She came to the well at noon to avoid people. Jesus was waiting: the Samaritan woman in John 4

It was about noon, the hottest part of the day, when a woman came alone to draw water from Jacob’s well. Most women drew water in the cool of the morning or evening, together. At the well sat a Jewish man, tired from travelling. He asked her for a drink.

The story of the Samaritan woman in John 4 is one of the longest conversations Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels.

Barriers and living water

The woman was surprised. Jews and Samaritans did not associate with each other, and a Jewish teacher speaking alone with a woman was unusual. “How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria?” Jesus crossed ethnic, religious and gender barriers with a single request. Jesus told her that if she knew who was asking, she would ask him, and he would give her “living water”. Whoever drinks ordinary water will thirst again, he said, but the water he gives becomes “a well of water springing up into everlasting life”.

She asked for this water, still thinking of wells and buckets.

Her story and worship

Jesus asked her to call her husband. She said she had none. Jesus told her she had had five husbands and that the man she now lived with was not her husband. He spoke plainly, but without condemnation. Many readers see in her noon visit a woman avoiding the judgement of her neighbours. The woman raised a religious debate: Samaritans worshipped on their mountain, Jews in Jerusalem. Jesus answered that the time was coming when true worshippers would worship the Father “in spirit and in truth”, regardless of place.

The first evangelist

When she spoke of the coming Messiah, Jesus said, “I that speak unto thee am he.” It is one of the clearest statements of his identity in the Gospel of John, and it was made to a Samaritan woman with a complicated past. The woman left her water pot and ran into the town: “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did.” Many Samaritans believed because of her words and came to hear Jesus themselves.

The water pot

The story shows that no one is outside the reach of God’s grace. It shows Jesus seeking out a person others avoided. And it shows how one changed life can lead a whole town to faith. She came for water and left without it. The pot she abandoned at the well is a small detail, and many preachers see it as the whole sermon: she had found something she needed more.