The Pharisees in Judea know Jesus is baptizing more disciples than John. Jesus has higher priorities right now than directly engaging the Pharisees. He wants to train his disciples and minister to needy souls he encounters.
He heads for Galilee. The shortest route from Judea is through the enemy territory of Samaria. Samaritans and Jews cannot stand each other, so the last place the Pharisees would go in search of Jesus would be Samaria.
He comes to Jacob’s well and sits down to rest. His disciples head for town to buy food. Jesus is alone at the well. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Jesus says to her:
“Give me a drink of water” (4:7).
This is a command, not a request, and another hint about perfect unity with Jesus: unity is not only opening our hearts to the Son of God; it is about giving back to Jesus, too! Do we ever think of him as thirsty from the agony we put him through even today? He commands us to give him a drink – perhaps to encourage him that we are really listening and obeying him.
The woman is stunned that a Jewish man would speak to a Samaritan woman. But Jesus replies:
“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” (4:10).
Jesus can see that the woman is completely mystified, so he adds:
“…whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water…will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (4:14).
Still clueless, the woman has no idea what eternal life means, but she desires the water Jesus is offering so that she might no longer be forced to come to the well to draw water every day. Her cluelessness is about to dissolve into belief, but the connection with Jesus cannot be made without honesty and truth. To allow this to happen, Jesus gives her three rapid-fire additional commands:
“Go, call your husband, and come here” (4:16).
The woman chooses repentance instead of disunity by simply being honest with Jesus and telling him the truth that she does not have a husband, to which Jesus affirms that she has had five husbands and is currently living with another man not her husband.
The door to perfect unity with Jesus swings wide open, not only to the person who obeys the Law of Moses but has no faith, but to the sinner Samaritan who simply tells the truth.
The woman wants to know how to worship, since Samaritans and Jews are so different.
In response, Jesus ushers her personally into the Kingdom of God with words that define the perfect unity we should strive for every hour of every day:
“…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers 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” (4:23-24).
The woman then asks whether Jesus might be the Messiah, whom both Samaritans and Jews await. Jesus answers:
“I who speak to you am he” (4:26).
How does Messiah see the disagreements between Samaritans and Jews back then, or today between Presbyterians and Reformed and Lutherans and Methodists and Catholics and Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox – need I go on? In our disunity, we are not where Messiah resides or where the door to perfect unity opens! It is on the knees of repentance for anything that is not pure worship of Jesus as Lord and Savior by admitted sinners, which includes all of us, including sectarian rulers, in unity.
The hour is coming, and is now here, to elevate the dialog of disunity among Christian churches, which need to be not islands of separation, but a true congregation of worship in spirit and truth. This is not to change subculture in the church. It is only to recognize that we can reach so many more souls if we worship and work together, preaching what we all know to be true in Christ.
The devil could never stand this kind of perfect unity.
In Part 2, we will see how this incredible transformed woman outshines the disciples, who are now the clueless ones!