John 4

Meeting the Samaritan woman

Introduction

John now switches his account of the journey of Jesus from Jesus teaching Nicodemus, a ruler and scholar, to a cameo of Jesus interacting with a person of opposites in several ways. Nicodemus initiated contact with Jesus in the dark so as not to be seen with him and risk losing his social status as a member of the ruling council of Israel. In this cameo, chosen by John to be a stark contrast in his journey with Jesus, Jesus initiates contact in the exposed brightness of the intense midday sun with a woman of no social status with her own people and the Jews. She had fallen with shame off the bottom rung of the religious and social ladders of her people. Consequently, she chose to draw water each day alone in the midday heat, rather than be rejected and humiliated by the women of her township drawing water at the well in the cool of the day, as was their custom. Such isolation is the lot of many used women today, particularly those homeless with young mouths to feed.

This cameo is for every person who feels disenfranchised by a specific individual, group, or even by themselves hiding the heavy burden of shame they carry within from breaking a moral standard publicly or in secret. For such a person, this cameo brings great hope. It enables us to watch how Jesus restored this isolated Samaritan woman, and then to open our heart to him for the restoration of our own dignity, purpose and fulfillment.

Hidden shame is endemic in the fallen human race. It is our primary blockage to being open to Jesus to enable him to remove it and set us free to journey in life with him. In the previous cameo, Jesus identified to Nicodemus this common blocking pattern, when he said,

Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. (John 3:20)

These are intense words used by Jesus. They match the power of the blocking pattern operating within every human. We can use his precise statement to test our own stance with Jesus and test our buried reason for it. What is your stance? Is it hatred expressed by outright bigotry about him? Is it passive avoidance to avoid facing what is hidden from your past, or is it openness? Jesus does not present our reaction to him as an academic issue to debate, but a fear-driven response to admit and correct. Test if the name of Jesus raises your defence hackles and intellectual arguments, registers nothing or draws you to find out more about him. We are either attracted to his pure light or repelled by a fear and hatred of it that leads us to become bound up in our gaping net of false excuses and feel-good diversionary philosophies. This was the inner conflict being played out in the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman.

This cameo shows how Jesus had to extract the Samaritan woman from her emotional prison of isolating fear and coax her into the light in order to set her free to journey again with confidence and honour. The result was that she became the first evangelist to the Gentile world. Many of her towns folk listened to her testimony about Jesus, sought him out for themselves and came to know with certainty that Jesus is the Saviour of the world (verse 42). She became an example of how stepping into the light from our hiddenness results in the light of Jesus expanding its reach further in us and then through us to free other hiding prisoners of moral failures.

The meeting background

Its initiating cause

1 The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

It is this situation that resulted in Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman.

Jesus was hugely popular by this time. John the Baptist had large crowds flock to him in the desert to hear his preaching of repentance, and of baptism as the public declaration of one’s inner decision to reject sins. Now his popularity with the people was being eclipsed by the representatives of his cousin Jesus. The Pharisees noticed this swift growth in popularity of the message of repentance and did not like it, even though it was prophesied in the last verse of their scriptures to be the necessary precursor to the coming of their long awaited, promised Messiah.

5 "See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes.6He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction." (Malachi 4:5-6)

Religious leaders are well aware that popularity driven by the heart has power to create and control new beliefs in the next generation that can displace old beliefs, and new leaders that can displace existing. Popularity fuelled by positive emotional, inspirational and aspirational change wins every time over the controls imposed by unpopular religious hierarchies and politicians. We see it in the daily news reports of global, regional and local politics.

Hope for a better future is a powerful driver in the human psyche causing it to follow new pathways. The internet stirs up many followers of a variety of gurus promising a better future. The masses will grow quickly following a charismatic personality, who presents a new vision with hope of a better future. Putin knew that. Hence he jailed and then executed Alexi Navalny. Trump knows that with his MAGA movement. The Pharisees knew that. Hence, they were becoming increasingly threatened by the wind of spiritual change inspired by John the Baptist, and now by the followers of Jesus, who also were preaching the need for personal repentance.

Jesus knew that the only strategy available to the Pharisees to recapture religious control of the people was for them to remove both John the Baptist and himself from the crowds.

