“Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus Himself was not baptizing, but His disciples were), 3 He left Judea and went away again into Galilee. 4 And He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; 6 and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. 9 Therefore the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” 11 She said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water? 12 “You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?” 13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.” 16 He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” 17 The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.” 19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
There is a truth about the earthly life and ministry of Jesus that would be immeasurably helpful for the serious Bible student to understand and be aware of no matter where they are currently studying in the Gospel narratives. It is this.
The Lord Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, had a divine purpose to fulfill given Him from the Father and as sinless Son of God, anointed for this purpose and perfectly fulfilling the Father’s will, He never wasted a moment, He never spoke an empty word, He was always precisely where He needed to be and was always perfectly aware and in tune with what was going on around Him.
If you think these are bold and indefensible assertions to make, then I invite you to search and study it out for yourself. I did not research Scripture verses and passages relating to what I just said to give you here, but all the evidence is present in the Gospels – most of it in the words of Jesus Himself – and it would be a profitable and rewarding journey for you to search it out.
Begin your own journey with this thought. Jesus came to serve and to give His life a ransom for many. He came to die. He came to bear the fiery wrath of God against sin in His own body on Calvary’s cross, and He came to lay down His life and take it up again and return to the Father, bringing many sons to glory.
I hope you caught that the things I just listed all happened at the end; His arrest, His crucifixion, His resurrection, His ascension.
Therefore every movement of His was divinely orchestrated toward His goal, and there was not a moment when Jesus was not in complete control, not only of Himself, but the circumstances around Him.
Men thought they planned their way, but the Lord directed their steps (Prov 16:9) for His purpose and for the Father’s glory.
I could list examples; one is seen in His healing of the lame man by the pool of Bethesda in John 5, where His very intent seems to be to provoke the hypocritical ire of the Pharisees. That’s just one example that I give you, so you can read that account with these things in mind and see what the end result was of His actions there.
But today we are here with Jesus and His disciples as they set out from Judea to Galilee, and we will focus on what is recorded for us in this amazing account of the divinely appointed meeting between Jesus and this very fortunate Samaritan woman.
JESUS NEEDED TO GO
Now there is this statement in verse 4 of which very much has been made. “And He had to pass through Samaria”.
We have so much to consider today in this account, I don’t want to spend a big chunk of time here, but let’s look at it for just a moment.
If you go to your maps in the back of your Bible, to one that is titled, “Palestine in the time of Christ” or something close to that, you can see that Judea, Samaria and Galilee are sort of stacked one on the other. Galilee is the farthest North, with Judea in the South, and Samaria located between them.
There is an historical reason for what I’m going to say next and maybe we’ll explain some of that later, but for now let it suffice to say that there was great bitterness and hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans. The Jews would have nothing to do with the Samaritans. That is why Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan would have incited a very strong reaction from His hearers, when He contrasted the actions of pious Jewish religious men who neglected the victim on the road, with the actions of the Samaritan who helped the man.
Because of their history and their enmity with one another, Jews would not even pass through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee or vice versa. They would cross the Jordan, traverse the miles it would take to go around the boarders of Samaria, then re-cross the Jordan. This added 2 to 3 days to their journey one way, but this is how great their disdain was for the Samaritans, that they would go to those lengths to avoid stepping foot within their boarders.
Now I explained all that here to point out that according to the typical Jewish thought of the day, Jesus would have ‘needed’ to take the circuitous, longer route.
So to say that He needed to pass through Samaria would be akin to one of us saying, “Fred needed to walk through that high-crime neighborhood instead of walking extra blocks to get around it”. The knee-jerk reaction to that statement would be, “No, Fred needs to go around, even if it takes longer!”
So why expend all this energy talking about this statement of verse 4? Here is why, and it is why probably every Bible teacher since John, teaching from this Gospel, has had to focus on it. Saying that Jesus needed to pass through Samaria can only mean one thing, and that one thing it must mean is that it was a part of the divine purpose and plan for which He came.
There was absolutely no need, humanly speaking, for Jesus to ever set foot in Samaria. It was a loathsome place to the Jews, and a place to be avoided. There wasn’t a Jew alive who would have said, ‘Oh, yeah, I see it. Good plan.’ But Jesus had a plan and it was a good plan; it was the Father’s plan, and it included a very lonely woman of Samaria going out to Jacob’s well by herself in the early evening to get her water, and it included a certain Samaritan village and a field white unto harvest.
