"A Well, A Woman And Living Water” Series

Just outside the city of Nablus on the Palestinian West Bank is the village of Balata. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was the site of the major rioting that is now infamously known as the First Intifada. All told, that violence led to the deaths of more than a thousand people.

Perhaps less known is the fact that until the time of those uprisings, Balata was also the home of as many as half of the world’s tiny remaining population of Samaritans. But for Christians Balata’s claim to fame lies within the precincts of its Eastern Orthodox church and monastery. There you will find what purports to be (and likely is) the site of Jacob’s well—the very location of this morning’s reading from the Gospel according to John—and from which you can still draw water to this day.

In New Testament times the town was known as Sychar. But its Old Testament name was Shechem. It was at Shechem that the Lord appeared to Abram and gave him the promise, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:6-7). It was at Shechem that Jacob later settled and built an altar to the Lord (Genesis 33:18-20). It was at Shechem that Joseph’s bones were buried (Joshua 24:32). And generations later it was at Shechem that the people of Israel assembled before Joshua and solemnly pledged, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD… The LORD our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey” (Joshua 24:16,25).

Lying on major trade routes that ran both east-west and north-south, Shechem had once been a significant commercial centre. However, over the centuries it had gradually gone downhill, so that by Jesus’ time all that remained was a sleepy wayside hamlet.

Now if you were travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem, the shortest route would take you through Sychar. That is, if it were not for one serious complication. The problem was that such a route would take you through Samaria. And, as we read in this morning’s passage from John, “Jews [had] no dealings with Samaritans.” The result was that the vast majority of Jewish travellers going from Jerusalem to Galilee would be forced to take a wide sweep eastwards across the Jordan River and later cross it again to head back west into Galilee. Needless to say, this added anywhere from two to four days to their journey.

A Well

Jesus, however, had no such reservations. So it is that we find him with his disciples in the tiny Samaritan village of Sychar. Now John does not tell us what time of year it was when Jesus and his disciples were travelling. But he does tell us the time of day. It was the sixth hour, which means noon. So the sun was at its height. And I know that for much of the year the temperature in that region can reach well into the thirties. So perhaps you can imagine what it must have been like for them to have been journeying on foot under the blazing heat of the near eastern sun.

The sight of the little village must have been a welcome one. Wearied from all the walking they had been doing (Eugene Peterson in his translation in The Message used the words “worn out”) and while the disciples went off to see where they could buy some provisions for lunch, Jesus took the opportunity to sit down in the cool shade beside a well.

So it is that John gives us a little reminder of Jesus’ humanity. He was not Superman or Captain America or Thor. He was not faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive. And he could not leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Rather, as we read in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…” (Philippians 2:7).

So it is that at the outset of his ministry we find Jesus being tempted by the adversary. A few weeks ago, reading from John 2, we saw him angry, as he drove out the money changers from the Temple, lashing at them with a whip and overturning their tables. Later in the Gospels we find him exhausted to the point that he fell asleep in the stern of one of his followers’ boats—so soundly that even with the waves crashing over the gunwales and threatening to sink it, he continued to sleep (Mark 4:36-38).

Now why is all this important? In the early years of the church there sprang up a form of heresy called Docetism. The core teaching of the Docetists was that Jesus only appeared to be human. That doctrine was quickly rejected by the church for several reasons. First, the fact that Jesus was fully human enables him to relate to us in the fullest possible way. The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”. This gives us the assurance that we can come to him in our own weakness, in full confidence that we will find mercy and grace to help us in our times of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).