3 So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Jesus controlled his destiny and not the Pharisees. This was not the time for a showdown with them attempting to remove him from the crowds. He had only just begun his purpose for coming to earth. He had more spiritual reality to reveal to the people and his disciples before being captured and put to death. His disciples were not ready to grasp and declare his divine identity to the world. They were only just beginning to gain some understanding of it. So he withdrew from the enthusiastic crowds hungry for spiritual truth and the spectacle of his miraculous healings. John the Baptist, however, stayed where the religious leaders could find him engaging in his public ministry of declaring that Jesus was the Messiah and baptising for repentance. As a result, he was soon imprisoned by the religious power structure to remove him from the crowds. There he met his death.

The choice of Jesus to disappear was as deliberate as his later reverse choice to return to Jerusalem when the time was ripe to create a confrontation with the religious power structure (see John 5). His return ended in crucifixion. By then he was ready to step towards it and his disciples were ready to learn from it.

Its targeted cause

4 Now he had to go through Samaria.

Instead of by-passing Samaria – the avoidance strategy often used by the Jews of the day – Jesus chose the shorter route home to Galilee in the north. The necessity of him having to go through Samaria, however, was not primarily due to reducing his travel time and distance by-passing Samaria. Rather, it was due to the woman his Father wanted him to meet drawing water alone from Jacob’s well.

The Father’s love will take any route necessary to meet with us in our need and reveal himself as our Saviour and Helper. There are countless stories today of how his divine love has targeted individuals who have met Jesus in unusual, unplanned situations. The Father will direct his Son today to detour for any person with an open heart ready to receive him as the promised Messiah and personal Saviour. In this case, he detoured for a rejected woman. He will also for you when you open your heart.

5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph, 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

In other words, it was scorching hot. It is an interesting picture to imagine the Creator of the universe sitting down by a well in the heat of the day, because he was weary from a long trek. Yet the Creator of every mathematically governed quantum detail of the smallest structure to the largest in all creation never wearies. He still sustains it all.

Sitting for a rest at the well is a vivid example that the human body, with which God clothed himself in Jesus, succumbed to the same weariness that we do. The Creator did not clothe the sinless seed he implanted in Mary’s womb with a body possessing superhuman characteristics. He clothed his divine seed with our physical humanity fully, Walking in the mid-day sun brought on his thirst as it would anyone. This makes the previous survival of Jesus forty days in the desert without food an incredible feat of determination to achieve a goal. It required unyielding commitment to his mission to defeat every temptation of Satan and keep himself sinless for the even greater trial of his later crucifixion, which he had to endure to the end. For this higher purpose, he chose to endure his testing in the desert.

Now, in this situation as a traveller passing through, Jesus could have sat somewhere in the shade and waited for the disciples to return with food provisions from Shechem[1]. His decision to rest at Jacob’s well was, therefore, as much for the sake of the woman he was about to encounter, as it was to quench his thirst. She became his higher purpose to sit at the well and rest. She was his targeted cause for being there. So also are we, however and whenever Jesus comes to our attention. We are ‘the many’ that form his higher purpose, as he later made clear to his disciples,

"For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 10:45)

He came to ransom us, to pay the price of judgement on our sins by a righteous God. Because sin cannot be separated from the perpetrator, he came to stand in our place by becoming our sin. Our sin became him, in order to ransom us from God’s judgement of the sin in us that has become us, and gift us fully with his perfect righteousness to become us.

The arresting question

6 … When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, 7 Will you give me a drink? 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

Jesus began his dialogue with the outcast woman with a simple request to challenge her.

