This is a long story and it has so much in it, and I hope I can help you grasp some of the implications in the story. It’s an important story and one of my favourites! So, we have Jesus stopping in the Samaritan city of Sychar. This is a most unexpected stop for a Jewish rabbi of Jesus’ time. But it seems Jesus felt that he had to travel through Samaria. This would have left readers of the time truly flabbergasted that Jesus would deliberately choose the route through Samaritan land! Samaritans and Jews were long held rivals, since the 5th century BCE. Although Samaritans also traced their lineage back to Abraham, and like the Jews held to the teachings in the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Old Testament, the major disagreement between them was the place each considered as “the primary religious center”[1]. Jews held to the temple in Jerusalem. Samaritan’s primary place of worship was Mount Gerizim. Remember for Jews and Samaritans, their primary temple was considered the House of God, where God chose to live, in essence, God’s home. Each felt God lived, as it were, in their temple, and not the other’s. You can see how that could cause a major rift!
So, Jesus and the disciples have been traveling by foot, it’s been a three day journey and he’s tired. The disciples go in search for food, and Jesus sits down by a well—not just any well, this is Jacob’s well. It’s noon and a woman comes to the well to draw water. In this society, and indeed still today, it’s women’s work to draw the household water. Usually women drew the water in the cool of the early morning and evening, and in the security of a group of women together, so a woman alone and at noon was unexpected and unusual. Jesus speaks to her, asking her for some water. The woman is shocked at Jesus’ request, and rather than run away, she responds: “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?” It’s like she’s asking him, “Do you really understand just what you’re doing by asking this of me?” In this culture, men didn’t strike up conversation with women who were strangers to them. Plus Jewish and Samaritan men would have nothing to do with each other, so for Jesus to approach a Samaritan woman and start conversing--that would have been an unthinkable crossing of social & cultural boundaries—never mind even drinking from her water jug or bucket. This was extraordinary. John even writes “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.” (v. 9b) Was it as simple as he was thirsty and she had a bucket? I don’t think so; I mean, this was Jesus! Jesus was deliberately reaching out to her; he was trying to establish a relationship with her, despite all the social values against it. No wonder she questions Jesus. But he replies “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.” This woman is no shrinking violet, she doesn’t take her water jug and go home, she challenges this man who is sitting there beside a deep well, without a bucket to draw water, and talking about giving her living water to boot! We know what Jesus means by “living water”, and it’s a deliberate play on words. Now, living water in those days was what we would think of as flowing water, like in a stream or a river. Living water was seen as fresher, better water. The woman’s first reaction of course is to take Jesus literally. She asks Jesus where’s that living water going to come from? And then she even challenges Jesus on a theological point! “And besides, do you think you’re greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well? How can you offer better water than he and his sons and his animals enjoyed?”
I suspect this is the opportunity Jesus was hoping for, so he offers her another insight into who he is and what he can do. He tells her: “...those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.” .The woman is beginning to see that this man is no ordinary Jewish traveller who accidently crossed into Samaria and stopped by her well at noon. There’s something special going on here.... 15 “Please, sir,” the woman said, “give me this water! Then I’ll never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to come here to get water.” Then, strangely it seems, Jesus abruptly changes track in the conversation, and asks her to get her husband. She says she doesn’t have a husband. And Jesus tells her he knows that, in fact, he says, she has had five husbands, and she’s not married to the man she’s living with. To our ears this sounds, well, maybe a bit immoral? Before we jump on our moral high horses, we need to put this into the perspective of the culture and time. This is a woman with a sad past. “To have been married five times in ancient Palestine would be evidence of circumstances completely beyond the control of any woman at that time. Likely widowed or divorced, the fact alone of having had five husbands would have indicated some sort of curse against her or her family.”[2] Remember in those days men could divorce a woman for the most trivial of matters, but more than likely she was unable to have children, which was considered a curse in those days. The man she was living with was “probably a levirate marriage. By law (Deut 25: 5-10) the brother of the dead husband was obliged to take in his dead brother’s wife, either by formal marriage or by living arrangement of some kind.”[3] Recall, this woman was at the well, at noon, alone. That in itself was very telling. And had five husbands and living in another kind of relationship—this woman was unwanted. This is a woman literally on the margins of her society, a bit of a social outcast. Jesus gets it, and he gets her and he wants her to know that he understands, and he’s not letting societal proprieties stop him from reaching out to her. She realizes that Jesus is a prophet, one who fully sees the past and understands the implications of how that past impinges on the present and the future. And that’s why Jesus asks her about her husband, to increase her awareness of him and his abilities. “For the woman to be able to recognize who Jesus is means that Jesus has to reveal not only who he is but also who she is. Her need for him must be named so as to make sense of the mutual dependence between believers and Jesus.”[4] Remember; John is re-telling this story for the believers in his faith community, some seven decades after Jesus’ death. This is a major story in John’s gospel, it’s the longest recorded conversation between Jesus and anyone—and it’s a nameless Samaritan woman! For John, faith is all about relationship, the relationship between Jesus and the believer, and what can happen when people believe in Jesus Son of God, the Christ, the Saviour.
