The Thirsty Woman at the Well

After his night talk with Nicodemus, Jesus and his friends left Judea and started the long walk north to Galilee, and the shortest road ran straight through Samaria.

(Jews and Samaritans had been quarrelling for hundreds of years about who truly belonged to God and where he ought to be worshipped. By now they would not even share a cup.)

Around noon they reached Jacob's well, just outside a town called Sychar. Jesus was worn out, so he sat down by it while his friends went into town to buy lunch.

Sensible people fetched water in the cool of the morning. But in the blazing heat, a Samaritan woman came out alone with an empty jar on her shoulder.

"Will you give me a drink?" Jesus asked.

She stared at him. "You're a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?"

"If you knew God's gift," Jesus said, "and who is asking you, you would have asked him for living water."

"Sir, you don't even have a bucket, and this well is deep." (It really was. Drop a pebble down Jacob's well and you could say "one, two" before you heard the plunk.) "Are you greater than our father Jacob?"

"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again," Jesus said. "But the water I give becomes a spring inside, bubbling up into life that lasts forever."

"Sir, give me this water! Then I won't have to keep hauling this jar."

(She was still thinking about her jar. Jesus was thinking about her.)

"Go and call your husband," he said.

"I don't have a husband."

"That's right," said Jesus. "You have had five husbands, and the man you live with now is not your husband."

A stranger knew all of it. She pointed at the mountain and changed the subject, fast: her people worshipped God up there, but his people said Jerusalem. Jesus told her the time had come to worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

"I know the Messiah is coming," she said. That meant the King God had promised. "When he comes, he will explain everything."

Jesus said, "I am he. The one talking to you."

His friends came back with lunch, amazed to find him talking with a woman. She left her jar and hurried back to town.

"Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did!" she called. "Could he be the Messiah?"

His friends begged him to eat. "I have food you don't know about," Jesus said. "Look up! The fields are ready for harvest." Down the road came a crowd, hurrying through the hot fields, with the woman out in front.

He stayed with them two days, and many believed. "Now we've heard him for ourselves," they told her. "This man really is the Savior of the world."

She had come out at noon to fill one jar, and she went home without it, carrying news instead: a man had told her everything she ever did, and had not walked away.

Jesus is like that. He knows everything about a person, and he stays. The one who could give a spring that never runs dry had started by asking her for a drink.

He would be thirsty again. His road ran south to a cross in Jerusalem, where he said, "I am thirsty," and died. On the third day his tomb was empty. The spring he promised a thirsty woman at Jacob's well has never run dry, and people from both sides of that old quarrel have been drinking from it ever since.