Living water
This week's study is on John 4:7-15:
In Biblical times, it seems like every woman was a de-facto waitress if she was hanging around near the town well. But as the Samaritan woman points out, you need something to draw water out of a well and travellers didn't tend to sling a bucket and a rope over their shoulder just in case they got thirsty along the way.
So Jesus is lounging around the town square waiting for the disciples to get back from their food run when the Samaritan woman shows up to draw some water. Finally, the restaurant is open! But she gets all racist with him and is like "Check your Jewish privilege and have another Jew get your water. Why are you asking me?" So Jesus, seeing that she's a very broken woman, starts to minister to her.
It's funny how people don't pick up on Jesus' parables right away, like the "but I won't fit in mommy's belly anymore" conversation about being born again. Jesus is talking about living water in a sense of value and sustenance through the Holy Spirit. The Samaritan woman keeps getting it confused with a kind of special magic water. Eventually she catches on and is changed.
Drawing water was a gruelling daily task back in those days. The first thing that causes the Samaritan woman to perk up is the idea of not having to make that daily journey, or journeys, with big heavy leaky buckets of water. Living water was fresh flowing water, not scummy water that had been sitting around. From her perspective, Jesus might as well have been offering to install plumbing and a spigot in her house!
What Jesus was offering was actually bigger than that. Much like our bodies need water every day in order to survive and be clean, our spirits need things like love and forgiveness and acceptance. If this Samaritan woman was forced to draw water at the worst possible time of day for hauling water, chances are she wasn't getting a whole lot of love and acceptance. Instead of having to slave away every day to try to be accepted, she could be accepted eternally. It's the difference between hauling a heavy bucket out of a hole and stopping to drink from fresh stream.
Without knowing the God we're dealing with, many of us resort to fetching "daily water" rather than drinking from the stream. We haul social media back and forth looking for "likes" from our "friends." Some of us work nights and weekends married to a series of thankless jobs trying to serve our career. We don't realise that in God we have access to a stream so deep that it continues through eternity.
Everyone who hauls daily water will just get thirsty again. Today you may have gotten hundreds of views on your page, but tomorrow nobody cares. You may work yourself half to death to get a promotion only to have the company go under and find yourself on the unemployment line and a stranger to your family. If we have a tight connection to God, those other things don't matter as much. We'll still go to work and share with others, but it won't be to avoid dying of thirst or being filthy. The empty desperation is gone.
If the Samaritan woman's situation speaks to you, Jesus is having a conversation with you too. Let him give you his living water and be spared your exhausting daily chores.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
In Biblical times, it seems like every woman was a de-facto waitress if she was hanging around near the town well. But as the Samaritan woman points out, you need something to draw water out of a well and travellers didn't tend to sling a bucket and a rope over their shoulder just in case they got thirsty along the way.
So Jesus is lounging around the town square waiting for the disciples to get back from their food run when the Samaritan woman shows up to draw some water. Finally, the restaurant is open! But she gets all racist with him and is like "Check your Jewish privilege and have another Jew get your water. Why are you asking me?" So Jesus, seeing that she's a very broken woman, starts to minister to her.
It's funny how people don't pick up on Jesus' parables right away, like the "but I won't fit in mommy's belly anymore" conversation about being born again. Jesus is talking about living water in a sense of value and sustenance through the Holy Spirit. The Samaritan woman keeps getting it confused with a kind of special magic water. Eventually she catches on and is changed.
Drawing water was a gruelling daily task back in those days. The first thing that causes the Samaritan woman to perk up is the idea of not having to make that daily journey, or journeys, with big heavy leaky buckets of water. Living water was fresh flowing water, not scummy water that had been sitting around. From her perspective, Jesus might as well have been offering to install plumbing and a spigot in her house!
What Jesus was offering was actually bigger than that. Much like our bodies need water every day in order to survive and be clean, our spirits need things like love and forgiveness and acceptance. If this Samaritan woman was forced to draw water at the worst possible time of day for hauling water, chances are she wasn't getting a whole lot of love and acceptance. Instead of having to slave away every day to try to be accepted, she could be accepted eternally. It's the difference between hauling a heavy bucket out of a hole and stopping to drink from fresh stream.
Without knowing the God we're dealing with, many of us resort to fetching "daily water" rather than drinking from the stream. We haul social media back and forth looking for "likes" from our "friends." Some of us work nights and weekends married to a series of thankless jobs trying to serve our career. We don't realise that in God we have access to a stream so deep that it continues through eternity.
Everyone who hauls daily water will just get thirsty again. Today you may have gotten hundreds of views on your page, but tomorrow nobody cares. You may work yourself half to death to get a promotion only to have the company go under and find yourself on the unemployment line and a stranger to your family. If we have a tight connection to God, those other things don't matter as much. We'll still go to work and share with others, but it won't be to avoid dying of thirst or being filthy. The empty desperation is gone.
If the Samaritan woman's situation speaks to you, Jesus is having a conversation with you too. Let him give you his living water and be spared your exhausting daily chores.
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