This might seem like a natural and necessary question from a thirsty traveller who stops at a well for a rest. For this woman, however, it was a shocking opening question: firstly, because of her race (Jews avoided Samaritans and despised them[2]) and secondly, because she consciously carried the stigma of being a woman of shame rejected by her own Samaritan community. Yet here was a Jewish male talking to her and asking for a drink. She did not know who he was. Accordingly, she responded,

9 "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Her response to the request from Jesus was to disqualify herself for what she considered to be a valid reason. As is usually the case, Satan puts superficial barriers between us and the giver of eternal life. He erects them in our soul, i.e., in our mind and emotions. As a result, we may see Jesus as superior and unapproachable and ourselves as low and outcast. We may see our very being as unacceptable by any measure of consistent goodness, whether that be in Jesus, or in any person we perceive to be consistently honourable and potentially shocked by our failures. This woman would have felt this intensely, because, without a doubt, she would have felt three counts were against her in this coincidental meeting with a Jewish stranger, i.e., (1) her race, (2) her gender and (3) her corrupted personal history marked by the repeated visible failures of her heart choices of a husband.

Jesus was fully aware of these factors intersecting this woman’s thoughts and emotions and how they caused her to consider herself having no dignity or value in her society, and certainly none to a male Jewish stranger. Jesus cut through these barriers of unacceptability she had erected with a jolting statement.

10 If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

He offered her a gift with life in it, when she felt that she had no life. He also does so for us.

If you knew the gift of God

The woman may have received this confronting comment by Jesus as a derogatory judgement of the extent of her knowledge about God, viz., it was deficient! "If you knew…you would have asked".

  1. If only we knew the gift of God… we would instantly discard our fears and prejudices against God and receive his gift with open arms, or more correctly, with and open heart. We would also stop repeating to ourselves all the barriers we consider disqualify us for any good fortune from God. We would no longer consider ourselves more unworthy in comparison to others who claim to have received his gift.

    How so? Because the gift of God to know about is his enduring love and his offer of it to everyone regardless of race, status in life or moral history. All of us qualify until we disqualify ourselves by rejecting him.

    His love is a gift of living water forever quenching our thirst for meaning. How can this be? It quenches forever, because his love is empowered by his life, which is forever, It has no boundaries in time. Furthermore, remember that it has no boundaries of choice. His love is for all races and all individuals. It has no favourites. It is full of grace, No one is lower than the person they perceive to be the highest. You are not. Certainly this Samaritan woman was not. Jesus stopped to give her time. He lived what he taught his disciples: "the last will be first, and the first will be last" (Matthew 2:16).

  2. If only we knew who it was that offered us this gift … we would not hesitate to ask for it urgently and enthusiastically. Who is this stranger called Jesus making this statement? How well have I examined his identity? To what extent does he remain a stranger to me? Here is the penetrating question calling for our honest response: "Why does he remain a stranger?" If we prioritised some time to investigate who he is, if we examined how he gave his love, which culminated in taking upon himself the judgement for our sins, we would stop holding up a barrier of distinction between our sinful failures and his sacrificial love for every one of us, with none excluded.

    Typically, we don’t know who is offering us the living water of eternal life, because we know little about God’s character of love pursuing us, and we know little about Jesus as God’s love in pursuit of us. Most people have spent little time reading God’s Word to learn of the character of God and the depth and relentlessness of his love searching throughout the human race from its beginning searching for those who will love him. The Bible traces the relentless search of God’s love from past centuries into the prophesied future for those open to receive it, culminating in the creation of a new heaven and earth, where sin will no longer exist to divide, and only love will reign. Who in their right mind would reject such love? Who would reject such a free gift? Who would choose a destiny absent of all love and filled with chaos instead? Are you for some unjustifiable emotion-based prejudice?

    Furthermore, if we had exposed ourselves to investigating God’s many expressions of relentless love found in the current journeys of a vast array of individuals, who were in self-made dire straits until the love of Jesus reached them, then we would no longer consider ourselves unworthy to receive his love. In short, because we have scanty knowledge of the character of the one who is offering living water as a free gift of his love, we hesitate to trust him and doubt his acceptance of us. The cause of our misguided opinion rests with us failing to investigate Jesus with an open mind. It does not rest with him. Tragically, we choose far lesser temporary substitutes to find meaning and fulfillment for our journey instead of choosing the only eternal love that can continually quench the thirst of our heart.