Let’s join Jesus at the well now and watch Him masterfully break down many barriers which needed to be demolished.
THE JEW/SAMARITAN BARRIER
“So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; and Jacob’s well was there.”
Now just stop and give this some thought for a moment. Verse 6 tells us that Jesus was resting from His journey there by Jacob’s well. Yet in verse 8 we are told that the disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. They had walked just as far as He, hadn’t they?
If Jesus had wanted to continue on, He could have had two options available to Him.
He could have continued on with the disciples into the city, which was about one half mile beyond the well, or He could have had them all lay around on the grass in the shade to take some rest with Him and they would have continued later into the city to get something to eat.
Just in case you’re thinking I’m entering into speculation here, let me say that had He chosen either of those options this meeting never could have taken place with the outcome we have recorded for us.
Jesus needed to be able to confront this woman alone because He had some very private subjects to bring up with her. Had the others stayed there with him, she might have felt sort of accosted because she was surrounded by 12 traveling male Jews all staring at her and perhaps even verbally challenging their Master for talking to a woman in public – and a Samaritan woman at that.
If He had gone into the city with them, obviously, He would not have been at the well at the same time the woman was.
The situation being as it was, Jesus came and rested by Jacob’s well at precisely the time of day this woman came all by herself to fetch water.
His disciples were gone into the city to get food and were thus engaged and ignorant of His private meeting. The popular speculation among commentators is that since she was a woman who had too many men in her life she was probably an outcast and could not gather with the other women of the village in the cool morning hours to get her water. That is an educated speculation and probably true.
But even if it was not the case, I think it’s safe to conclude that Jesus knew she would be there and that they would be alone and that the divine and supernatural light was going to be turned on in her heart that day.
So He opens the conversation with an astounding request. Can you picture this? Here is Jesus, sitting quietly in some shade near the well. The woman comes with her vessel to get water for the day, and by all appearances these two are ignoring one another. She is averting her eyes and probably wondering why a Jew was in Samaria at all, much less resting His feet instead of moving on as fast as He can to get through the region and back to Jewish territories.
Suddenly this man breaks the silence with a request. “Give Me a drink”
How this must have shocked her! The initial response of the woman may seem semi-casual to us at first, just reading the words and unable to see expressions or hear voice inflexion, but not if we consider the circumstances.
First of all, in that entire culture, men just did not speak to women in public. It was beneath them. Secondly, it would have been doubly outlandish for a Jew to speak to a Samaritan, much less a Jewish male to a Samaritan female.
But let’s look even deeper. See the woman’s response: “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?” Now do you see the parenthesis there in verse 9? “(For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans)” That was John as author, sticking that line in there so his readers would understand the gravity of what was happening.
Let’s pause here and look very briefly at the history between these cultural groups.’
In 720 B.C., following hundreds of years of warning from God through His prophets against their idolatry and their pagan practices and their gross immoralities, the Northern Kingdom was taken into captivity by Assyria. They were all transported into the eastern part of Media, and some of them to Babylon.
The few Jews left behind, who were poor and of no consequence to their invaders, were left in the land to fend for themselves, living in the regions away from any real source of commerce and so forth. Well, after the larger Jewish population was removed, other people moved in to possess and settle in the land. They came from Babylon and Cutha and Hamath and other places that always get underlined in red on my computer.
As the year passed these leftover Jews intermingled and intermarried with these foreigners creating a sort of half-breed race – and in the process burying any record of their precious heritage under God and the purity of their race.
So of course when the Jews came back into the land after their captivity they despised this mongrel race of people for giving up their heritage and the barriers went up. To make matters worse, in about 450 B.C. when the Southern Kingdom was reestablished and those under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah began to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem, the Samaritans wanted to help, seeing it all as a part of their heritage also.
But they were turned away, which was at least in part the catalyst for these two characters you can read about in Nehemiah, Sanballat and Tobiah, to keep irritating the builders of the wall and deepening the bitterness.
