Sustained Relationship: John 4:4-29
Ordinary Time
August 2026
"Genuinely Curious" series
Jesus had to go through Samaria. 5 He came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, which was near the land Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there. Jesus was tired from his journey, so he sat down at the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came
to the well to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me some water to
drink.” 8 His disciples had gone into the city to
buy him some food.
9 The Samaritan woman
asked, “Why do you, a Jewish man, ask for something to drink from me, a
Samaritan woman?” (Jews and Samaritans didn’t associate with each other.)
10 Jesus
responded, “If you recognized God’s gift and who is saying to you, ‘Give
me some water to drink,’ you would be asking him and he would give you living
water.”
11 The woman said to
him, “Sir, you don’t have a bucket and the well is deep. Where would you get
this living water? 12 You aren’t greater than our
father Jacob, are you? He gave this well to us, and he drank from it himself,
as did his sons and his livestock.”
13 Jesus
answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but
whoever drinks from the water that I will give will never be thirsty again. The
water that I give will become in those who drink it a spring of water that
bubbles up into eternal life.”
15 The woman said to
him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will never be thirsty and will never
need to come here to draw water!”
16 Jesus said to
her, “Go, get your husband, and come back here.”
17 The woman replied, “I
don’t have a husband.”
“You are right to say, ‘I don’t have a
husband,’” Jesus answered. 18 “You’ve had five
husbands, and the man you are with now isn’t your husband. You’ve spoken the
truth.”
19 The woman said, “Sir,
I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors
worshipped on this mountain, but you and your people say that it is necessary
to worship in Jerusalem.”
21 Jesus said to
her, “Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you and your people will
worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You
and your people worship what you don’t know; we worship what we know because
salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the time is
coming—and is here!—when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The
Father looks for those who worship him this way. 24 God
is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said, “I
know that the Messiah is coming, the one who is called the Christ. When he
comes, he will teach everything to us.”
26 Jesus said to
her, “I Am—the one who speaks with you.”
27 Just then, Jesus’
disciples arrived and were shocked that he was talking with a woman. But no one
asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” 28 The
woman put down her water jar and went into the city. She said to the
people, 29 “Come and see a man who has told me
everything I’ve done! Could this man be the Christ?” (CEB)
The
first thing to know about this Scripture is that Jesus didn’t have to go
through Samaria. John’s Greek makes it seem
so; the word he uses is ἔδει (edei), which is also translated “should” or
“ought” or “need to.”[1] But it’s not a matter of Samaria being the
only route available. Jesus didn’t have
to go through Samaria in the literal sense that there was no other way to get
to where He was going; He needed to in the sense that part of the destination
was, actually, the journey itself.
Let’s
back up a moment for context. We’re in
the gospel of John, the one most concerned with signs as proof that Jesus is
not just a neat guy wandering around with pithy sayings but is actually God
incarnate. Previously on “The Gospel of
John,” Jesus has spent some time with His cousin, John the Baptist, getting a
feel for his teaching and how their ministries align. Then Jesus gets word that the main religious
sect of the day, the Pharisees, is also doing a lot of hands-on ministry
and He senses the need to get a move on—after all, Jesus has another 14
chapters’ worth of teaching to do before He can really get into a rumble with
the religious authorities. So Jesus
decides to go to Galilee, His home region, and kick about a bit there. Galilee is almost straight north from Judea,
where Jesus had been chilling with His cousin—but Samaria is in the way.
“Though
Samaria lies between Galilee and Judea on the West Bank of the Jordan,” writes
Allen Dwight Callahan, “Israelites from Galilee who worshiped in Jerusalem were
accustomed to crossing the Jordan twice to do an end-run around hated Samaritan
territory.”[2]
John
politely notes that “Jews and Samaritans didn’t associate with each other,” but
that’s like saying “it gets chilly in Duluth in January.” We of the modern age need don’t always
understand that the ferocity of the tension between Jews and Samaritans in the
gospels is not like a sports rivalry.
It’s tempting to draw that parallel, especially because some sports
rivalries are deep, but it’s not about opposing teams. It’s grounded in a wound that festered
because they were originally the same people; Samaria exists because of
fractures within the people of Israel several centuries before this story at a
well as communities were shifted around by war.
The Samaritans eventually felt separate enough to need their own system
of governance and worship—which the woman here references—and Jews fiercely
denounced the idea that true worship could be anywhere other than the Temple.[3] A couple hundred years before this story, the
Judean ruler John Hyrcanus burned the Samaritan temple to the ground.[4] There’s a reason that Jesus’ famous parable
about the good Samaritan centers who it does.
Samaritans weren’t just other, they were flat-out heretics,
shunned from larger Jewish society, hated and chased with slurs and derision
from the larger religious structure. The
tension is closer to that between progressive and MAGA Christians than the
Vikings and the Packers, is deeper even still in the pain and fear and anger of
it.
John
saying Jesus edei, “had to” go through Samaria is not, then, as simple
as it sounds. Miguel G. Echevarría writes that “the verb communicates the
‘eschatological necessity of God’s plan, especially in regard to the saving
work of Jesus.’ This sense fits with
Jesus’ mission to redeem the entire creation, including Sarmatians. No one is outside of Jesus’ redemptive
plan. That’s why ‘it was necessary’ for
him to go through Samaria.”[5]
The
place He stops at Samaria is also quite a choice—it’s Jacob’s well. You may remember it from a few Sundays ago
when we read about Jacob being a terrifically awkward human trying to woo Rachel
and succeeding despite himself. This is
that same well, guarded through the centuries and accruing legend and faith as
a touchpoint for the people’s history.
