Enter the woman at the well

“Oh no,” she probably thought, as she approached the well with bucket in hand, “There’s some Jew guy at the well. Talk about a bad day! I suppose he’s there to make my life more miserable than it already is!”

Jesus pulled out an old great-commission trick from up His sleeve.

“Ma’am, would you be so kind as to give me a drink from the well?”

When we present ourselves as having a need, they tend to take down their defensive walls. Yet, her surprise provokes her to answer with a very Samaritan response:

“How is it that you would even utter a word in my direction, Sir? You Jews hate us Samaritans with a passion.”

Jesus does the normal Jesus thing, which is to not really answer the question. Rather, He says,

“If you only knew Who I am, I could give you living water.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I don’t see you even have a bucket. So, where you gonna get the water? Are you greater than Jacob who dug this well?”

I want to know who kept such good aquarial records so that 1830 years after the well was dug, people still knew who had put the shovel in the ground first!

Jesus, like I said, is not one much for direct answers:

“This well gives water that lets people get thirsty again. My water never ends, it quenches thirst forever.”

Now me, if I were her, I might have been a trace sarcastic, “So if you have thirst-ending water, how is it you are sitting here thirsty and bucketless? Huh? Huh?”

But no, she didn’t say that.

It turns out that, just as Jesus was thirsty, Ms. Sama was hungry, hungry for something real, something true, something eternal.