Living Water

Midday. The sun is high and hot. A woman walks out to a well with an empty jar on her shoulder. And sitting on the edge of the well is a stranger, a Jewish man, who looks up and asks her for a drink.

Jesus is travelling north from Judea to Galilee, and the road runs through Samaria. Near a town called Sychar is a famous well, the one dug long ago, tradition says, by Jacob himself. It's about noon. Jesus is tired from the journey, so he sits down by the well while his disciples go into town to buy food. Then a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. “Will you give me a drink?” Jesus asks. She stares at him. “You're a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” Jews and Samaritans didn't share cups. Most of the time, they didn't share anything.

“If you knew the gift of God,” Jesus says, “and who it is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She points at the well. “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where would you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well?” Jesus answers, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst. It will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” “Sir,” she says, “give me this water, so I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here.”

“Go and call your husband,” says Jesus. “I have no husband,” she replies. “You're right,” Jesus says. “You have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband.” John doesn't tell us her story. She may have been widowed, or divorced, or both; in her world, it was usually men who could end a marriage. Preachers have imagined many things about her. What we do know is that Jesus knew everything, and he was still talking with her. “Sir,” she says, “I can see you're a prophet.”

So she asks the big question that divides their two peoples. “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say the place to worship is Jerusalem.” Jesus tells her a time is coming, and is already here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. “God is spirit,” he says. She answers, “I know the Messiah is coming. When he comes, he'll explain everything to us.” And Jesus says, “I am he. The one speaking to you.”

Just then the disciples come back, surprised to find him talking with a woman, though nobody dares to ask why. The woman leaves her water jar behind and hurries into town. “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he be the Messiah?” And the people come streaming out across the fields. Jesus stays with them for two days. Many believe because of what she told them, and many more once they hear him for themselves. “Now we know,” they tell her, “this really is the Saviour of the world.”

When the woman says “this mountain,” she means Mount Gerizim, which rises above the well. Samaritans had once had their own temple on its summit. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, a Jewish ruler named John Hyrcanus destroyed it more than a century before Jesus was born. So when she raises the question of where to worship, she's touching an old and painful wound between Jews and Samaritans, standing almost in the shadow of the mountain where it happened.

Living Water. You'll find it in John chapter 4, verses 1 to 42. She came for water and went home with news, and she was the one who brought her whole town to Jesus. So here's a question to carry with you. What are you thirsty for that only God can fill?