The Search

John sets the scene without ornament. Jesus is travelling from Judea toward Galilee and comes to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the piece of land Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob's well is there. Jesus is tired from the journey, so He sits down by the well while His disciples go into the town to buy food. A woman comes to draw water, and He asks her for a drink.

Two things make that request remarkable, and John expects us to notice both. She is a Samaritan and He is a Jew, and John stops to explain that Jews and Samaritans did not share things in common. She is also a woman, and a Jewish teacher would not normally begin a conversation with her. She says exactly that: "How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?"

It is worth saying plainly what the text does not say. John does not tell us why she came, or what she expected to find. Explanations of her motives are common, and some of them are unkind. They are ours, not his.

Jesus does not answer her objection with a lecture about custom. He answers with a gift: "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

She hears the phrase and thinks of moving water, the best kind, the kind a well cannot hold. So she raises the practical problem, and then the deeper one: "Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock."

That is when Jesus says what He is offering: "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Notice what He does not do. He does not despise the water she came for. It is real water. It does what water does. It simply cannot do what she is asking it to do. It satisfies for an afternoon, and then the thirst returns, and she walks back to the same well with the same jar. That is not a flaw in the well. It is the nature of a well.

Her reply is easy to misread as faith when it is still confusion: "Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water." She is thinking about the walk. She wants the errand solved. But she has asked, and asking is where this conversation is going.

Later in his Gospel, John tells us what this living water means: the Spirit, given to those who believe in Jesus (John 7:37-39). That is interpretation rather than something Jesus spells out here, but it is John's own explanation, and it tells us that the gift Jesus offers at the well is not a mood or a metaphor. It is the Spirit, given to those who believe.

Which brings the question home. The wells we drink from are usually good things. Work that matters. A person who needs us. Being admired, being useful, being right. None of them is wicked. Each of them is a well, and each of them will leave us thirsty again by evening.