Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman

I wonder if it made the Samaritan woman feel uncomfortable at first to see this lone Jewish man sitting on the well she would have to use to draw water. She may have hoped that he would move away, but he didn’t, so she had no choice but to go up to the well to get her water.

Have you ever been in one of those uncomfortable situations? You want to keep yourself to yourself. But the Lord loves people, all people. There’s no ranking system with God, that some people are better, He loved this mixed-race, mixed-religion woman and He respected and honored her.

What opportunity has God opened up for you, no matter how lowly, to talk about the Gospel? What kinds of people have you already decided you won’t be talking about Jesus with because they’re just too coarse, or they’re not too smart, or they’re too worldly?

Maybe you’ve told yourself they have their own religion already, leave well enough alone, or they have science, or they’re just not your kind of people. When do prejudices stand in your way and mine, in these uncomfortable situations?

If you’re the kind of person who lives an outwardly blameless life, how do you act around a person who doesn’t? Do you make them feel comfortable around you, or do they sense your disapproval?

Notice how Jesus reached out to her in such a simple and vulnerable way. He asked her for a drink of water. Though He is God, He is also a man, and He knew what it was to be hot and tired and thirsty, to have physical needs.

She was of course surprised that a Jewish person would talk to her, and here Jesus was also a man, that made it even more uncomfortable. I’d like to think she still poured Him a drink as she asked Him how He could possible by willing to drink from her unclean jug. Jesus had an even bigger surprise for her

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." (John 4:10)

That really took her aback!

What was Jesus talking about? Living water in ancient times meant fresh running water which remained healthy and pure, like a stream. Often water stored in cisterns would grow stagnant, so a source of fresh water was especially valued in the desert. But even wells could go bad or run dry, so a stream was the most valuable of all since it meant that there was a continuing source of water no matter how hot and dry the rest of the area got.

The prophet Jeremiah compared God to living water, and rejecting God for earthly sources of satisfaction as being like drinking stagnant water from broken cisterns.

declares the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12-12)

There are other Old Testament references to this idea of God being the source of fresh, pure living water, but since none of them are in the first five books of the Bible, the Samaritan woman would not have been familiar with this concept. Still, she might have remembered God's dealings with His people in the exodus, providing them with water whenever they needed it.

If this post got you to thinking, please leave a comment by clicking on the word "comments" below, and join the conversation

Background on Samaria

Ordinarily, most Jews of Jesus’ day, if they wanted to get to Galilee, took the long way around, six days on foot instead of two, so they wouldn’t have to go through Samaria.

A thousand years and more before Jesus’ time, the ten northern tribes of Israel had rebelled and started their own government, leaving only the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin as the "real Israel" under King David’s dynasty. The northern tribes rejected the Jerusalem temple worship and set up golden calves at their own shrines, in "holy cities" of their own making.

Three hundred years later the Assyrians came in and wiped out the northern kingdom, took the people captive, and sent in their own people to repopulate the devastated area. You can read the whole story in 2 Kings 17. Hundreds of years after that, when the Jews came back to Judah to rebuild the temple, they would not let the Samaritans help them and forbade intermarriage with the Samaritans.

For the next 450 years the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other. The Samaritan built their own temple on their own mountain, Mt. Gerizim, in the historic area of Shechem where Jacob had originally pitched his tent and dug a well. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible as scripture, and they also worshiped five other deities besides Yahweh. They were a mixed-race people, part Hebrew and part Assyrian, and they had a mixed religion, like New Age today.

When Jesus and His disciples got to Jacob’s famous well, they decided to take a break. Jesus sat down to rest, and the disciples went into the nearest town to go buy some food. They probably passed by the woman with her water jug as they walked into the town of Sychar. Archeologists show there was another well in town, but she was walking the extra half mile every day out of town to go to Jacob’s well, probably because of her low reputation amongst the other town members.

If this post got you to thinking, please leave a comment by clicking on the word "comments" below, and join the conversation

Jesus: A Divine Conception

Somehow, under the direct action of the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, the second person of the Godhead, the Son, was implanted in Mary’s uterus. The Son of God is one person of the Godhead. As God He is eternal, He always existed. Jesus has the true divine nature.

