Turn your Bibles please to John, beginning at the first verse.
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John—although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples—he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. He had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sicar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s Well was there, and Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink,” for his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Lord, let your word illuminate our hearts. Let it encourage us and strengthen us in faith even as we hear your truths, truths which are not what the world wishes to be true. Help us to receive what you teach in all that you said, to see it for what it is and why it is, to understand you and your purposes better so that we may live faithfully in response to you. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So following the first three chapters of John’s gospel, we experience a significant transition in the evangelist’s presentation. The first three chapters were principally a theological record about places that Jesus went, some of the things he did early on in his ministry, and what those things meant. But apart from Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, the early part of this gospel does not cover Jesus’s teaching ministry with any great detail—merely a few simple statements made in uniquely specific contexts in calling some disciples during a wedding and then at a festival in a very crowded place.
So most of the introduction has been taken up by the evangelist’s explanation of who Jesus is. Yet now, as we move forward in this gospel, John will become more focused on stories about Jesus. He will give us his recollection of Jesus’s words and deeds, presenting them to us as evidence in support of his ultimate and original thesis that Jesus is the Logos who is Theos and Anos—both God the Son and the Son of Man, the one who is above all and the Redeemer of all God’s elect children.
Continuing on, this first narrative that John presents follows close upon the Baptist’s explanation about the difference between himself and Jesus; that he, Jesus, must increase, but that I, John, must decrease. This next story will be very familiar to everyone who has been in the Christian faith for a long time; it’s the story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. But perhaps we do not know the story as well as we think.
We know that it is not just a story because Jesus shares several important spiritual truths through his words and by his conversation with the woman. Jesus is teaching theology; he’s teaching us to think through certain things theologically while keeping our spiritual focus on the Lord God. We will consider these different points over the next several weeks, but today will be more of an overview as we consider the story’s purpose and its context.
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John—although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples—he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. He had to pass through Samaria. To address the elephant in the room, when we remember that John’s gospel was written last and was written later in the first century, likely after Peter and Paul had died in Rome, the evangelist here makes an important and necessary clarification that Jesus himself did not baptize.
Remember Paul? He admonished the Corinthians, saying, “I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.” He says this because he identified the division within the Corinthian Church as being related to the question of who baptized whom, a matter of superiority debates based entirely upon which specific church leader a person followed.
Today, we still risk turning our church heroes into idols, whether it’s John Calvin, John Wesley, John Piper, John MacArthur, or Billy Graham. Can you imagine how bad things could have gotten if a baptismal hierarchy was carried to the furthest degree? If the person who baptized affected its effectiveness, then who might have been the best person to be baptized by? “I mean, I was baptized by John the Baptist. I was baptized by Apollos, not bad! I was baptized by Cephas, by Peter the Apostle! Yeah, well I got you all beat because I was baptized by Jesus himself way back when at the very start of things.”
How bad might that be? I mean, a person arguing that might well try to claim great honor for themselves because they were baptized by Jesus. That’s why we need to remember the difference between John’s baptism and the post-resurrection baptism commanded to the disciples and the whole church.
John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance, a public profession of one’s sinfulness and a confessed desire to live a changed life for God’s glory. The person being baptized would confess their sins and profess contrition for their transgressions against God and man. Whereas Christian baptism is a visible sign and a spiritual seal of a person’s admission into covenant with God—or, at least, their anticipated hope for admission in the case of believers’ children.
Whereas the one baptized, the church, confessed that the person being baptized is being received into the family as a child of God, professing them baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, therefore being united in Christ.
So, you see, there is a different question here that needs to get brought to attention because of this. When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John, the evangelist implies that Jesus’s impetus for traveling north was his knowledge that the Pharisees had heard.
So what? Why did it matter that the Pharisees knew what Jesus was doing? Might they come out and try to stop him? Might they listen and decide to follow him? Might they infiltrate and corrupt or disrupt his ministry, sowing tears among the wheat? Might they be the righteous willing not his intended audience since he was sent to heal the wickedly sick? Or might it have been something else? We cannot really know for certain, but remembering that the Pharisees had gone out to inquire of the Baptist concerning his spiritual identity back in the first chapter, we can well understand that Jesus was not ready to answer the same questions yet, for his hour had not yet come.
I mean, Jesus was ready to show them who he is, but he was not yet ready to say who he is to them. Jesus was becoming more popular and more influential than the Baptist, so if they had subjected John to such an interrogation, then surely they would have done the same, if not more so, to Jesus. If Jesus had been asked directly at this point in his ministry, like the Pharisees’ representatives who asked John, “Who are you? Are you Elijah? Are you the prophet? Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” Then Jesus would have had no choice except to answer them truthfully and clearly by affirming, “Yes, I am the Christ.”
But since Jesus could not have lied—for if he gave false testimony about himself, not admitting it, he would have given false testimony about God—he would have violated the ninth commandment and would become a sinner. So I suggest that it was to preserve his sinless virtue that Jesus and his company left Judea and departed again for Galilee.
