Adversity as Gospel Opportunity
Two people meet. One is running from controversy and finds himself exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry. The other is a shame-filled social outcast who seems to be doing everything she can to avoid others. It’s difficult to read this and think their encounter will lead to a great spiritual awakening.
Yet, as we read about the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, we are reminded that the gospel often advances through adversity. God seems to delight to work through weakness to show the incredible power of his grace.
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? (John 4:1-11).
This encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well happens because of each of their weaknesses. God providentially orchestrates this meeting through their frailty.
Why is Jesus here at this well? First, he finds himself in Samaria at all because controversy has driven him from Judea (John 4:1-3). He’s avoiding conflict that seems poised to boil over, and so he journeys north from Jerusalem to Galilee and passes through Samaria on the way. Second, exhaustion has has led him to stop (4:6-8). He’s wearied from his journey (4:6). It’s noon in the middle east: he’s tired, hot, and thirsty.
Why is this woman at the well? The short answer—we will learn—is that she’s an outsider. John even communicates to us her outsider status by not naming her. For Jesus, she was an outsider because she was a Samaritan, whom first-century Jews considered to be traitors and apostates. On top of that, she was a woman, with whom no self-respecting rabbi would be caught alone. (Of course, we see throughout the gospels how Jesus overturns first-century expectations about how to treat women).
But this woman seems also to be an outsider from her own people—she doesn’t come to the well at the typical times (morning and evening). She comes in the heat of the day. Many scholars believe this is because she’s an outcast from her own people. She is so filled with shame that she would rather suffer in the heat of the day than go to the well with others from her community.
This reason for this shame becomes clearer as the passage goes on: she’s been married five times and is now living a man who is not her husband. We don’t learn the details of these marriages or how they ended but the number was well beyond the societal norm. So each of these husbands either divorced her or had died. Women at this time were not able to initiate a divorce. Either way, there’s a real sense of abandonment—she’s been left to fend for herself in world where she could not own property and had few options to actually provide for herself. The normal safety nets of extended family seem either to not have existed or to have failed her. And so, in her desperation, she finds herself now living with a man who either has not or will not marry her, which only further adds to her isolation and shame.
These are the circumstances that God uses to bring about this encounter—controversy and fatigue for Jesus and shame and isolation for this woman.
I suggest that this is how God often works to advance the gospel. He works in our weakness to awaken to our desperate need for the gospel. This happens at the start of the Christian life—we’re so overwhelmed by our weakness that we turn to him. But this is also how he grows us in the Christian life. The pressures and pains of life opens the door for him to work in our hearts—when we come face to face with our weakness we have to die to the illusion of self-sufficiency and we drop to our knees and call out to him.
God’s working through weakness is one of the reasons we believe so strongly in church planting— for CTK and by God’s grace that we would partner with others to plant more churches—because church planting puts us in a position of weakness and forces us week in and week out to depend upon the Lord. We don’t have the security, the property, the people, or the programs of an established church—and so it takes a whole lot more for us to be fooled into thinking that this depends on us. It’s all by God’s grace and his power working so mightily through our weakness.
The gospel advances in our own hearts and lives through our weakness. Furthermore, we see in this encounter that God advances the gospel through our weakness. God does not need our strength, influence, or wealth to advance his mission. He often works through our weakness, obscurity, and poverty to bring others to saving faith.
In many ways Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians is an extended meditation on how God works through weakness to advance the gospel. Toward the end of the letter, Paul recounts how the Lord left him in his weakness:
But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Cor 12:9).
We can trust our Lord Jesus when he leaves us in our weakness because he himself became weak for us that we could come to share in the power of his indestructible life. He is our Savior who conquered his enemies by suffering to the point of death, even death on a cross. Yet, God our Father has raised him up and seated him at his right hand far about all rule and authority and above every other name. In light of the resurrection, we can confess with Paul in our weakness,
We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (2 Cor 4:7).
God works through adversity to advance the gospel in us and through us. We join him in advancing the gospel not only by announcing the message of the cross but by proclaiming that message in the way of the cross.
