There are two New Testament encounters between Jesus and an unnamed woman that, every time I hear them, speak to my very core. I just love these two encounters, and I love when my quiet times and my sermon preparations lead me to preach either of these two passages. One of them is the encounter between Jesus and the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years. The other is the passage we’re going to look at today that many of you have probably heard before: Jesus and the woman at the well.
I’m going to be in John 4:7-26, and we’re going to look at who Jesus says He is through this encounter with the Samaritan woman, and how we respond to who He says He is.
“A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. So the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus replied to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” (vv. 7-10).
Let’s pause right there because I want to start to break this down part by part so we can build on it as we read the rest of the passage. We need to know first that what Jesus says here about Himself is that He is the one who gives LIVING WATER. As we read, we’ll see that for the most part, this is a really cryptic and mysterious thing that Jesus said to her that she doesn’t understand. Do we understand it? Do we understand what Jesus meant when He said that He is the giver of living water? What is living water?
Water is the most abundant resource found on earth, and good thing too, since it is a necessity for life. But, in places like the Middle East, and here in New Mexico, where water is a rare and precious resource, we understand, possibly better than some, how important it is and devastating it is when water is in short supply. People in ancient times in the Middle East lived close to a water source, would dig wells and channels to get water to go where they needed it. The central role that water played in their every day lives was so prevalent that in literature, water became an archetype. It served as an image that reoccured throughout the stories people would tell, and many times, that image would be used to explain a complicated idea.
Water appears in many common expressions we use even today: when I smell some good food it makes my mouth water; or, that’s water under the bridge; or don’t water the message down; a stream of light; it’s raining cats and dogs; or a baby shower. Water imagery is everywhere.
This is no less true of the Bible. Water is used as an image everywhere in the Bible, Old and New Testament. Many times, when water is given as a symbol in the Bible, it is an image of God’s revelation and salvation. The images of water reveal God’s character, and shows how salvation and deliverance only come from God. For instance, Psalm 1:3 talks about a person who is rooted firmly in God, that they will bear great fruit like a tree planted by flowing streams. In this psalm, the flowing stream is a symbol for God’s power to purify and transform lives. In Revelation, John gives an image of a river of the water of life pouring out from the throne of God, a symbol of God’s life giving words. In Psalm 46, the river mentioned stands for God’s continual outpouring of grace toward His people.
So, many water images in the Bible reveal God’s character in some way or reveal His salvation in some way. Jesus is surely using “living water” in this way. He is calling Himself the giver of living water. He is the giver of living water, so He is the one who reveals to us the character of God, the grace of God, the mercies of God, and the salvation of God.
Jesus was certainly revealing these things to the Samaritan woman at the well when He told her that He is the giver of living water. She needed living water. What she had is what is described in Jeremiah 2:13, “For My people have committed two evils: They have abandoned Me, the fountain of living waters, to carve out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that do not hold water.” The woman at the well had a broken jar that did not hold water.
This would have to change if the woman at the well was going to come to faith in Jesus. The Samaritan woman had some barriers that kept her from seeing the revelation Jesus was making about Himself and God, and those barriers would have to be broken down before she would come to faith in Him. Thankfully, the living water that Jesus gives not only reveals the Father and the salvation He offers, but the living water He gives also breaks down barriers we might have that keep us from being firmly planted in Him. Think of what a river does over time to rock. Rock seems immovable, like it takes a great force for it to be broken down. But water cuts through rock like no other natural force.
What’s important about who Jesus reveals Himself to be to the woman at the well isn’t just that He reveals the character of God to the woman, or that He revealed to her the path to salvation, but that He also removed all the barriers she had to prevent her from coming to that saving faith in the Lord who loved her deeply. The good news is that He does this for us, too.
Look again at verses 7-10, “A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. So the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus replied to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
Here’s the first barrier the woman was dealing with: a RELIGIOUS barrier. She was a Samaritan, Jesus was Jewish. We’re told that Jews do not associate with Samaritans. This went back some time, to shortly after the kingdom of Israel split into two kingdoms: the northern kingdom of Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah. The southern kingdom remained faithful to their worship of the Lord for most of its history, but the northern kingdom did not. Instead of returning to Jerusalem to worship at the temple of the Lord and to offer sacrifices, they built their own temple in Samaria. Their worship of the Lord became polluted and mixed with idol worship, and eventually their worship of the Lord was abandoned all together.
But, they were still considered part of God’s people. They were still Jewish, after all. Until the northern kingdom was taken over by Assyria, and the people mingled with the Assyrians. They were no longer Jewish people, not in religion, and not in nationality. To the Jewish people, Samaritans were impure, unclean. They believed that their spiritual impurity could be spread, like spiritual germs, so Jewish people avoided Samaritan people at all costs.
Samaritans worshiped, but they did not know who to worship. In fact, Jesus saw this about the woman. “The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and yet you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.” Jesus said to her, “Believe Me, woman, that a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews.” (19-22)
Jesus saw her heart, saw that she had a desire to worship, saw that her people had a desire to worship, but just didn’t know who to worship. Their hearts, like so many, recognized the God-shaped hole they had in their lives, but filled it with worshiping all the wrong things.
When Jesus saw that this was her hang-up, that she was stuck in her own religion, He offered a solution, “But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (23-24) The fix to her hang-up, the way that living water would break through the barrier of religion was to worship the Father in SPIRIT and truth. He told her that this was how true worshipers would worship.