The conversation continues. The woman reminds him of the worship differences between Samaritans and Jews. Jesus tells her that the time is coming when it won’t matter where people worship, but those who wish to worship will do so in spirit and truth, because God is spirit. She responds that she knows the Messiah is coming and that he will proclaim all things when he comes. And Jesus says to her “I am he”, the first of Jesus’ I AM statements. And because of her connection to Jesus, a relationship that quickly developed into a very close one, she knows within herself, she believes that Jesus is the Messiah! She is so full of the enormity of this news and what it means, that she cannot contain it within herself. She has to share it—she goes back to the city to tell others, leaving behind her water jug. Now, the fact that this is mentioned is important, because as we know, in John’s gospel every detail means something. What else has she left behind? “The verb (to leave) can also be translated ‘let go’. She is able to leave behind her feelings of being ostracized, her loneliness, because Jesus has brought her into his fold, into his love. She can let go of her disgrace, and the disrespect she has endured to enter into a new reality, a new life that is abundant life.”[5] She has had a taste of the living water, even though she left her jug behind! In the village she tells people “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he possibly be the Messiah?” Did you catch her words of invitation? ‘Come and see’. Where have we heard those words before? Just a couple of weeks back we heard them, these were the words Jesus used to invite those first disciples to follow him, when they asked where he was staying. And we have to compare and contrast this story to last week’s story of Nicodemus. You could say the difference was, well night and day--literally! Nicodemus, a man, a Jew, indeed a Pharisee, so a member of the religious establishment, and he comes to Jesus at night. The Samaritan woman is, nameless, a woman, and a societal outcast. Jesus’ encounter with her is in broad daylight, high noon. Nicodemus is seemingly unable to grasp what Jesus is trying to tell him. The Samaritan woman knows in her heart that Jesus is the Messiah and runs to share the news and tell others, and brings them to Jesus. Both had opportunity for personal relationship with Jesus, and he challenged them both. But the educated Pharisee who had everything the world could offer couldn’t wrap his head around who Jesus could be. And the outcast Samaritan woman came to believe Jesus was her saviour and was able to let go of the pain of her past. Nicodemus left Jesus, still in the dark as to who he was, the Samaritan women came to know the light of Christ and share that light.
Also it is very interesting that Jesus reveals that he is Messiah to a Samaritan, and a woman; not in the temple in Jerusalem, or to the Pharisees, Saducees, scribes or others in the Jewish religious establishment--or even to his own disciples. As John’s gospel tells it, the biggest revelation in Jewish history is revealed to a nameless outcast Samaritan Woman beside the well of Jacob, in Samaria, the last person anyone would expect to believe in who Jesus really was. “The only time Jesus is called ‘saviour’ in the entire gospel of John it is here and by outsiders.”[6]
So, what does this tell us about Jesus, what does this tell us about God? Let’s go back once again to last week’s reading: John 3. 16 God so loved the world—not just some of the world, or just a select few in the world, but the entire world, and all who are in it. Jesus reached out and shared of himself and his saving grace with an outcast, lonely and sad woman. And it changed her life. She no longer felt the thirst of spiritual emptiness, because she drank of the living water. Jesus reaches out to all of us and wants nothing more than for us to be in relationship with him. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, what you’ve done in your past or where you are in the present. Just open yourself to his love, let him in, and you need thirst no more. Amen
[1] Karoline M. Lewis John (Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MI) 2014. 53
[2] Lewis 60 [3] Ibid [4] Lewis 59 [5] Lewis 64 [6] Lewis 68