Many levels are evident in this account. Unfortunately, the story is very often imagined to be just a personal conversion incident. However, much more lies within its lineaments. Too often we focus on the woman. What if we rather look at Jesus, see what he is doing for a change, see what the Father is doing, and understand the significance of what they are doing.Jesus 'must needs go through Samaria'. A strange statement because most Jews must needs never go through Samaria. If you were a pious Jewish Rabbi, you went the long way around Samaria and avoided going through the accursed place. Samaritans were heretics and accursed! Jesus waits in the heat of the day for a woman, this woman who is going to be bear testimony to his character in the city of Sychar, a ritually unclean place. But, this Rabbi, was concerned always to be doing the will of the One who sent him (v 34).
Jesus asks for a drink, which on the surface of things seems so pedestrian and trivial. However, with St John, every detail is important. The seen and the unseen things are intertwined but it is the unseen (the spiritual, the things of the Spirit) that one must understand in order to comprehend what Jesus is doing.
Jesus innocently asks for water but he quickly moves to distance his request from the water in Jacob's well. The water is Jesus Himself who is the salvation of the world (including accursed Samaritans in Sychar). The woman's attempts to treat him like a crazy Jew who doesn't know the proper manners of the time and embroil him in a Jewish-Samaritan argument gets derailed with Jesus moving from water to truthful worship that eclipses either Samaritan or Jewish worship. He then moves further when she asks about Messiah to reveal himself as that One.
The growing spiritual awakening of this woman prompts her to go and share what she knows with those in the city. A correspondent recently, quoting William Law, said that Christians are those who have died, gone to heaven and returned with good news!! It seemed the case with this woman. She had experienced the true living water with Jesus, the heavenly water, and went off impelled to share what she now had experienced.
Many of the Samaritans came to believe in our Lord as the Saviour of the world firstly because of the testimony of the woman but eventually because of hearing Jesus' own words during the two days he stayed with them. So the Word made flesh 'tabernacles' as the true temple of God with these outcast people bringing Himself as their salvation because God wants all to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
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