Jesus · c. AD 27
Chapter 15
The Woman at the Well
Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again,but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
The had heard that was making and more than , though it was his disciples who did the baptizing, not Jesus himself. When the Lord learned that the Pharisees had heard this, he left and set out for .
He needed to go through , and so he came to , a town in Samaria, close to the piece of land that gave his son .
Jacob’s well was there. Jesus was tired from the journey, so he sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour, around noon.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The disciples were away in the town, buying food.
The woman said, “How is it that a Jew like you is asking a Samaritan woman like me for a drink?” Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and knew who is asking you to give him a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” said the woman, “you don’t have anything to draw with, and the well is deep. Then where would this living water come from? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob? He gave us the well, and he drank from it himself, and so did his children and his livestock.”
Jesus answered her, “Anyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never thirst again. Instead, the water that I will give him will turn into a well of water inside him, springing up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water. Then I won’t get thirsty, and I won’t have to come all the way here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go and call your husband, and come back here.”
“I have no husband,” the woman answered.
Jesus said to her, “You were right to say, ‘I have no husband,’ because you’ve had five husbands, and the man you have now isn’t your husband. What you said is true.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can tell you’re a . Our ancestors worshiped here on this mountain, and you Jews say is the place where people ought to worship.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the time is coming when it won’t be on this mountain or in Jerusalem that you worship the Father. You don’t know what you worship. We know what we worship, because salvation is from the Jews.
“But the time is coming, and it is here now, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. The Father is looking for people like that to be his worshipers. 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, the one called . When he comes, he’ll tell us everything.”
Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who speaks to you.”
Just then his disciples arrived. It amazed them that he was speaking with a woman. Still, no one said, “What are you looking for?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”
So the woman left her water pot and went off into the town. “Come, see a man who told me everything I’ve done,” she said to the people. “Could this be the Christ?”
The people left the town and started out toward him.
Meanwhile the disciples kept pressing him, “, eat something.”
But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”
So the disciples said to each other, “Did someone bring him something to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “My food is to do what the one who sent me wants, and to finish his work. Don’t you say, ‘The harvest is four months away’? I tell you, look up and see the fields. They’re already white and ready for harvest.
“The one who reaps is paid his wages and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps can rejoice together. This is where the saying is true: ‘One sows, and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap a crop you didn’t work for. Others have worked, and you have stepped into their work.”
Because of what the woman told them, many Samaritans in that town believed in him. “He told me everything I’ve done,” she had said.
When the Samaritans came to him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed two days.
Many more believed because of his own words. They said to the woman, “Now we believe, and it isn’t because of what you said. We’ve heard for ourselves, and we know that he truly is the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
After the two days, Jesus left that place and went on into Galilee, because he himself declared that a prophet has no honor in his own country.
When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, because they too had gone to the feast of the in Jerusalem and had seen everything he did there.
So Jesus came back to in Galilee, the town where he had made the water into wine. Now a nobleman had a son who was sick at .
When the nobleman heard that Jesus had come out of Judea into Galilee, he went to Jesus and begged him to come down and make his son well, because the boy was dying.
Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see and wonders, you won’t believe at all.”
“Sir,” the nobleman said to him, “come down before my child dies.”
Jesus said to him, “Go on your way. Your son lives.” The man believed what Jesus had told him, and he went on his way.
As he was on his way down, his servants met him. “Your child lives!” they told him. He asked them what time his son had begun to get better. “Yesterday at the seventh hour,” they said, “the fever left him.” That was about one in the afternoon.
Then the father realized that it was the very hour when Jesus had told him, “Your son lives.” And he believed, and so did his whole household.
This was another sign, the second that Jesus did after coming out of Judea into Galilee.