    Look closely at the weary Jesus, and remember that all his weariness and all his sufferings were for you as much as any previous or current follower of him. He earnestly wants to give each of us the eternal water of life and save us from our path of ultimate destruction at death. We can therefore urgently ask for his free offer of living water to quench our deepest thirst. All of us can. There are no barriers at all within him to give it. The barriers are within us, not him, He urgently wants to give us his living water of life and to free us from our burden of sin and the consequential separation from God and others it has caused. He wants to give us eternal life now, his life to our spirit now, spiritual life to our spirit now, so that we can live abundant life now, for which he made us and intended us to enjoy. This is what he wanted for the Samaritan woman.

    10 If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

Missed identity

The woman completely missed the spiritual reality of the gift of living water Jesus was offering her, possibly because of her shamed mind-set. Instead she remained focused on the physical reality confronting Jesus to be able to draw water from Jacob’s well.

11 "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep".

Her physical observations were correct. Jesus did not have a receptacle to fill with water, and the well was potentially up to 55 meters deep at the time[3]. That is deep! Who was this stranger making such a bold claim of recovering water from this depth with no means of doing so? The impossibility of his claim naturally led her to search for alternatives.

Where can you get this living water?

If she really wanted an answer, she would have waited for Jesus to respond, but instead she pivoted to turn the claim of Jesus into a competitive comparison of his identity with Jacob as the revered father of both Samaritans and Jews. She switched from the focus being on her spiritual state to have a religious debate.

12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?"

Jesus ignored her attempted diversion, as he does with every person who takes a quick step sideways to avoid confronting who they are before the eyes of the Holy One. Our intellectual debates serve the purpose of side-stepping. We are each very conscious of our diversions and attempts to keep our distance from Jesus. We retreat from our heart and its fears of exposure into our head, He is fully aware of our closed heart’s direct rejection of his offers to come to him for eternal life. Nevertheless, as with this woman, Jesus stays on message with us until we surrender our will to his, or we die devoid of eternal life and love.

Missed message

Staying on message, Jesus answered,

13 "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

What a message! What an offer! Who would not want a perpetual quenching of their inner thirst for meaning and relevance in their life, particularly if it continues into eternal life? Who would not want this quenching arising perpetually from within themselves, to be there when they awake and when they switch out the bedside light at night?

Who would not want this? The answer is simple: those not ready for it. So who are they?

These are individuals who want to stay living in their self-controlled physical world of reality, which they mistakenly believe they can control. In that physical world, however, where we seek answers to satisfy our hunger for meaning and purpose that are assembled solely by inputs from our physical senses, we continually thirst. None of our attempts to satisfy our thirst drinking from "physical" wells ever lasts. When the capacity of the well we have chosen to satisfy our inner needs dries up, our only option is to find another, which also finally loses its capacity to satisfy the thirst of our soul. Then we go looking for the next well to stimulate or ease our life, e.g., a new job, a new relationship, a new investment, new pub, new club, new sports team, new drug, new good cause, new religion etc. We never arrive at eternal life welling up from within us providing a constant stream of inner satisfaction. Rather, our thinking, feeling and understanding remain encased within physical descriptions of cause and effect in our life and those we may seek to help, e.g., psychological explanations of causes in our childhood affecting mental and emotional health in our adulthood etc. As a result, we function in family and social life with bland physically-based explanations but not with the living water of a drinking spirit that can bring us alive perpetually. We miss out on never thirsting again, because we will not go to Jesus, who is the sole source of water that wells up into eternal life. He is that eternal life offering to forge a union within us, bound to our spirit by his perfect love.

The Samaritan woman missed the message, because her focus remained on her physical self, viz., on her physical thirst and on the repetitive physical effort she had to exert to acquire physical water.

15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water".

She missed entirely that Jesus was talking about a spiritual phenomenon not a physical need requiring physical effort to access. She seemed deaf to the reality of eternal life welling up from within one’s being perpetually quenching inner spiritual thirst for meaning and growth.

The question for each of us is: "Am I stuck in my comfort zone of being in sole control of my physical world, while missing the free offer from Jesus of everlasting life he wants to release from within my spirit now and throughout eternity?" This must be the biggest miss in life that anyone can make. Are you making it? For this reason, Jesus picks his timing to jolt us into becoming aware of our need to find living water that lasts perpetually and quenches the depths of our inner being. It is then that he reveals himself as the living water for our thirsty soul and our source of inner rest.