Then there were other instances that served to just pile the barriers higher, for example a renegade Jew named Manasseh who married one of the daughters of Sanballat and then rejected Jerusalem as the center of worship and built a new temple on Mt Gerizim in Samaria, and after that the Jews and Samaritans were fixed in a permanent feud and would have no dealings with one another.
Now here’s the kicker. In verse 9, when John says in his parenthesis that the Jews and Samaritans would have no dealings with one another, that word ‘dealings’ is a long Greek word that is verb in form and it means literally, ‘to use together’.
They wouldn’t use anything together!
So isn’t it interesting, that John would make this seeming side comment right here on the heels of the woman saying, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?”
What was she saying? You have nothing to draw with, so by asking me for a drink you must mean that you want to drink from my vessel, and you know as well as I that your people do not commonly use anything with my people.
In other words, “You want to drink from my cup?!?”
Do you see how deftly Jesus has begun to tear down barriers? First, He goes where most Jews considered themselves too good and pure to go. I can imagine that when His disciples realized the path they were taking that day they must have had a mumble/grumble party at the back of the line, wondering amongst themselves what in the world Jesus was thinking.
Then Jesus speaks to this person, not in a disdainful way and not in a hostile way, but putting Himself in a position of obligation to her. “Give Me a drink”. She could see that Jesus had no bucket. He was at her mercy insofar as getting a cool drink from Jacob’s well was concerned.
So she is drawn into conversation with Him, and that alone is an indication to us that a barrier had come down. Women didn’t dare just speak out to a man. Her first and best choice would have been to dip into her bucket without a word, let Him drink, then turn and head for home without a word. Instead, she sees something in this Man – hears something in His tone – that makes her want to know why He would deem to talk to a lowly Samaritan woman.
Now He has her nibbling the hook as it were. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him and he would have given you living water.”
And by this statement Jesus has her fully engaged in conversation. Wouldn’t it pique your interest? Think about it. Think about the setting and His strange statement about the gift of God and living water. Wouldn’t you be inclined to set your bucket down and say, “Please explain what you mean by that”?
Now we could spend a great deal of time breaking down these next couple of verses, between verse 10 and verse 16, but today we’re talking about Jesus dealing with barriers and if I try to unpack it all you’ll be napping soon…not because the subject matter is boring, by any means, but because there’s just too much here to handle adequately. I perused the material of one preacher who managed to preach 3 sermons from this text, and on the side, 5 sermons on the definition of ‘true spiritual worship’. So there’s a lot here!
Suffice it to say that Jesus makes statements to this woman that have obviously caused her to begin to suspect He is much more than a weary traveler on the road, and that He seems confident He has something much grander and much more lasting and wonderful to offer her than the mouthful of cool well water He had first requested from her.
So enthralled is she now, that she has seemingly forgotten the reason she came – and I say ‘seemingly’ because of the way the conversation is going – she has forgotten that she was actually engaged in a socially taboo verbal interchange with a man and worse, a Jew, and so taken is she by His words that the tables have completely turned. Jesus asked for a drink of water, now she is asking for the gift of living water He has offered. She doesn’t even know what it is; she just wants some.
THE SIN/SELF-DEFENSE BARRIER
Now we’re going to have to come back to this section and take a much closer look at the things Jesus says to this woman that pique her interest so, and things He says about true spiritual worship which we all need to understand and reflect upon often.
If the Lord is willing we will do that in a subsequent sermon. For now, let’s keep our focus on the transformation that is taking place as Jesus breaks down barriers between men and men and men and God.
He has drawn the woman into conversation, then He has made some seemingly cryptic statements about Himself that, while being absolutely true, are foreign sounding to her way of thinking – and naturally to ours – but they result in creating in her a desire for something more than she presently has in her life and extracting from her a request for whatever it is He seems to be offering.
Let me give you a short personal illustration to clarify what I’m saying here. I grew up the son of a minister. So talk of Jesus and God and the Bible were nothing strange to my ears. I spent virtually every Sunday morning of my life listening to my dad preach, and when I wasn’t busy pulling the hair of the little girl in front of me or drawing Zorro ‘Z’s on my bulletin, I was actually hearing much of what he was saying.
But I have the very clear recollection of lying on my bed before falling asleep one night and looking up at my ceiling, and suddenly realizing that I wasn’t sure if any of it was true.
