Sunday Readings: Exodus 17.3-7 Romans 5.1-2,5-8 John 4.5-42
A Samaritan woman came to draw some water. Jesus asked her, “Give me a drink.” But the woman replied, “You are a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan and a woman, for a drink? Jesus replied, “If only you knew God’s gift and who is asking you for a drink, you would ask him and he would give you living water.” The woman replied, “Sir, you don’t have a bucket and this well is deep. Where do you expect to get living water? You don’t pretend to be greater than our ancestors Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, who gave us this well and whose family and flocks all drank from it?” Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will keep getting thirsty, but whoever drinks the water that I give will never be thirsty again. The water I give will become a spring within that wells up into eternal life.” The woman said, “Sir, give me this water! Then I will never be thirsty again, and I won’t have to keep coming here to draw water” (John 4.7-15).
“Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well?” the Samaritan woman asks Jesus, when he offers her living water. This is a Samaritan question. The well has been an abiding gift to the people of central Israel. But Jesus’ gift goes beyond Jacob’s. In the water Jesus gives, the Spirit wells up within the person into eternal life. Jesus’ gift quenches all thirst.
The woman acknowledges her people expect a messiah who will tell them the things of God. “I am he,” Jesus says, the first of many times in John’s gospel when Jesus uses the divine name God first confided to Moses—I Am. No wonder the woman leaves her water jar behind and goes to her townspeople.
Jesus calls her out of her alienation as a Samaritan into his new community of spirit and truth. She challenges the villagers to see in Jesus what she has seen, “Could this be the messiah?” They come and see Jesus and ask him to stay, which in John’s gospel means to dwell with. On the strength of the woman’s word of testimony, these Samaritans join the community of believers in whom Jesus abides.
- When have you experienced the Spirit well up within you? Where has trusting the Spirit’s stirrings led you?