Then he had to pass through Samaria—except he didn’t have to travel down that route because there were other available options. So if Jesus had to, that means he needed to because of his divine purpose. Why was traveling that route a big deal for Jesus? Well, it was the shortest and most direct route between Jerusalem and Galilee, requiring only about three days of travel by foot. But it was more dangerous and inhospitable than the eastern route through Perea and the Decapolis, a route which avoided Samaria by going around it to the west of the Jordan River.
This longer eastern route, which took about five to six days, was safer because there were many Jewish communities there friendly towards pilgrims. Whereas the shorter route was dangerous because there was—and still is—a deep-seated animosity between the Samaritans and the Jews.
While we are often reminded about this issue whenever we consider the parable of the Good Samaritan, we usually gloss over the depth of their animosity. There are many reasons explaining the negative relationship between Jews and Samaritans, and I’m certain that each part plays a role.
The division and hatred between the two peoples is a product of ethnic discrimination, racism, cultural and political differences, and religious deviations. This problem goes way back to the time of the Divided Kingdom when the Northern portion commonly called Israel came to be called Samaria. After Samaria fell to the Assyrian Empire in 722 BC, most of the populace was removed and replaced with transplants from elsewhere. Over time, the few remaining Israelites and these foreigners intermarried and syncretized their culture and religion.
Later, after the Southern Kingdom fell in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians similarly removed the people of Judah, although they left the land desolate. When the Judeans returned after the Babylonian exile, their relations with their Samaritan neighbors to the north— their cousins—were very strained. The Jews considered the Samaritans to be impure half-Jews because of their mixed ethnic heritage and kept themselves separate from them because, in their opinion, Samaritan religion was corrupt as opposed to the pure, true Jewish faith centered around Jerusalem.
Although that alone would be enough to explain their rivalry, their relationship got even worse over the passage of time. During the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews and Samaritans were effectively equal social rivals in the land. But after the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great and his empire collapsed and divided, Judea experienced alternating periods of autonomy and subjugation. This allowed for a Jewish resurgence, and the Hasmonean dynasty rose to power after securing Jewish independence from the Seleucid Empire. They began a systematic program of conquest to reclaim all of Israel’s former territory through resettlement and immigration.
This included persecution and prosecution against the Samaritan people, forcing their conversion to Jewish orthodoxy. John Hyrcanus, the Jewish high priest, affected the destruction of the Samaritans’ temple to Yahweh located on Mount Gerizim around 110 BC, during which the reconsolidation of Jerusalem’s priority in religion was being built up.
But after the Jewish state surrendered their independence to Rome, the Samaritans remained a marginalized people. They were an oppressed ethnic and religious minority segregated in the midst of a larger ethnic and religious minority who were limited in authority and autonomy. This Samaritan social status fueled regional strife and violence against Jews wandering in Samaria, worsening the generational ethnic conflict.
Lastly, the root cause of their strife was their differences in religion. Both Jews and Samaritans believed that they were worshiping the same God, Yahweh, and that each alone worshiped him properly as commanded by his word. This religious division, their schism, went back to the division of the kingdom during the reign of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. After Jeroboam split away the ten northern tribes, he created two worship sites in competition with Jerusalem: one in Dan and one in Bethel, where he raised up an idol of a golden calf at each site and implied that those idols were Israel’s hereditary God, Yahweh. Then we see during the days of Ahab and Jezebel, the worship of Baal and Asherah rising and ascendant as the worship of Yahweh.
After the Assyrians imported foreigners and they mingled with the remaining Israelites, the Samaritan religion evolved again into this final form by the first century. The scripture used by the Jews was the Torah, the law, the prophets, and the writings. The Samaritans only accepted the Pentateuch, the law, but their version of the Torah was very different from the modern Hebrew text, around which 6,000 variations have been identified.
However, both sides still claimed the same antiquity for their texts, the same divine inspiration of their Torah, the same God Yahweh, and the same rightness of their religion, and similarly condemned the other because of their corruption of the Mosaic text. Particularly noteworthy are two added provisions to the Decalogue supporting the divine command to build an altar on Mount Gerizim rather than Mount Ebal and to worship there perpetually as the place of God’s choosing.
This doctrinal difference concerning where to worship God defined their religious division. Both sides claimed some of scripture, but each believed that the other’s text was false. When Hyrcanus destroyed the unorthodox Samaritan temple, that was an act of religious oppression cementing the Jews and Samaritans in permanent division.
All of those historical reasons for generational animosity and their scriptural differences are what define the social context into which Jesus was now intentionally traveling—into by going to Samaria.
So when we consider the story’s glory, we need to remember this volatile environment that Jesus was walking into. He came to a town of Samaria called Sicar near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s Well was there, and Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. Now this town of Sicar is today known as Nablus, but in even more ancient Biblical times was called Shechem.
Shechem has a long history in redemptive history. It cannot be a coincidence that Jesus stopped here to rest, especially because Jews who did travel this route ordinarily tried to cross all of Samaria in one day to avoid stopping in what they perceived as unclean lands.