28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-30)

Timed message

Now was the time to jolt the Samaritan woman into new awareness of who was talking to her. Now was the time to shift her from surface physical thinking to buried inner need. Therefore, Jesus suddenly threw out a challenge that went to the state of her soul and opened up the possibility for honest dialogue about her core identity. A large component of our identity formation is the health of our closest relationships. Accordingly, Jesus threw out the challenge,

16 "Go, call your husband and come back."

17 "I have no husband, " she replied.

It would be interesting to know what was in her mind as she gave this instant response. Was it, "I have to dodge this one. I don’t want him finding out the failures in my private life. I am not married to my current partner according to the standard definition of my society. On that score, I can answer truthfully that I have no husband". This was a half-truth, however. The other half exposed her moral failure, which she kept hidden. She was in a relationship with a male, presumably an intimate one, if her marital history was any indication of that likelihood. Her answer was an attempted deception. How easy this is to do about any matter where we try to hide our wrong from others and ourselves!

Note the response of Jesus. It was time to give this woman a wakeup call, viz., an instant exposure of her private life to a stranger that left her nowhere to hide.

The wakeup call

17 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."

Jesus did not mince words. He jolted her suddenly with the facts, He shattered her mirage. It was the time in their interaction to expose the truth of her situation. "How does he know these facts about my personal life?" Imagine being drawn by a total stranger into a discussion where they first of all insult your lack of knowledge about an unfamiliar topic,

If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink…

Then you respond defensively to their apparent boast by attacking their status,

Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?"

Then they apparently offer a way to lighten your physical and social stress,

13 Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

That sounds appealing to you, so you respond accordingly focused on its physical benefits unaware of its spiritual nature,

15 "Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water"

Then, before you know it, they suddenly tell you more about yourself than you want known,

17 "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."

Totally exposed. No escape. "The fact is." That is how it is with Jesus. The time comes for everyone when he decides to shine his light on our hidden life. Jesus turns our preoccupation with physical existence to focus us on spiritual necessities. We are unexpectedly hit with conviction and guilt about specific acts and attitudes, which he exposes. We are faced with a point of decision that will affect our eternal destiny. We either choose to run and hide under fake excuses we give to ourselves and others, or stay in the presence of his pure light shining on our inner being. The woman stayed. She attempted to flatter Jesus by affirming his spiritual anointing.

19 "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet".

Only prophets, priests and kings of Israel received the gift of anointing by of the Holy Spirit upon them. She claimed to see this anointing operating in his knowledge of her as a stranger. Then in a flash she turned her spiritual affirmation into a religious debate to avoid more exposure of her spiritual state. She raised the matter of worship, which is the core expression of devotion to any god. She, however, put the focus on its physical location and not on the heart from which devotion comes. She was not ready for her heart to be seen.

20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain[4], but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem."

The Samaritan woman knew full well that this would take the focus of the Jewish stranger off herself. She raised the very reason why Jews and Samaritans hated each other, viz., where is the authentic centre for carrying out the instructions in the five books of Moses. Religious debates invoke passion and continue up to this day breaking friendships, dividing groups, sometimes leading to physical attack and national wars. There was no better way for her to take the focus of Jesus off her personal life.

The true worshippers

Now let’s look how Jesus handled the woman’s attempted diversion from her marital performance to a debate on where to worship.

Jesus immediately made it clear to the woman that true worship has nothing to do with place. Similarly, it has nothing to do with how much we know, or how determined we are to build our own righteousness by doing good works as we define good works, nor keeping religious rituals and commands e.g., regularly attending Mass, not eating during Ramadan.

