Day 2 – Jesus Satisfies Our Deepest Thirst

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 Samaritanwoman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

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 thirstyand 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.”

…

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.”

Comment

Yesterday we saw Jesus at a wedding, giving an undeserved abundance of the very best wine. Today we find him beside a well, asking for a simple drink of water. Yet once again, an ordinary need becomes a window onto his beauty. Jesus is physically thirsty, but he meets a woman whose deeper thirst has shaped her whole life.

Her arrival at noon is striking. Drawing water was normally cooler and easier in the morning or evening, when women came together. This woman arrives alone in the heat of the day. We cannot know every reason, but the story soon reveals a painful and complicated history. She has had five husbands, and the man she now lives with is not her husband (v.18). Whatever mixture of her own choices and the choices of others lies behind that story, she appears isolated and ashamed.

In that culture, Jesus might have been expected to avoid her. She is a woman, a Samaritan and someone whose life would attract moral suspicion. Each fact creates a barrier; together they make her an outsider in almost every imaginable way. Yet Jesus has deliberately travelled through Samaria, sits where she will find him and begins the conversation. The woman herself is astonished: ‘How can you ask me for a drink?’ (v.9)

Here is the beautiful welcome of Jesus. He is not embarrassed to be seen with her. He does not treat her as a category, a problem or a cautionary tale. He treats her as a person worth knowing. In the previous chapter Jesus met Nicodemus, a respected male Jewish religious leader near the top of society. Here he meets an unnamed Samaritan woman near the bottom. No one is so respectable that they do not need Jesus, and no one is so disreputable that Jesus will not receive them.

But Jesus’ welcome is not sentimental. He knows her life completely and speaks truthfully about it. ‘Go, call your husband,’ is not a cruel attempt to expose her. It lovingly brings her deepest thirst into the light. She has sought life in relationships that could not finally bear the weight of her longing. Jesus does not shame her, but neither does he pretend that the broken cistern is a spring.

That image comes from Jeremiah. God laments that his people have forsaken him, ‘the spring of living water’, and dug their own broken cisterns which cannot hold water (Jer. 2:13). We repeat the same exchange whenever we ask a good created thing to give us what only God can give. Career, achievement, romance, family, health, comfort and approval are good gifts. But when they become our source of identity, security or hope, they always leave us thirsty again.

Jesus offers something entirely different: ‘the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ (v.14) He does not merely offer a more successful strategy for filling our empty buckets. He promises to place the spring within us. Through his Spirit, God gives us new life: reconciliation with him now and life with him for ever. Circumstances may still bring sorrow and loss, but our deepest life no longer depends upon them.

The beauty of Jesus is seen in the way tenderness and truth belong together in him. Truth without tenderness can crush a person; tenderness without truth can leave them enslaved. Jesus neither humiliates the woman nor flatters her. He knows everything she has done, crosses every barrier to meet her and offers precisely the life she needs.

There is an even deeper beauty here. This is not the last time John tells us that Jesus is thirsty. At the cross Jesus will say, ‘I am thirsty’ (John 19:28). The one who offers living water enters the desolation our sin deserves. He bears our guilt and separation from God so that outsiders like this woman – and like us – may be welcomed by the Father and receive the Spirit who gives eternal life. Jesus thirsts so that we need never thirst again.

The woman’s neighbours first believe because of her testimony, but then they meet Jesus for themselves. Their conclusion widens the welcome still further: he really is ‘the Saviour of the world’ (v.42). Christianity is beautiful because its centre is this Jesus: the holy one who knows us fully, welcomes us graciously, tells us the truth and gives himself to satisfy the deepest longing of the human heart.

Why does God want me to hear this today? Perhaps because I am still returning to a broken cistern, hoping that one more achievement, relationship or experience will finally satisfy me. Jesus invites me to stop hiding, to bring my thirst into his light and to ask him for the gift of living water.