Jesus Talks With
a Samaritan Woman
4 Now Jesus
learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more
disciples than John— 2 although in fact it was not
Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 3 So he left
Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
4 Now he had to go
through Samaria. 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.”
The Disciples
Rejoin Jesus
27 Just then his
disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman.
But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 Then, leaving
her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come,
see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They
came out of the town and made their way toward him.
Many Samaritans
Believe
39 Many of the
Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s
testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So
when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he
stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many
more became believers.
42 They said to the
woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard
for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
Let us pray….May the words
of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in thy
sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
The First
Evangelist
As a woman, and as a mother of daughters, I have been
disappointed over the years because many of the Biblical role models held up as
examples of faithfulness for us often happen to be men. When I was a little child,
I heard about the marvelous accomplishments and risk-taking of David and Moses
and Daniel and Noah. I learned about
the journeys of Abraham and Paul, the strategic leadership of Joseph and
Joshua, and the Wisdom of Solomon. If
women were mentioned, they were often secondary – they were there to be support
for the men.
Since I have become an adult and a minister, I have
cherished the stories of women in the Bible. In them, I see something that was
not emphasized when I was a little girl in Sunday school classes – many of the
women written about in our scriptures overcame tremendous obstacles to serve
our Lord. The Samaritan woman at the well is one of those women.
Jesus met the Samaritan woman early in his ministry….Jesus
was beginning to become recognized by the Pharisees and by the followers of
John the Baptist, but was only beginning to have a larger audience. The
Pharisees were starting to be suspicious of Jesus’ activities, and so, Jesus
decided to leave Judah and return to Galilee….to put a little space between
himself and the religious authorities.
To get there, Jesus and his disciples had to cross the territory of the
Samaritans. Although the Samaritans and the Jewish people had common ancestors
and related faith-traditions, the groups disagreed about several key faith
points, including where to worship God.
When Jesus and the woman talked, we hear the woman refer to this
disagreement – she said the Samaritans worshipped on Mount Gerizim and the
Jewish people worshipped in Jerusalem.
Either way, the Samaritans and the Jewish people had
long-standing disagreements and did not get along. They avoided each other. Therefore,
many of the things that occurred when Jesus met the woman at the well were odd
for the sensibilities of first century followers of God.
When Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman, he broke many
taboos – First, he was speaking to a woman, in public, who was not his wife, and was not even Jewish.
In the 1st century, most Jewish men would not speak to women in
public…they would not even speak to their wives in public... And, yet, Jesus
spoke to the woman at the well. He had a conversation with her. He discussed theology
with a woman in a time when rabbis ignored women and refrained from having
theological conversations with them ….and would avoid both men and women who
were not Jewish.
The second taboo Jesus broke was that he asked to drink
from the woman’s bucket of water. Since the woman was Samaritan, the bucked would
have been perceived as ritually –unclean by Jewish people. Yet, Jesus asked her
for a drink despite breaking the cleanliness laws.
Jesus knew the woman had been married 5 times. Jesus knew
she lived with a man who was not her husband. Jesus knew she was shunned by the
other women and was drawing water at midday to avoid them. Yet, the third taboo
Jesus broke was to not avoid her when all of the rules of propriety would have
led him to do so.
Jesus broke all the rules, all the taboos, to offer the
woman the living water of the Holy Spirit.
This gift of Jesus represents abundant life, eternal salvation and our
opportunity to have an intimate relationship with God. The Holy Spirit satisfies our thirsty souls
and motivates us to do the work of God in the world.
The woman’s encounter with Jesus must have been incredibly invigorating
and amazing for her. The woman had suffered under the harsh judgment of her neighbors.
And, yet, after her encounter with Jesus,
she rushed to tell them about meeting him.
This woman became the first Christian Evangelist. Her
neighbors were astonished by the woman’s description of what Jesus told
her. Even though the woman was an
outcast among her people, her words were so convincing that many of her neighbors
came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They rushed to meet Jesus
themselves and invited Jesus to stay in their town so that they could all learn
from him and could also receive the living water of the Holy Spirit.
One of the problems for people with curious minds is that
we don’t always know what happened before we meet the people in our scripture. We
wonder about the woman having 5 husbands, but we don’t have answers to how she
got into that situation: did her previous husbands die and she had really bad
luck? Did the previous husbands divorce her because they were jerks or did she
had a disability they couldn’t handle? What was deal with the man she lived
with when she met Jesus – was he her brother, or her uncle, or her boyfriend? We
will never know the details.
What we do know, though, is that she was an outcast….despite
her status, and despite many taboos against it, Jesus offered the woman the living
water of the Holy Spirit. And, once she received Jesus’ invitation, the woman
turned around and offered it to countless other people.
Like the woman at the well, we often doubt ourselves….perhaps
we feel ashamed about things we have done in our pasts….perhaps we don’t feel
like we have led very holy lives….perhaps other people have said things and
done things to us that make us feel unloved, rejected, or unworthy. No matter
what it is, no matter who we were, not matter what we have done, Jesus came to
earth for us. God loves and forgives us. Jesus gives us the living waters that
will keep us from ever being spiritually thirsty again.
Like the woman at the well, it is our work to tell others
about Jesus….to tell others how to receive the living waters that will never
allow them to be thirsty again. No matter who we are, or where we are on our
life’s journey, we can share the Good News of Jesus with others. We don’t have
to be perfect to receive the Holy Spirit’s living waters….we don’t have to have
unblemished pasts to receive the Holy Spirit’s living waters….we don’t have to
be holy to receive the Holy Sprit’s living waters….we just need to be open to
receiving the Good News, embracing it for ourselves, and then be open to
sharing it with others. The gift of the Good News is both life-giving to receive
and life-giving to share.
Let
us do so today and all days. Amen.
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