There are some stories in the Bible that have not only been read but used—used against people.

Used to warn the vulnerable that if they are not careful, the church will make an example of them.

This story of the Samaritan woman at the well is one of those stories.

For generations, Christians have been taught to see this woman as immoral, sexually reckless, spiritually suspect, and socially disgraced.

We have been told that she came to the well at noon because she was a scandal.

We have been told that her five husbands prove she was a sinner.

We have been told that Jesus exposed her shame and then, in his mercy, tolerated her anyway.

We have been told this because patriarchy tells us that the primary sin of women is to be sexual tempters of men.

But that is not what the Gospel says.

That is what misogyny says.

The text never calls her sinful.

Jesus never calls her immoral.

Jesus never tells her to repent of sexual sin.

He never speaks to her with disgust, suspicion, or condescension.

Quite the opposite: he speaks to her as a serious person.

He speaks to her as someone capable of theology, someone worthy of revelation.

In fact, in John’s Gospel, this unnamed Samaritan woman receives one of the clearest self-revelations of Jesus anywhere: “I am.”

So today I want to say plainly what the church has too often refused to say: she is not the sinner we were told she was.

And that matters, because oppressive systems survive by inventing degrading stories about vulnerable people.

Oppressive systems survive by controlling the narrative about groups if wishes to control by making them vulnerable.

If you can make people believe that a woman is promiscuous, you do not have to listen to her.

If you can make people believe that immigrants are criminals, you do not have to see their humanity, you don’t have to give them a home in your land, you do not have to expand your view of the world to include people who are different from you.

If you can make people believe that queer and trans people are dangerous, you do not have to honor their belovedness.

If you can make people believe that black and brown communities are threats, you do not have to repent of racism and work to change the systems that perpetuate racism.

If you can make people believe that women are liars, you never have to face male violence or give women a place at the table at which decisions are made.

Slander is one of the oldest tools of domination, and the church has too often blessed it.

But Jesus refuses it.

He meets this woman at Jacob’s well, tired and thirsty, in the heat of the day.

And the setting matters.

Wells in scripture are places of encounter, places where life changes, places where strangers meet and new futures begin.

This is not a trap.

It is a holy meeting place.

And immediately Jesus crosses boundaries his world held dear.

He speaks to a Samaritan.

He speaks to a woman.

He asks her for a drink, making himself vulnerable to her.

He does not begin from superiority; he begins from need.

A thirsty Messiah asks something of her.

And she, for her part, is no passive figure.

She notices the social reality at once: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

She understands the danger and the strangeness of this moment.

She knows the history.

She knows the hostility.

She knows the wall between their peoples.

She is perceptive, alert, and honest.

Then Jesus speaks of living water, and like so many people in John’s Gospel, she first hears him literally.

But misunderstanding Jesus is not a sign of stupidity in this Gospel.

Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus.

The disciples misunderstand Jesus.

Everybody misunderstands Jesus.

The issue is not whether she gets it immediately.

The issue is whether she stays in the conversation.

And she does.

She asks questions.

She pushes back.

She wonders whether Jesus is greater than Jacob.

She engages him on the deepest dispute between Jews and Samaritans: where is the true place of worship—Mount Gerizim or Jerusalem?

She is not evading theology.

She is doing theology.

She is not changing the subject because she is embarrassed.

She is asking the question that matters most in her world.

And Jesus answers her seriously.

That alone should stop us in our tracks.

Jesus does not dismiss her.

He does not laugh at her.

He does not say, “That’s not for you to worry about.”

He does not tell her to go find a man who can speak for her.

He stays with her in the longest conversations he has with anyone in the Gospels.

He treats her as someone capable of receiving truth.

Then comes the line that has been used against her for centuries: “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

And generations of preachers have rushed to do what Jesus does not do: condemn her.

But in the ancient world, women did not generally control the terms of marriage and divorce in the way later interpreters have imagined.

A poor Samaritan woman in the first century was not likely collecting husbands like trophies.

She may have been widowed multiple times.

She may have been discarded.

She may have been passed from one arrangement to another for the sake of survival. She may have lived through grief, abandonment, or dependency that none of us can fully reconstruct.

The point is this: the text does not say it was her fault.

The text does not say she was sinful.

The text does not say she was ashamed.

Those details were supplied by readers eager to turn a complicated woman into a cautionary tale.

Jesus does something far more beautiful than exposing her: he sees her.

He names her reality without slander.

He tells the truth without degradation.

He knows her fully, and what she experiences in that knowing is not humiliation but recognition.

“He told me everything I have ever done,” she says—not as one crushed, but as one astonished.

She has been seen without being despised.

Isn’t that what so many people hunger for?

To be known but not reduced.

To be named but not caricatured.

To be seen but not shamed.

That is holy ground.

And from that place, this woman becomes one of the first evangelists in John’s Gospel.

She leaves her water jar behind and goes back to the city.

“Come and see,” she says—the very words used elsewhere by disciples.

And the people come.

Not because they think she is a joke.

Not because she is infamous.

They come because they trust her testimony.

The Gospel says that many Samaritans believed because of the woman’s word.

Her word.

The church has spent centuries distrusting the woman whom the Gospel itself presents as trustworthy.

That should humble us.

Because this is not just about correcting a Bible story.

It is about whether we will participate in the slanders that keep cruel systems alive.

We are living in a time when whole communities are being described and defined by people who do not love them, people who want to control them for their own needs for power and control.

Immigrants are described as invaders and criminals.

Trans and queer people are slandered as predators simply for existing.

Women who speak about abuse are called unstable, vindictive, or dishonest.

Black and brown people are cast as dangerous when they ask to live with dignity. Entire peoples are marked as suspicious, disposable, or less than human.

And once those stories take hold, violence becomes easier.

Exclusion becomes respectable.

Cruelty starts sounding like common sense.

That is how empire works.

That is how nationalism works.

That is how white supremacy works.

That is how patriarchy works.

And yes, that is how Christian nationalism works, and Christian nationalism is not from Christ, it is not actually Christian.

It is a tool of empire.

It is a tool of white supremacy.

It is a tool of that which is not of God.

It survives by telling lies about the people it wants to control.

So, what does Jesus do at the well?

He refuses the lie.

He refuses inherited contempt.

He refuses ethnic hatred.

He refuses gendered dismissal.

He refuses purity politics.

He refuses the weaponization of a woman’s personal life.

He refuses to let the dominant story define the person in front of him.

And then he entrusts good news to the very one others would have discredited.

This is the way of Christ.

This is the way of God.

It is not enough for the church merely to say, “Well, Jesus loved her anyway.”

That still leaves the slander standing.

No—the call of the Gospel is deeper than that.

We are called to reject the lie itself.

To refuse the degrading story.

To stop helping power do its dirty work.

Lent is a season for truth-telling.

And one of the truths we must tell is that the church has sometimes read scripture in ways that wound the already wounded.

We have made survivors into sinners.

We have mistaken misogyny for exegesis.

We have called suspicion discernment and prejudice holiness.

We must repent.

And then we must learn from this woman.

She is not the sinner we were told she was.

And neither are so many of the people empire tells us to fear, mock, or erase.

So let the church be done with slander.

Let the church refuse the easy lie.

Let the church tell the truth about those whom power degrades.

Let the church become a place where people are fully seen and not shamed.

And let us go with the Samaritan woman into the city, saying to a frightened and divided world: Come and see. Amen.