The Hour She Went for Water

There is a supermarket seven minutes from her house and a supermarket twenty three minutes from her house, and she goes to the one twenty three minutes away.

She has never explained this to anybody, largely because nobody has ever asked. She does the big shop on a Tuesday at about ten to nine at night, when the aisles have that particular late calm and the man restocking the cereal has headphones in and no interest whatsoever in her, and the whole thing takes forty minutes including the drive, and she gets home and puts the radio on and quite enjoys it.

The seven minute one is where everybody is. That is the entire difference. On a Saturday morning the seven minute one is thirty people she half knows, and thirty conversations that all begin with the same four words and go on for four minutes each, and every one of those conversations is perfectly pleasant. She likes these people. That is what makes it so hard to say out loud.

There is a particular version of the arithmetic that only certain people run. It goes: if I go now, that person will be there. If I go in an hour, they will have gone but the other one will have arrived. If I go at ten to nine on a Tuesday, nobody I know goes at ten to nine on a Tuesday. It is not paranoid and it is not dramatic. It is planning, done well, with a genuine cost that never appears anywhere in the household budget: two extra hours of driving a month, so that a certain kind of encounter does not happen.

And she is not hiding anything, exactly. There is just a season she came through a few years ago that she does not want to summarize in a car park. There is no short version of it. There is only the long version, and a supermarket aisle on a Saturday morning is not built for the long version, so she goes on Tuesdays and everybody stays friendly and nobody has to do the summarizing.

You know your own hour. Perhaps it is not the shop. Perhaps it is the school gate, and you come at nine minutes past. Perhaps it is the route you take that adds a mile to avoid one street. Perhaps it is the coffee you drink at your desk so you are not in the kitchen at half eleven. Whatever it is, you know exactly what time it happens at, and you have never once written it down, and if somebody worked out the pattern you would be more exposed by the timing than by anything the timing was protecting.

Now come with me to a village in Samaria, to the hottest hour of the day, and to a woman walking out to a well with a water pot.

The sixth hour

John tells us the time of day, and he did not have to.

Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.John 4:6

The sixth hour. Midday. In that country, in that heat, with a stone jar to carry there and a full one to carry back up the hill.

Anybody who has ever carried water can tell you what noon costs. It is not the hour a person picks. The cool of the morning is when water is fetched, and the cool of the evening, and it is fetched in company, because carrying is easier with somebody and always has been.

The Gospel does not tell us why she came at noon. Notice that, because it matters, and because it is where a great deal of well meant preaching starts inventing. John gives the hour and says nothing about her reasons, and that restraint is a kindness, and I am going to keep it exactly as he left it.

What the text does say, it says plainly and without one word of contempt: later in the conversation Jesus speaks of five husbands, and of the man she is with now not being her husband, and she does not run from Him. He is the one who says it, and she is the one who stays. There is nothing in that exchange for anybody to be clever about, and I would not want to be the person who tried.

You are held by a God who does not mark iniquities against the people He is speaking to. Psalm 130:4 says there is forgiveness with Him, and the written word puts that line in a psalm sung on a road by people walking uphill, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it arrive as relief rather than as a verdict being kept back for later.

So here is what the hour gives us, and it is enough. It tells us about the shape of her week rather than the state of her heart. A week with an hour in it that has to be got through on your own. And that is not exotic and it is not ancient. That is a Tuesday at ten to nine.

You are known by God at the hour you thought was the unwatched one. Psalm 139:3 says He compasses your path and your lying down and is acquainted with all your ways, and the Spirit who searches the deep things of God is not conducting an audit but keeping company, which is a different thing entirely.

He was sitting there first

Now look at where Jesus is in that verse, because this is the whole of it.

He is already at the well. He got there first. He is tired from the road, He has sat down on the stonework in the full heat, and He is at the one place in that village where, at that hour, one person was going to turn up alone.

He did not intercept her. He did not arrange a public moment with an audience. He went to the noon well and He waited, and when she arrived He opened the conversation by asking her for a drink, which put Him in her debt rather than the other way round. That is how He starts. A request, from a tired man, to a woman who had arranged her entire day around not being spoken to.

You have a God who chooses the hour nobody else is available. Scripture says He is a very present help in trouble, and Psalm 46:1 does not add a clause about office hours, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a present-tense verb like that land on somebody sitting in a car park at ten to nine.

Then He offers her water she does not have to carry, and He tells her plainly what He knows about her life, and neither of those things drives her off. That is worth sitting with. The knowing did not end the conversation. In the whole of her carefully arranged week, the safest place turned out to be in front of the one person who did not need the long version explained to Him.

You were never going to have to summarize yourself to Him. John 4:29 has her telling the town about a man who told her all things that ever she did, and the Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that and makes it feel like relief rather than exposure.

And then the detail that undoes me every time. She left the water pot. The thing she came for, at the hour she chose so she could come for it undisturbed, is put down at the well and left there, and she goes back into the city and speaks to the people. Not at dusk. Not on a Tuesday. Then.