Who then are true worshippers according to Jesus? Do they worship in a mosque, or synagogue, or temple, or cathedral, or a church hall, or office, or pub, or living room? Are they defined by religion, ‘correct’ theologies or practices of them? Here is how Jesus defined them. There is no worship outside of his definition, Here is his measure of whether or not you are a true worshipper:

23 the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

There is no alternative to that source of worship as Jesus defined it here. Worship comes from our spirit when we commit to live the truth about God and ourselves as revealed by God himself in his words and actions. I cannot lay claim to being a true worshipper on my life journey, if my spirit is dead and unyielded to him, while I seek to utter words of praise solely from my mind or emotions. I cannot lay claim to being a true worshipper, if choose beliefs that are comfortable for me but blur the truth revealed by God in his Word. I am not a true worshipper if I won’t worship God from my spirit surrendered to him in trust and completely open to listen and obey the truth he wants to teach me at each moment of my journey. That means conversing with God about the truth revealed in his Word regarding who He is and who His Saviour is, and conversing in truth from his Word about who I am relative to his plan for me.

Firstly then, to enter into the worship God desires means putting aside all falsehood and coming clean. God is out searching for people who will do that. He wants an honest relationship. He enjoys an honest relationship. How can there be a relationship of enjoyment unless it is built on being honest with each other, and relaxing in the intimacy of that honesty? The irony is that God already knows everything about us anyhow. To attempt to hide is to suffer from the same delusion as our ancestors Adam and Eve. How can one hide from the all-knowing God? He knows of all the sin I have committed, even the sin I do not see, my sin before I commit it, while I am committing it, and when I see it unmasked fully. He certainly knew all about the journey of the woman at the well.

Jesus told her what she was trying to forget and avoid, just as he will show you and me if we are open for it. But this is not condemnation. He speaks directly to our sin by his resurrected Spirit abiding in us, in order to free us from the weight of the past.He makes clean the person who will come clean, because he has already taken the judgement of their sin in full on the Cross. He became our sin so that it could be judged completely and enable him to gift his perfect and complete righteousness to us by living in us.

It is a waste of time to try to worship while keeping my innermost Self hiding behind religious duties, or trying to bury my true Self in the hyper-activity of doing good works, as I choose to define them, attempting to create my own righteousness, or seeking to hide my inner Self in self-deception. As soon as we commit to the truth about our inner selves, God activates the spiritual capacity to see Jesus as the Truth of all life and the Saviour who gives us his perfect righteousness when we trust ourselves to him.

Secondly, to enter into true worship of the Father and the Son requires being prepared to accept the full truth about his Son Jesus. God is continually searching for such people.

God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth, (John 4:24)

God is searching for those who will worship Him by putting full trust in the truth about his salvation provided in Jesus. We can each embrace the prayer,

Lord, give me your Spirit, the desire, the honesty and the courage to worship you in spirit and in the truth about Jesus and myself as you continue to show this to me.

We need to be aware of the need to allow our spirit to be touched and come alive. Our challenge is not to let the dialogue of truth stay only on the level of doctrinal discussion. Jesus was not interested in debating theology with the woman just as he would consider debating philosophy with an atheist a waste of time. For the atheist need is the same as for an agnostic. It is to open up and allow God to confront us on the truth about hidden things in our soul. Only then will we gain any sight of the spiritual reality of God and ourselves. It is to admit our sins to him and allow him to show us the truth about his righteousness that he offers to place within us. It is to invite him to dwell within us with his righteousness. It is to ask him to show us the spiritual gifts he has given us and the ways he wants to use them to bring life to others. Then we become a true worshipper.

23 the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

The true Jesus

Now that Jesus had shifted the woman’s attempted religious debate about the correct location for worship to the nature of true worship, she left the debate in order to refer to the coming Messiah as the ultimate authority on spiritual truth. She sought to leave the debate by pushing its solution somewhere into the future coming of the Messiah.

25 The woman said, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us."

She was, nevertheless, at last ready for Jesus to reveal his true identity, because he had exposed details about her life that a stranger could never have known. He was more than a tired and thirsty Jewish traveller. She knew that now by personal experience. Accordingly,

26 Then Jesus declared, "I, the one speaking to you — I am he."

The moment had come. She had been sought out by Jesus as the anointed One, the stranger was the prophesied Messiah of the Jews. He was here now, not in the future. He had stopped by to introduce himself to her and elevate her sense of worth from the lowest of her society to the height of God’s full acceptance. Now she had gained enough restored dignity needed to cast her soiled reputation aside and go public in her community to announce Jesus as a Jewish stranger who was potentially the long awaited prophesied Messiah who had told her everything she ever did.