I wanted it all to be true, but the thought had suddenly occurred to me that I had never seen any empirical evidence of this God my dad preached.
So I prayed, very simply, ‘God, if you really are there, would you show me that you are so I can believe?’ That was it. I even forgot later that I had prayed that prayer. And nothing happened right then. But I believe that at that moment I was as this woman at the well who had very suddenly been made aware that there was something more she could have that none of the men in her life had been able to provide, and that the water from Jacob’s well could not supply. She may not have known what she was asking, but I believe she had a sudden, inexplicable thirst such as I had in the quiet of my bedroom when I was 15 years old… and Jesus was about to fill that need.
But there was an issue that had to be addressed first. And this is always the case. You’ve heard me say it many times if you have been exposed to my teaching, and you have heard if from other preachers if they have been preaching the Gospel.
Her sin needed to be confronted. That is the New Testament pattern of evangelism. It always calls first for recognition of sin and a turning from that sin toward God. Always.
So Jesus attacks this very powerful barrier with an invitation He already knows she can’t keep, and brings to light a truth that she will not be able to avoid.
“Go, call your husband and come here.”
Now why do I call this a barrier? Sin is always a barrier. It is the great barrier between God and men. Sin is death and since all have sinned, all are dead until they are regenerated by the Holy Spirit – that is, ‘born from above’ – given life that comes from above; from God.
So sin has to be confronted and that barrier broken down between the sinner and a Holy God.
“Go, call your husband and come here”.
What were her options? You know, she could have said, she might have said, ‘Mind your own business.’ and grabbed up her vessel and headed back to Sychar.
She could have tried to claim her husband was busy or off on a trip.
That’s what people do, isn’t it? Isn’t it what we do or have done when confronted by our sin? Either get defensive or try to dance the wide step around the issue?
This was an honest woman, and Jesus commended her for her honesty. I want you to notice that. She said, ‘I have no husband’, and Jesus said, ‘That’s right, you shameless hussy!’ NO, He didn’t!
He commended her for speaking truthfully and then He told her things about herself that no stranger could have known. Jesus does that.
He just brings out truth, not in a condemning, guilt-trip way but just a revealing way because sin makes us blind and self-deceived and we can go for a very, very long time – a lifetime if left to it – ignoring and remaining ignorant of sin in our life because if no one else knows then there’s just no need to stir up the stink.
THE UNBELIEF BARRIER
And again she responds well. She still hasn’t figured out who Jesus is, but she now believes she is in the presence of a prophet, which is pretty amazing since there hasn’t been a prophet in Israel for 400 years.
Do you see that divine and supernatural light beginning to come on in her heart? That’s usually how God works in us you know. Step by step, turning us around, bringing us to the knowledge of the truth, awakening our mind, changing our heart. He’s a gentleman…a gentle God when it comes to saving sinners.
I prayed my prayer at 15 and became a born again believer at 23. Eight years and a lot of stupid later.
But it was still some years before I suddenly remembered one day that prayer that I had prayed at 15, and what a blessing it was to remember that and realize that God had graciously answered even my faithless prayer and made Himself real to me and saved me in spite of myself.
Look at verse 20 for a moment, because we’re not going to go there today.
“Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.”
A commentator I read years ago suggested that she was trying to avoid the 5 husband/one lover issue with a side question. I disagree with that assessment.
I think it was a question to which she really wanted an answer, because I think that she really wanted to worship God, but since all her life all she had seen around her was hypocritical religious grand-standing and sword rattling and empty prattle from big-headed men, she was left in total confusion and didn’t know where to turn or what to think.
But here she was, with this Jew who quietly asked her for a drink of water, then offered her something that sounded like freshness and life, and with the same, polite non-condemning manner let her know that He was already aware of the details of her life revealing Himself to be a prophet of God, and I think she saw this as a prime opportunity to get her question answered, and a very well-chosen question it was!
We’re not going to go there. Lord willing, we’ll go there next time. For now I have to start bringing this to an end and I want to continue the course we’ve pursued and watch more barriers come down.
Look at verse 25
“The woman said to Him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us”
Isn’t that amazing?
