t fit the gender boxes. The person struggling with addiction who’s reduced to “addict” instead of “human being who’s struggling.”
We look at them and we think we know their story because we know one thread of it. We think we understand them because we’ve categorized them. Filed them away in our mental database under “problem” or “other” or “not like us” or “undesirable”.
But we don’t know them. We know our assumptions about them.
The Spirit vs. The Letter
This is what happens when rules become more important than people. When maintaining order becomes more important than extending grace. When protecting our comfort becomes more important than recognizing someone’s humanity.
We start living by the letter of the law instead of its spirit.
The letter of the law says: she’s a Samaritan, don’t talk to her. She’s been married five times, she’s immoral. She’s a woman alone, she’s suspect.
The spirit of the law says: she’s thirsty. She’s human. She matters.
Jesus chose spirit every single time. And it got him in trouble with the rule-keepers every single time as well. Because when you actually see people, really see them for who they are, you can’t help but disrupt the system that depends on not seeing them truly and justly.
What If We Tried?
So here’s my challenge to myself (and maybe to you, if you’re game): what if we stopped reducing people to their most convenient label? What if we resisted that very human urge to think we know someone’s whole story based on the thread we can see?
What if we had that party (metaphorically speaking) where we stripped away all the usual social markers and just… talked to each other? Listened to each other? Gave each other the dignity of being fully human instead of partially categorized?
I know, I know. It sounds impossibly idealistic. We need some structure. Some order. Some way to move through a world with millions of people we’ll never fully know.
But maybe we could start by recognizing that whatever box we’ve put someone in, they’re bigger than that box. More complex than that label. More interesting than that single thread.
The Samaritan woman at the well wasn’t defined by her past. She was defined by her encounter with someone who saw her as she really was. And that encounter transformed her into one of the first evangelists, running back to tell her whole village about the man who told her everything she ever did; and loved her anyway.
What if we could do that for each other? See each other as we really are and love each other anyway?
It’s just a thought. From one Samaritan woman to another.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.