28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?" 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

Thousands of martyrs have since followed this woman with their sense of value elevated to the extent of being prepared to die for the sake of declaring the identity of Jesus and his restorative, enduring love. Through them, many have come out of their familiar setting and begun their journey towards him.

While this spiritual phenomenon was happening, the disciples remained stuck in their physical world. With well-meaning intent and care they urged him,

31 "Rabbi, eat something."

32 But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."

33 Then his disciples said to each other, "Could someone have brought him food?"

Jesus then used their focus on physical food to teach them a much more enduring focus for their life. He had just finished teaching the Samaritan woman about living water that lasts forever quenching her thirst for meaning. Now he taught his relatively new disciples about a food that lasts forever. His statement was true. They knew absolutely nothing about this food Jesus ate. What was this food?

34 "My food," said Jesus, "is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

35 Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labour."

The few disciples were about to witness the food that satisfied Jesus when the Samaritans from the woman’s village arrived, and when after two days of interaction with him reached the conviction that Jesus is the Saviour of the world. The hated enemies of his Jewish disciples reached this conclusion faster than them.

39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.

42 They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world."

They took time to investigate the identity of Jesus firsthand. He took time to teach them. He always does for honest investigators of his identity. As a result, they came to know firsthand that his identity is the Saviour of the world. Then they took the step of putting their whole trust in him. They became believers of him. The same process is essential for every person. We never arrive at a place of full trust in Jesus for our journey of life without taking the time to investigate him. The process of being able to trust what Jesus says is quick for some. For others it is a slow path to full trust in him. Our history of hurt and self-aggrandizement takes time to face, which influences the length of our journey to trust.

The disciples saw the power of living water in Jesus turning Samaritans into believers of him. Simultaneously they saw the food reward gained by Jesus from harvesting the Samaritans. Our challenge from these events is to take the steps necessary to know for ourselves that Jesus is our Saviour offering living water that quenches our thirst for meaning forever. Later we come to understand that Jesus also offers us food to nourish and sustains us forever when we join him in reaping the harvest all around us. Then we see with spiritual eyes that the field of humanity in our neighbourhood or workplace is ripe for harvest.

37 Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." (Matthew 9:37-38)

We become an answer to this prayer we are asked to pray. We now drink and eat.

  1. For the location of Jacob’s well at the time of Christ, see the article on Sychar in the Encyclopedia of the Bible based on the research of W.F.Albright and G.E. Wright, Schechem: the Biography of a Biblical City (1965). The well is historically one of the best attested sites in Palestine. It was sitting on an impermeable layer of basalt that provided quality water flows being located at the Eastern side of the valley between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim. It was about half a mile from the village of Balatah. ↩︎

  2. The Samaritans were Jews descended from the ten tribes of Israel that separated to the north from the remaining two in the south, who continued to worship in the temple originally built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in response to the desire of his father David. The northern tribes became the Northern Kingdom, later called Israel, with Samaria as its capital city. The southern two tribes of Judah and Benjamin later became known as Judah with Jerusalem as its capital. The Jews in the Northern Kingdom without the Temple had to set up a new worship centre, which they located on Mount Gerizim. The Southern Kingdom continue to worship in the Temple rebuilt by Herod the Great.

    In 721 BC, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was invaded by the Assyrians. Many Israelites were taken as captives to Assyria. Simultaneously, Assyria transplanted many foreigners in Israel. As a result, a syncretistic religion emerged based on the Pentateuch to accommodate non-Jews and Jews. This mixture of Jews and foreigners later became known as Samaritans, named after their capital Samaria.

    In 586 BC the Southern Kingdom, comprising the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, was conquered by the Babylonians. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed, and many leading Jews were exiled in Babylon. When these Jews later returned to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, the Samaritans, whose worship centre was on Mount Gerizim, caused problems attempting to stop the rebuild. This began the long-lasting hatred between Jews and Samaritans, which continued at the time of Jesus. This woman would have assumed it was in Jesus.[2:1]: ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. As per the research of G.E. Wright referenced in the previous footnote. ↩︎

  4. Mount Gerizim ↩︎