Jesus and the Woman of Samaria

4th century AD image

4Now when Jesus^* learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’—² although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized—³he left Judea and started back to Galilee.⁴But he had to go through Samaria.⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’.⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)^*10Jesus answered her, ‘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.’¹¹The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?¹²Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’¹³Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,¹⁴but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’¹⁵The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

The Genesis passage explains the existence of different races of humanity and their different languages with a story about the dangerous arrogance of human beings who think that by cooperating on the construction of a skyscaper they can rule the world like gods. In this effort their “gathering” is depicted as a threat to the order of creation, an assertion of human power that imagines itslel divine. Perhaps the story was written at the time of great empires like that of Egypt and Babylon. God “scatters” humanity and makes its languages mutually incomprehensible as a way of limiting human evil. The history of worldly empires from Babylon to the USSR and USA shows the same arrogance  and the same inevitable collapse.

John’s gospel has depicted Jesus as the Bridegroom of Israel, the Messiah, but here he acts the part of Bridegroom towards a non-Jew, a woman from Samaria. All Jewish stories about men and women meeting at wells are in some sense stories of courtship. Here a woman who has had many husbands (representing a people who’ve had many religious commitments) finds that Jesus is the true partner for her and her people. He woos her not with flattery but with truth-the difficult truth about her own life- but also with the truth which he draws from a far deeper souce than Jacob’s well (that is, deeper even than the Jewish religion.) This living water is God’s goodness bubbling up into human life. The reader should note that here Jesus begins to repair the racial and linguistic division of humanity. His “gathering” of people is not a power play but a patient personal communication of God’s goodness; a sharing of the divine life across racial and religious divisions. This story could be a guide to the Christian Church for its evangelical work today.