Before there was anything, Jesus was with God, a distinct person in the Godhead, and He also was God. Yet now God the Son was about to take on human flesh, and become what we understand as the God-Man who lives forever, equally God, equally man. He became a baby, a tiny being growing inside Mary. He was born in the way babies are born.

Jesus' human nature had the limitations of normal humanity, except He was completely without sin. Jesus has a true human nature that is perfectly united with His divine nature.

It is a pivotal point in Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ story. Why a virgin birth? Was there a biological reason? A moral reason? All we can say is that in Genesis 3:15 God said the deliverer would come from the seed of the woman. This is the way God had always planned to give the world the Messiah.

When I was a young girl, there was an enormous social stigma attached to having a baby when you weren’t married. You got sent away to extended family, had the baby in secret, started another life, or gave the baby up for adoption, very privately. Children raised out of wedlock didn’t have the same legal rights as children born to or adopted by a married couple.

But right around the 1970's that all changed with abortion laws and the legalizing of all children’s rights, regardless of whether they were raised by a married couple. Today, thirty years later, Lots of single women actively pursue getting pregnant, there isn’t any stigma at all, it’s actually kind of popular, except in some conservative circles, so it’s harder to imagine what this must have been like.

But try.

Even though they were living in Nazareth, which was not as strong a religious community as Jerusalem, and was actually sort of a cosmopolitan trade center for its day, they were both godly people.

Try to think how difficult it must have been to face the family pressure, the social pressure, the disapproving stares when they attended synagogue.

The father is who?!

They never even had a big wedding, but hurried through a small private affair, just like a shotgun wedding. But both Mary and Joseph were convinced that God knew what He was doing, and would take care of them all along the way.

God often uses difficult circumstance to accomplish His will

* His will was to have His Son, the Son of God, be born to this little family, and He took care of them.

* His will is to make you like Jesus Christ. So He puts difficult people in your life to shave off your rough edges, to polish you and transform you.

* His will is to let others know about Him, and His will and His word, so He puts you together with people who need to hear about Him, maybe in your workplace or your neighborhood.

* His will is to show you His love and His grace, and He can only do that when He has your complete attention, so He often uses difficult circumstances to focus you.

What’s the difficulty in your life right now? I’d be surprised if there wasn’t at least one thing going on right now.

How willing are you to trust God, to have faith in Him, that He knows what He is doing, that He is good and loving and powerful enough to take care of you all along the way?

How willing are you to lean into the struggle and give it all you have, so that you will be cooperating with God as He accomplishes His purposes in you?

If this post got you to thinking, please leave a comment and join the conversation

Guest Book Review by Katie Phillips

I should know better than to read a book recommended by my pastor friend--I should know it'd involve way too much thinking.

Recently I finished "The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is" by NT Wright. I almost quit about 4 chapters in. I don't mind my understanding of what Scripture says being challenged-that can cause growth. But I wasn't sure I could go where Mr. Wright went.

He speaks of Jesus fulfilling the role of the Temple for Israel, and Israel being called to come to Him to meet with God instead. I get that. But what I struggled with was interpretations of passages that I always interpreted to refer to the Second Coming--Matthew 24 and Mark 13 for example.

Wright says they "denote major political or social upheaval..the son of man coming on the clouds would not be read, by a first century Jew as referring to a human being 'coming' downwards toward the earth riding on an actual cloud. It would be seen as predicting great events in and through which God would be vindicating his true people after their suffering."

Wright puts Jesus in the proper first century context and addresses how Jews of His day would've understood His words. He speaks of Israel still being in exile in Jesus' day and Jesus being the one to bring them back out of exile. Evidently what a first century Jew understood "messiah" to mean is different than a 21st century Christian. Probably not surprising, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, I'm glad I stayed the course and finished the book. Perhaps I have a better grasp on Jesus' role as a Jew. Although I had to reread several paragraphs more than once, and probably don't understand much of it, getting more of a feel for the Jewish culture into which Jesus was born was fascinating. And gray-matter stretching.