This isn’t just an attempt to distract Jesus, as that commentator said. This wasn’t a statement pulled out of thin air; as though she might as well have been saying, ‘Gee, hope it don’t rain!’
Jesus has shown Himself to be a prophet at the very least, and in these verses we’re not stopping at today He talks about God as Father and He teaches her that the Father is spirit and that He is not spatially near or far like the temples men build but that worship is a thing the true worshipper carries with him. And in the course of it all the light comes on in her so she puts this statement out there to see if she’ll get a confirmation or a denial.
Why? Because a true prophet will quickly point out that he is just a voice speaking the words given him by one greater than he. That’s what John the Baptist did, remember? The priests asked, ‘Who are you?’ and instead of telling them who he was he told them who he wasn’t. ‘I am not the Christ’.
Don’t even go there! Don’t go around telling anyone that I’m out here claiming to be the Messiah. First of all, that gets a guy stoned to death or crucified; more importantly, if I let you think I’m Messiah then my testimony would be false. I am not the Christ.
But what did Jesus say? “I who speak to you am He”.
When He talked to Nicodemus and the Pharisee hinted that he wanted to know who Jesus was, he didn’t get a direct answer, did he?
And all the other men of Israel who confronted Him in their faithlessness got no answer. But to this simple woman who has a felt need and has sincere questions and is apparently without deceitfulness in her, Jesus comes right out and says it. I am the Messiah.
Ok, here is a matter of interest that I want to be careful not to skip over. Although I’ve chosen these first 26 verses for our focus today, the story is far from over, isn’t it?
Verse 27 says, “And at this point His disciples came…” Some translations say “Just then…” The language used there is very specific and John points out that it was at that very moment that the disciples arrived.
Remember when I talked earlier of Jesus coming to the well and being alone at just the perfect time to have this conversation with this woman? This is just another example of the divine perfection of His timetable.
He has gone through this entire discourse without interruption and drawing this woman into belief with His words and the things He has shown her… then just as He gets to this all-important punch line, if you will, of the conversation; the very claim that confirms to her that she has met the Christ, the disciples walk up ‘at that very moment’ and they could not have missed it!
Can you envision it? Here they come up the road from Sychar with their little deli bags with pastrami sandwiches, kosher pickles and coleslaw, and they can see that Jesus is sitting by the well and He is apparently talking to this Samaritan woman, and they are wondering about this and perhaps asking themselves if their eyes are deceiving them, and just as they get within ear shot they hear, “I know that Messiah is coming, (He who is called Christ), when that One comes, He will declare all things to us”. “I who speak to you am He”.
Is it any wonder that no one asked Him “Why do you speak to her?”?
Can you see yet another barrier beginning to come down there?
So the woman leaves her water pot, runs into the city and humbly makes a suggestion to the men there that ‘Hmmm… this man I met at Jacob’s well told me all about myself. Do you think this could be the Messiah everyone’s been waiting for?’
And they went out to see for themselves and they believed, and this whole Samaritan village becomes believers in Jesus as the Messiah and the Savior of the world (verse 42), and the barriers are just tumbling down all over the place, aren’t they?
So much more can be said from this passage and this single account from the ministry of Jesus. It has to be one of the greatest stories in the New Testament.
“He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.” (1:11-12)
THE GOD/MEN BARRIER
Jesus breaks down barriers my friends and family. He does so in human relationships and He breaks down barriers that are established by false religion and the self-serving traditions of men. Most importantly, He has torn down the barrier that existed between men and the Father and by His own blood has reconciled us to God.
He made Jew and Gentile into one group before the Throne of Heaven, and having broken down the barrier between us, then reconciled us to the Father.
“But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity.
Do you want to know why Jesus ‘needed’ to pass through Samaria?
It was the same reason He ‘needed’ to become flesh and dwell among us.
Because Jesus doesn’t cut a wide swath around us and go His way. He is not hindered by barriers of prejudice and sin and hatred and law and tradition and the expectations of men.
Jesus meets us where we are, gives us life, opens our eyes, heals our hearts and reconciles us to God. No barriers.
There is nothing now standing in the way to hinder you from worshiping and glorifying the God of Heaven and earth, who made you and called you to Him by His grace.
So next time we meet we will learn what it is to worship in spirit and in truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