It’s a well of betrothals and flirting, and Jesus rocks up to ask this
woman who has no husband to give Him water.
Culturally, it’s Jesus sitting down at the bar next to a gal and asking
if He can buy her a drink.
The
woman says thanks, I’m good, and also what on earth are you doing asking me. Christian history has not been kind to this
woman in trying to explain why Jesus asking her is a red flag, usually
resorting to saying she’s had multiple husbands because she’s a hussy. Gail R. O’Day writes that “the popular
portrait of the woman in John 4 as a woman of dubious morals, guilty of
aberrant sexual behavior, derives from a misreading…There are many possible
reasons for the woman’s marital history, and one should be leery of the
dominant explanation of moral laxity…When interpreters speak of the woman as…a
‘tramp’…they are reflecting their own prejudices against women, not the views
of the text.”[6]
It’s
a fascinating rabbit hole to go down about what the exchange of the woman’s
various husbands could mean, but the point is this: Jesus is in a land where
people of His ilk don’t usually go, He’s standing at a well that has at least
betrothal if not romantic overtones, He’s talking to a woman who is wildly
off-limits for Him in several ways, and He says, “I am the Messiah.”
The
woman is having a heck of Tuesday, really.
We’ve
been walking through this series on how to have difficult conversations and how
to build bridges with genuine curiosity.
When Tyler and I were mapping it out, we both felt strongly that this
scene at the well was where we needed to go to figure out what that kind of
conversation should look like. In the
series, we’ve talked about how some conversations are non-starters and trying
to force them causes more harm than good; we’ve talked about how it’s important
to set boundaries so that it’s a conversation between equals instead of an
imbalanced drag; we’ve talked about how showing up with genuine earnestness
goes a long way; and we’ve talked about how we have to be ready for ourselves
to be changed by the conversations rather than deciding the other person is the
one doing all the changing. In this
scene, all of that goes into action.
Jesus goes to Samaria—where He didn’t have to go but chose to so
He could build relationship—because the conversation is worth it. The woman sets a boundary that Jesus respects
about how this is not a betrothal scene and she is not here for any ideas Jesus
might have about it. Jesus lays out the
woman’s history and she doesn’t flinch from it because she knows who she is—and
He doesn’t judge her for it, despite what many retellings of this story may
say. And even the disciples end up
changed by this, offsides Greek chorus that they are; they know better than to
tell Jesus He’s better than this gal because they’re starting to learn that
where Jesus goes, things shift.
“Community
can only be built when we are not afraid of overcoming old prejudices and are
willing to break the social conventions that dehumanize us,” writes Professor
Osvaldo Vena.[7] Jesus takes the first step of meeting the
woman on her own territory, but she is the one who has to accept that this
Jewish man is starting a conversation with her.
And conversation it is; this is the longest conversation Jesus has with
anyone in John. The woman gets to
respond, to ask questions, to challenge, because this isn’t a teaching or an
edict. Jesus genuinely wants to engage this
woman in this encounter that has so much stacked against it. Professor Karoline Lewis notes, “We are
living in a time when conversation needs to be cultivated and valued. Practiced
and pursued. Longed for and lived. Without real conversation, we lack intimacy
and understanding; connection and empathy. Without real conversation, we risk
detachment and distance.
“No wonder
Jesus engages in and insists on conversation when it comes to believing, since
believing in John’s Gospel is synonymous with relationship. It matters that
Jesus’ revelation of who he is to her and her realization of who he can be for
her happens in conversation. Their conversation is emblematic of what true
relationship looks like — mutuality, reciprocity, and regard.”[8]
Jesus’
example teaches us: show up in the places people tell you are beneath you
because there are people there, too, whom God loves. Bring people who support you so that you
aren’t walking into anything unsafe alone.
Invite people into conversation about shared connection points. Realize that stereotypes and prejudices are
not the full story about people. Listen
with an open heart instead of judgment.
Offer love freely.
Jesus
offers “living water,” a lovely concept in a desert and a beautiful thing even
here in the land of 10,000 lakes. He
offers it to someone His own friends would have told Him to pass by, and He offers
it. He’s not pouring it down her
throat, even if it is good for her. In
response, “The woman put down her water jar and went into the city. She said to
the people, ‘Come and see a man who has told me everything I’ve done! Could
this man be the Christ?’” She becomes
the evangelist to her people, a preacher of this good news that there is water
that quenches the thirst of the soul.
Jesus
didn’t have to go to Samaria, except that He did. He wasn’t going to change the world but
ignoring chunks of it. And we who are
learning to stretch forward in faith, beloved creatures that we are, follow—to
the places that other people tell us not to go, to the people that other people
tell us not to love, to tell the stories that other people tell us not to
share. We follow, vulnerable, aware,
hopeful, stepping along behind Jesus Who says, “Come; let Me show you how the
world can be.”
May we have
the courage to step into conversations of difference; may we have the wisdom to
protect ourselves and others; and may we have the faith to know that God is
with us in every encounter, loving us entirely, inviting us to drink of the
living water. Amen.
[2]
Callahan, “John,” in True to Our Native Land 2nd edition,
eds. Brian K. Blount et al. (Fortress Press, 2024), 203.
[3]
There are many places this is explained in greater detail, but I’m looking at
“Gospel of John” by Gail R. O’Day in Women’s Bible Commentary 3rd
edition, eds. Carol A. Newsom et al. (Westminster John Knox, 2012), 521.
[4]
Callahan, “John,” 203.
[5]
Echevarría, “Gospel
of John,” in The New Testament in Color, eds. Esau McCaulley et al. (InterVarsity
Press, 2024), 184.
[6]
O’Day, “Gospel of John,” 521.
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