Shechem was where Abraham first paused upon his arrival to Canaan. The Lord appeared to him there, and he built an altar. After Jacob returned to Canaan from his time in Haran, he bought property outside of Shechem and settled there. After the exodus from Egypt and the Canaanite conquest, Shechem was included as part of the tribe of Ephraim’s territory, and the bones of Joseph, Jacob’s son, were entombed there. Then Shechem was also the initial capital of Northern Israel under Jeroboam, which would become Samaria.
So Jesus stopping here was surely intentional. Shechem was important to the Samaritans, Shechem was important to the Jews, which makes it important to Jesus. It was important enough for him to go where he was neither expected nor wanted.
Jesus arrived in Samaria and rested beside Jacob’s Well. Then, the story becomes rather weird. I think that weirdness is what leads us to the whole point of John including the story.
See, Jesus was traveling through Samaria, a region avoided by devout Jews unless circumstances absolutely required it. Jews and Samaritans did not engage with one another socially; they both preferred to maintain their separateness. Then Jesus engages with a woman privately yet in a public circumstance, something which would not be considered proper social conduct between any man and a woman who is not his wife—especially between a Jewish man, a Jewish rabbi, and a Samaritan woman.
These three points are so unusual, so unlikely, and so unexpected that they could cast doubt upon whether the entire exchange happened. The story is just too unbelievable. That’s what makes it so strange that we must accept it as the truth, as having happened precisely as John records, because it’s too weird to have been made up.
The truth really is stranger than fiction. This story could not and would not have been fabricated by someone with the evangelist’s Jewish background; it went against all common practice and convention. Furthermore, it was an unusual story. If this unusual story was completely unique, then it might be dismissible.
But Jesus’s frequent treatment of people who are considered outcasts, his outreach to the marginalized, and his lack of concern for unnecessary social norms and conventions—like sharing meals with people considered sinners and unclean—all demonstrate that this story is well within Jesus’s character and the scope of his common practice.
That’s why we should receive and believe this story, which is why we shall pay such close attention to the spiritual matters that Jesus and this woman will discuss sitting there beside Jacob’s well.
As we continue to study and examine the spiritual truths they discuss in this conversation, we should be confident and secure in our faith. The moral of the story that we should take from this brief overview is that Jesus intentionally went where he was unwanted and unwelcomed without fear.
He went at risk to himself—physical risk due to Samaritan animosity against Jews, social risk because of the Jews’ racist attitudes towards the Samaritans, and the perceived spiritual risk because the people of the land were ritually unclean and Jesus risked contamination by contact. But Jesus went into and through Samaria because he considered the Samaritans to be more important and more worthy to hear the gospel he had to share than preserving his own life.
He went to Samaria to bring a message of hope, peace, love, and reconciliation with the Lord to a people who did not understand how much they needed him. Jesus was living out the gospel, that God shows his love to us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Jesus went to a people not his own before his own even rejected him to show us that God the Son did come into the cosmos for all nations and all peoples.
How then do we live in response? How shall we go where we, in Christ, are unwelcome or unwanted to shine his light in that darkness? We must go out into the world—but especially out into the local world right here around us. Foreign missions like our ministry with Etienne in Sierra Leone are great and wonderful works for Christ. National missions, like our work with Samaritan’s Purse, are great partnerships with fellow American Christians.
But local missions, local engagement in the different communities of Richland County and across Ohio, are where we may make the greatest, longest-lasting, and most substantial impact.
We can hear testimonials from people we have personally helped or engaged with. We get to see the transformation of individual lives and experience the social improvement. So what risks are we—are you—personally willing to take to share the message and love of Jesus Christ with others? Do we fear men who can only kill the body more than we fear the God who has saved and redeemed our souls? Where are we willing to go at some risk of personal cost to love others for Christ, to agape in the name of Jesus?
I would challenge us and remind us all to remember that every time we step out of our front door, we are truly standing in the mission field. Let us remember that everyone, everyone needs Jesus. We should not and cannot deny anyone the opportunity to meet him.
Let us go where we might otherwise feel like we should not or could not go, going without fear and carrying the hope of Jesus’s love for us and our neighbors.
Let us go now in the love of God and our shared love for all of our neighbors, taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to them, no matter who they are. Let us tell everyone about how Jesus loves them so much that he lived, died, rose again, and now reigns in heaven for them so that they may be reconciled to God and to one another—justified in his sight and received as his beloved children to enjoy him forever.
Let us tell them about this great gift of grace that they may receive, if they would only turn to him in repentance and faith, if they would only believe and trust him.
Let us tell them about the new life, the transformed and changed life of righteousness, obedience, and love that we now walk in—living in the loving glory of God’s presence, because that is good news worth sharing.
So let us take it where it’s needed most, everywhere we go, but especially to the places that we might think of as hard.
Please stand and let us say what we believe using the words of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe…”