John 4:5-26
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.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “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.[a])
10 Jesus answered her, “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.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 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?”
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.”
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.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied.
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.”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Only Jesus Can Quench Our Thirst
In a small town, word gets around. On the one hand, that can mean that your tribe is there to celebrate with you when things are going well. On the other hand, if you do something wrong, everybody will have heard about it before you get a chance to get ahead of it. And then they look at you differently, and treat you differently too.
It’s no wonder that she went to the well at noon. All the rest of the women would have been there first thing in the morning, so that they could get ahead of the day, so that they could do their heavy lifting in the cool of the day. But those things weren’t as important to her as it was to avoid the glares of the other women and the comments they would mumble about her under their breath. She went there at noon to be alone, to get her work done without getting noticed, without having to talk to anyone or explain herself to anyone.
Today was different, though. There was a man there, and he clearly wasn’t from around here. He dressed differently. He had an accent. At a single glance you could tell that he was from north of the border, which was strange because most of the time people like him would avoid this place like the plague; they’d walk miles out of their way, add a week to their trip just to bypass this whole region. And, honestly, how could you blame them? There was such bad blood that weary, solitary travelers like him would sometimes get beat up and robbed and left for dead on the side of the road.
In the rare event that men like him would pass through, women like her wouldn’t dare talk to them. Apart from the history, there were the optics. A local lady talking to a foreign man by herself in a secluded place, what would people think? She was already the subject of so many rumours. Could her already battered reputation survive another?
And then he doesn’t have the decency to leave her alone. He draws her in. Asks her to draw water for him. What would people think if they saw it? What would they say? He doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it seems that he wants more than a drink of water; he wants to have a conversation, of all things. Ordinarily she’d be prepared with her excuses; she’d say what she needed to say and be on her way, but there was something he said that piqued her interest. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she had to know more.
He was offering her something. At first, she thought that maybe he knew of a better place to get better water – not this storm runoff that gathers into a dusty well, but a spring of fresh water that’s always bubbling and never runs low, no matter how long it’s been since the last rain. It’d be strange if a stranger knew a better place to get better water in her hometown than she would, so she was skeptical, until he said what he said next.
Water that takes away your thirst forever. Now, that sounded good. Sure, it would take away the chore of having to haul water from this well everyday, but more than that, it would mean that she’d never have to rearrange her life and endure the heat of the day just to avoid the glares and comments anymore. She’d be free.
More than that, she’d be full. And that was appealing, because she had felt so empty for so long. Maybe that’s why she had had such a long string of bad relationships, i.e. why she had tried to find meaning and security and purpose in men who inevitably let her down.
But, hold on. How did this guy know that? He’s not from around here. There’s no one else at the well to warn him about her. Now he’s really got her attention. There must be something special about him. She’s heard about people like this – prophets, they’re called, i.e. guys who have a special connection with God, who know things that other people don’t. Maybe he knows the big things.
She’d always wondered why her people worship on Mt. Gerizim, where Joshua blessed the Israelites after they entered the Promised Land, but his people insisted on worshiping in Jerusalem. Who was right? She expected him to toe the party line, to give the stock response, but he said something she never could have seen coming, “True worshipers worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”[1] It didn’t matter where you worship, but whom and how.
She thought she knew the answer to the first. She had grown up reading the books of Moses. She had heard promises of a Saviour going all the way back to Adam and Eve, i.e. the Messiah, the Christ. And then he had his mic-drop moment: “I, the one speaking to you – I am he.”[2]
Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine she would the meet the Messiah, but there he was. She did not have it on her bingo card that morning that she would quench the thirst of her Saviour, but then again, he had quenched a thirst in her she didn’t even realize she had. All that time searching for meaning in relationships – all that time avoiding furtive glances and mumbled comments because it caused her to question her own worth and value – all of it had been because there was something missing in her life, i.e. this cross-shaped hole in her heart. But now Jesus filled it, and in so doing he gave her meaning and purpose and an identity that wasn’t rooted in what she had or hadn’t done, but was based on who he was and what he had come to do for her. He came to associate with undesirable people, to provide a spring of living water in her soul that would well up to eternal life, to forgive her sins and assure her of her salvation, and even to show her what true worship looks like.
And that’s what Jesus has come to do for you too.
Maybe it’s not quite as drastic for you as it was for this Samaritan woman. Maybe you’re not a complete social outcast who avoids other people like the plague. But I’m sure that you’ve felt that sense of isolation before. You don’t fit in. You haven’t found your people. You did something that makes you ashamed to meet other people’s gaze. They’ve hurt you by the way they look at or talk about you, even if you did contribute to the problem.
Worse, of course, is our status with God. He knows everything. Sexual immorality takes many forms, not just the serial monogamy of the Samaritan woman who hopped from one sexual partner to the next. We can be guilty of adultery just by using our eyes and our imaginations. And that’s just one of the 10 Commandments. There are so many more that we break every day and God knows them all. He knows how guilty and undesirable we should be. But he chooses to be with us.
In fact, we didn’t read this, but the verse before our text for today provides so much meaning in 7 short words: Now he had to go through Samaria.[3] Jesus didn’t have to do anything. Most Jews avoided Samaria at all costs. There were well-worn paths along the Mediterranean Sea coast on the West and across the Jordan River on the East. But he had to go through Samaria because she was there. Because there was a sinner who needed to know her Saviour.
And that’s what God did for you. There was nothing that we could have done to force him to come, but from his perspective, he had to leave heaven and come to earth, to live and die on a cross, to rise from the dead and ascend back into heaven, so that these sinners could know their Saviour too. So that you could hear these words and know that God is speaking them to you too.
The Samaritan woman wasn’t the only one with a cross-shaped hole in her heart. We all have that thirst for something more. And the thirst isn’t bad, as long as we look to fill it with Jesus. It’s when we try to fill it with other things that we go astray. And none of them are neutral. If we look for meaning and purpose and identity in our occupation, in our relationships, in the activity of our lives – or even if we just try to escape it all by numbing ourselves to reality and distracting ourselves through life – then we may as well be drinking salt water. Our thirst will never be satisfied; it’ll just grow and grow and grow.
But, if we know the gift of God, and if we know who it is that speaks to us in his Word, who offers us living water, then we will never thirst again, then the water he gives us will become in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
Of course that doesn’t mean that we stop coming back to the well. That doesn’t mean that we’ll never have questions or cravings ever again. What it means is that if we find our meaning and purpose and identity in Jesus, then we won’t feel the need to seek it from anywhere, anything, anyone else. Then it doesn’t matter where we live or what our history was. What matters is that we continue to worship our God in spirit and in truth.
And isn’t that an amazing thing? The supreme being of the universe is not some distant, inaccessible deity. Not only did he become man and breathe the same air we breathe, but he is spirit just as we worship in spirit. In other words, we don’t have to jump through hoops. We don’t have to worship in Jerusalem or on Mt. Gerizim. We don’t have to observe the Day of Atonement or offer Passover sacrifices. We can worship our God and Saviour anywhere at any time and in so many ways. As long as those ways are grounded in his truth.
And by his grace, they are. We’re not like the Samaritan woman was anymore. We worship what we know, that Jesus is our Saviour, who willingly associates with undesirable sinners, to give us his living water so that our hearts can overflow with the living water of his love through this life and into eternity.
It’s Jesus who quenches our thirst. Amen.
[1] John 4:23
[2] John 4:26
[3] John 4:4