She Went Back into the Town and Used the Worst Thing About Her as the Headline

A man knows the exact length of the pause.

It is about half a second and it happens before somebody says his name to somebody who has not met him. He has heard it hundreds of times now and he can feel it coming before it arrives, the tiny recalibration while the person decides how much to say and in what tone.

Nobody is being cruel. That is the part he finds hardest to explain. The people doing it are kind, and they are managing an awkwardness on his behalf, and he would probably do the same thing in their position.

It has been four years. He has stopped expecting it to fade, because the way it works now is that the information goes ahead of him into rooms he has not entered yet, and arrives before he does, and there is nothing in the world he can do about that.

He has been forgiven. He knows that, and he is not confused about it. What he cannot work out is how to live in a town where everybody already knows.

She went at noon, and He was sitting there

The woman at the well in John 4 goes to draw water in the middle of the day, which is the wrong time to go and which everybody reading it in the first century understood immediately. You draw water in the cool of the morning, with the other women. You go at noon if you would rather carry a heavy jar in the heat than stand in a group.

Jesus is sitting there, and He asks her for a drink, and then, a few exchanges in, He says the thing:

Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly. (John 4:17-18, King James Version)

He names it. He does not skirt it and He does not pretend not to know, and He does it without one word of contempt.

And He does not stop the conversation to deal with it. He goes on, and what He goes on to is the longest theological conversation He has with anybody in the whole of John, and it ends with Him telling her plainly who He is, which He does not do for very many people.

Then this:

The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ? (John 4:28-29)

Read what she did with it.

She went back into the town that knew, and she used the very thing they knew about her as the reason to come. He told me all things that ever I did. She did not have to get her reputation back first. She did not wait for the town to forget, which the town was never going to do.

You are not named by what a town remembers about you. John 4:29 has her using the thing itself as the invitation. It is the same Spirit, John 16:13 the Spirit of truth, who lets a person walk back in without first needing the town to change.

And if what people remember has begun to press on you at the level where you stop wanting the week, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Public shame takes people quietly, and there is no version of this where you should be alone with it.

The record kept the denial

Here is something that ought to be strange and never gets remarked on.

Peter's denial is in all four Gospels. Every single one. It was not quietly dropped from the later accounts once he became the leading figure in the early church. It was preserved, in detail, including the crowing of the rooster and the fact that he swore.

That is permanent. It is more permanent than anything anybody knows about you. It is in the most copied and most read book in human history, and it will be there in five hundred years.

And the same man stands up in Acts 2 and preaches the sermon that begins the church.

The record did not have to choose. It kept the failure and it gave him the pulpit, and it never once suggests those two facts are in tension.

You are not defined by a failure that made it onto the record. Acts 2:14 follows the denial in the same volume. It is the Spirit of God, poured out in that same chapter, who is named as the one who filled the man everybody had watched fall apart.

Paul wrote the list, and then the tense

There is a passage in 1 Corinthians that is usually read as a list and is actually about a verb.

Paul writes out a list of things, plainly, the sort of list that would identify people. And then:

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

Such were some of you.

Now think about the setting. This is a letter, and letters were read out loud to the whole gathered church. Which means Paul wrote a sentence naming what people in that room used to be, and it was read aloud, in front of them, by somebody standing up.

And the sentence does not end on the list. It ends on three verbs in the present tense, and every one of them is something done to them rather than by them.

You are washed, and that is present tense while other people's memory is past tense. 1 Corinthians 6:11 puts both in the same sentence and puts the washing last, and it is His Spirit, named in that verse in the words by the Spirit of our God, as part of how it happened.

What Jesus did with shame

There is one line in Hebrews that tells you what to do with it, and it is bracing.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)

Despising the shame.

That does not mean He did not feel it. It means He weighed it against something else and treated it as not worth what it was demanding. He did not negotiate with it and He did not wait for the crowd to change its mind.

Public execution was designed to be a public shaming. It was the whole point of the method. And the writer says He looked at that, held it up against the joy on the other side, and disregarded it.

You are permitted to disregard what shame is telling you about your future. Hebrews 12:2 shows Him despising the shame, which is a valuation rather than a denial. It is the Holy Spirit, Hebrews 9:14 saying He through the eternal Spirit offered himself, who carried Him through a shaming designed to be permanent.

The promise about what shame gets exchanged for

And then Isaiah, who is not vague:

For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion. (Isaiah 61:7)

And the Psalms:

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed. (Psalm 34:5)

They looked unto him. Not away. Not down. The direction of the looking is what changes the face.

You are not going to be left in this. Isaiah 61:7 and Psalm 34:5 both name an exchange rather than a deletion. It is the same Spirit, 2 Corinthians 3:18 changing us from glory to glory, rather than a change in what people know, who lifts a face that has been down a long time.