Worshiping in spirit and truth is only possible by worshiping the One who Jesus says is spirit, and is the source of truth. Those who worship in spirit and truth worship not just with words or thoughts or mere emotion, they worship with their innermost self, their whole hearts. True worship engages the mind, emotions, heart, and causes us to worship as one who is without any falseness or hypocrisy in our worship. True worship is worship that encompasses everything that we are in devotion to the One who is spirit and truth.
This is the same solution to anyone who comes out of any sort of religious background that is opposite of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The only way to come out of the falseness and apathy of other religions is to worship the Father in spirit and truth.
Let’s look at the next barrier she had to coming to faith in Jesus. “She said to Him, “Sir, You have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do You get this living water? 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?” Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw water.” (11-15)
The woman at the well still doesn’t quite understand what Jesus is revealing to her about Himself, but she’s still asking questions, she’s still engaging and has an open heart, ready to listen, and those are the kinds of people Jesus loved to interact with.
She talks about Jacob, who dug the well she was drawing water from, the well Jesus wanted to drink from. This goes all the way back to Genesis, and what the woman is pointing to is the beginning of the fulfillment of the covenant God gave to Abraham.
The covenant, just as a reminder, was the promise from God to Abraham to make him a great nation, to make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand in the ground. The Samaritans recognized that God began to really follow through with the promise through Jacob who had 12 sons, one of whom made God’s people very prosperous and well-respected for a time in Egypt. Jacob was seen as sort of a new direction of the covenant to Abraham, so to be greater than Jacob, like the woman says, would mean that Jesus would be a greater fulfillment of the covenant.
“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.” Jesus said to her, “I am He, the One speaking to you.” (25-26)
The One she was waiting for, the One she believed would set everything straight, the One who would be greater than Jacob, the One who would be a greater fulfillment of the covenant was the Messiah. And Jesus is He.
The second barrier the woman was dealing with was a barrier of identity. Not necessarily her identity alone, but the identity of her people, not just Samaritans, but Jews as well. They had many “faith giants”, as you can see in Hebrews 11. They had these strong people to look up to, people who had walked with God and been a part of His promises. Their national identity in many ways was tied up in who they thought they were because of their great ancestors: Abraham, Jacob, David. What they had learned about themselves through these great ancestors shaped their conceptions of who Messiah would be. They thought He would be a prophet, a king, a priest, but they didn’t expect the Son of God, in the flesh, a spiritual leader, not a political leader. So many Jewish people missed that He is the Messiah because they were so wrapped up in their tradition and their identity through those traditions, especially what those traditions taught about the Messiah.
Jesus’s fix for this was to focus on His identity. Not what tradition said about who He should be, but to focus on who He actually is. The same holds true today. We can get caught up in all different types of identities. We can form our own identity based off everyone else’s opinion, my own opinion, and then forget to ask God what He thinks of us! We can form our identity through things like our nation, our culture, our family, our education, our sexuality even, and people make themselves all about these things. But the key to coming to faith in Jesus is to focus on who He is, not on who we think we are. If we can’t let the living water of Jesus break through this identity barrier, we will find ourselves always at odds with the gospel, because the message of Jesus isn’t about me and who I am, it’s about who He is and what He has done. We must stop identifying ourselves with anything or anyone except Jesus Christ.
Here’s the last barrier the woman was dealing with in this passage, “He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered and said to Him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this which you have said is true.” (16-18)
This is the SIN barrier. The woman knew her truth, she knew that she had not been living a pure life, but she didn’t reveal that to Jesus. She didn’t lie, but she also didn’t tell Him the full truth. No doubt there was some shame in her heart, guilt over her life choices. Why else would she be coming to draw water from the well in the hottest part of the day when no one else would be around? She would have been looked down on, even by her own people who were looked down on themselves.
But Jesus saw her heart. As we saw last week, His desire is not to condemn, but to forgive our sins and be the object of our faith and worship. After He declared Himself to indeed the One she was looking for, the One greater than Jacob, she said, “Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty,” She still misunderstood, like we so often do at first when we come to Jesus, but with this desire to have more of what Jesus offers because He is clearly greater than all she begins her faith journey.
She knew He saw her sins completely, and even says later in the story that Jesus was the one who told her everything she had ever done. Yet she returned to Him, excited about what He had shown her, not because she felt condemned, but because, perhaps for the first time in a long time, she felt like she had been seen for who she truly was and loved deeply.
Sin is a barrier we all have to let the living water crash through, and the only way to do that is to place our FAITH in Jesus as the One who is truly greater than all.
We’ve all likely struggled with barriers like this, we’ve all come from some sort of a religious background, even if you had no religion, we’ve all tied our identities to all the wrong things, we’ve all sinned. The living water that is a gift of God will break down all these barriers, but that requires turning to Jesus and placing our lives completely in His hands.
1. Which of these barriers have you identified at some point in your life? Do you still struggle with remnants of these barriers from time to time?
2. The woman’s understanding of God and faith in Jesus was very basic. We don’t see what happened to her after this encounter, but it’s clear that her life was changed. What was the first thing she did after beginning to understand who Jesus really is?
3. Those who worship in spirit and truth worship not just with words or thoughts or mere emotion, they worship with their innermost self, their hearts. True worship engages the mind, emotions, heart, and causes us to worship as one who is without falseness. Reflect on your own worship. Is this your experience? If not, why not? Is there some change the Spirit is prompting you to make to experience more true worship?