Jesus, The Woman at the Well, and the Wizard of Oz

¹⁶ He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back."

¹⁷ "I have no husband," she replied.

Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. ¹⁸ The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true."

It struck me last week as I was reading this passage from John 4 last week, that I really like warm, fuzzy Jesus. And the culture likes warm, fuzzy Jesus.

But Jesus refuses to stay warm and fuzzy.

In this passage, he purposefully exposes this woman in a completely unnecessary way. If he wanted to tell her who he was, he could do so without having to bring all her baggage into the light. I would prefer to not have to have all my baggage dragged into the light.

But we are nothing if not experts at hiding. We hide from others, from one another, and we try to hide from God.

And our capacity for self-deception is seemingly limitless. We discover all kinds of creative ways to avoid dealing with our own brokenness.

But as long as we are hiding, Wizard-of-Oz like, behind the curtain, pulling levers and pretending to be larger or smarter or cooler or more intelligent or more powerful or more put together than we really are, we are stuck in our own neurosis and life cannot reach us.

Healing can only come to the exposed wound. This would seem to be a principle of the universe. And Jesus is a relentless healer. He will stop at nothing to expose us--not to shame us but to heal us.

We would rather be left alone. But Jesus will not allow us any charade of personhood. He would have us to be real people, not images. Thick, solid, real--not ghosts pretending to be fully human. And so he will stop at nothing to expose our ridiculous play-acting at whatever our own particular play-acting role tends to be. He is that good.

And so he forces our fears and anxieties and wounds to the surface that he might touch them and make us whole people.

And so he is not the warm-fuzzy Jesus that I or the people around me want him to be. Instead, he is exactly what we need: our rescuer, God come to turn orphans living in the Land of the Ruins into sons and daughters of the Most High Father.