A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The 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.) Jesus 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but 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.” The 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.”
John 4:7-15 (NRSV)
There are a lot of people who, if given the choice, we would not choose to talk to – people we might deem to be unworthy of our time or attention. It may be also that we simply wouldn’t choose to talk to them because we don’t know who they are and they don’t know us, so there is no real reason to stop and carry on a conversation. There could be many reasons why we would choose not to talk to someone, or to avoid someone if she or he tried to talk to us.
Jesus had every reason in the world not to talk to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Jesus had stopped to rest there because he was tired. The unnamed Samaritan woman approached the well to draw water. Jesus, being a Jewish rabbi, would not be expected to give a woman from Samaria the time of day let alone engage in a lengthy and meaningful conversation with her. Nevertheless, it was Jesus who instigated such a conversation with her at the well.
That conversation revolved around water. We today well know the significance of water to the Christian faith. Water is a symbol of life because it is life-giving. We need it to survive. Jesus tells this woman about a different kind of water. In the end, not only did this woman receive the living water Jesus told her about, but so did many others because of her story about the man she had never met before in her life, but who nevertheless told her everything she had ever done. This man couldn’t possibly be the Messiah, could he?
May we leave our buckets behind and receive the living water from the well that never runs dry during this season of Lent, and share that water with others.
First United Methodist Church 