Our Gospel reading for today is from John 4:5-42. Listen for God’s word to you…
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” —although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized—he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common 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 no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 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 have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 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 worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these 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” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
What are you spiritually thirsty for? I believe the woman at the well was thirsty for love.
Why do I say that? We are told in the text that it was about the sixth hour when Jesus had this conversation with this woman at the well. The sixth hour was 12 noon. Normally, women would come to draw water at the end of the day rather than in the heat of midday. Why was this woman coming to draw water in the middle of the day? Why was she the only person at the well other than Jesus? The answer is because she was ostracized from society. And why was that so? Because she had a string of five husbands and the man that she was now living with was not her husband. The Jews held that a woman might be divorced twice, or at the most, three times. If the Samaritans had the same standard, then this woman would have been viewed as exceedingly immoral, especially since the man she was living with at present, was not her husband.
Why would this woman go through this string of relationships? I suspect that she was, as the country song once put it, looking for love in all the wrong places. I wonder how this woman felt being ostracized from society. I imagine her desperate need for love was only growing more intense. I believe she felt about love the same way a shipwrecked person in the middle of the ocean might feel about water. Such a person would long for fresh water. But if all they could find was saltwater, then they would drink that eventually. I believe this woman at the well longed for love, but all she could find were short-term sexual relationships with men. So, she settled for sex, rather than continuing her search for true love.
What are you thirsty for? What is it that you long for more than anything else in life? Psychologist Dr. Larry Crabb says we are thirsty people. We long for physical comfort. He calls these casual longings. We long for good relationships with people. He calls these critical longings. And we long for the joys that only a relationship with God can provide. These are crucial longings.
I believe that Jesus can meet our crucial longings. Jesus has power to quench our spiritual thirst. Jesus says to the woman at the well, “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.”
By making this statement, Jesus was taking something that this woman was very familiar with, namely water, and using it as an analogy for something in the spiritual realm. The Jews used the phrase living water to refer to water running in a stream, or bubbling up from a spring, as opposed to water from a well or cistern. And living water was definitely preferable.
By living water Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit. Jesus says in John 7:37-38, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” Then John tells us, “By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” (John 7:39) And Psalm 42:1-2 says, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”
Jesus is the one who can quench the thirst of our crucial longings by pouring the Holy Spirit into our lives. Paul says in Romans 5:5 that, “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” And in Galatians 5:22 Paul tells us that the fruit of this same Holy Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
But the woman at the well did not catch Jesus’ analogy. She took what Jesus was saying with crude literalness. “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 flocks and herds?” Not only did this woman misunderstand Jesus but she thought he was being rather arrogant by claiming that he could provide better water than the patriarch Jacob.
In response, Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” In other words, Jesus promises to give us water that will permanently quench our thirst. The Holy Spirit will permanently meet our crucial needs in life.
The crucial desire that led C. S. Lewis to faith in Jesus was his desire for joy. this was such a dominant need in his life that he titled his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. During Lewis’ years of spiritual searching he would experience stabs of joy, but no permanent, settled kind of joy. But once Lewis came to faith in Christ, he almost completely lost interest in the subject of joy because he was experiencing it all the time and knew its source.
When a person is thirsty, they think about water, talk about water, and search for a source of water to quench their thirst. If the thirst lasts long enough, they will even dream about finding water. But once their thirst is quenched, they lose the sense of desperation they once had.
So it is with God. When we don’t have God in our lives, some of us desperately look for something to fill the empty place. But once God has filled us, and continues to fill us, and promises to quench our spiritual thirst permanently, we lose the note of desperation that was once there in our lives.
Jesus goes on, and he promises to the woman at the well, and to us, that he will put a spring of water in us. “Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Jesus mentions another one of our crucial longings that only God can meet, our longing for eternal life. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God “has also set eternity in the hearts of men.” We all long for eternal life, timeless life, a life that will go on forever, not bound by the clock, a life full of meaning, purpose, joy and love. Jesus promises that he will put into us a spring of water, the Holy Spirit, who will well up to eternal life. Once the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, he promises he will never leave us or forsake us. He gives us a whole new quality of life that begins now and will never end.
One of the differences between a spring and a well is that a spring provides fresh, flowing water. Another difference is that you can cover over a well, but you cannot cover over a spring. If you try to cover over a spring with dirt, eventually the fresh water of the spring will bubble through again. When that happens, the water may be muddy at first. So it is with the Christian. Our lives do get muddy with sin. That is why we need to confess and ask the Lord to cleanse us. And when we do, his Holy Spirit comes bubbling through again.
In response to Jesus’ promise, the woman at the well said, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus’ next words to the woman teach us that before we can drink the water of eternal life, we need to do two things.
First, we need to face and forsake our broken cisterns. In Jeremiah 2:13 we read the words of the Lord to his people, “My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
This verse points out two things. First, we are all spiritually thirsty. God knows this and he never condemns us for our thirst. The problem is not that we are thirsty but that we move in wrong directions in response to our thirst. Instead of asking God to meet our needs, we dig our own cisterns. The places we look for satisfaction, apart from God, become broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
The woman at the well had broken cisterns, so to speak… her relationships with men. That is why Jesus tells her to go, call her husband and come back. Another one of her broken cisterns was her inadequate concept of God. Jesus knew where this woman’s broken cisterns were and he wanted her to confront them, to see them for what they were.
What are our broken cisterns? To what people or things do we look to quench a thirst that only the one true God can satisfy? Each one of us may have different broken cisterns. It may be food, or sex, or human relationships, or wealth, or even religion. All of these things can be good. But when we use these things to fill an emptiness in ourselves that only God can fill, then it just does not work.
The second thing we need to do in order to drink the water of eternal life is to turn and accept Jesus for who he is. The woman at the well said, “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” In response Jesus said, “I who speak to you am he.”
God was a distant and shadowy reality to the woman at the well. But Jesus revealed himself to her as the One she was searching and longing for, the One who could quench her spiritual thirst. Jesus literally says to her, “I am the one speaking to you.” Jesus uses the personal name for God from the Hebrew Scriptures, I am, and he applies that name to himself. This is the first of seven times that Jesus uses I am in reference to himself in John’s Gospel.
Are we facing and forsaking our broken cisterns? Are we turning to Jesus and recognizing him for who he really is?
Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the most famous British journalists of the twentieth century. He once said,
I may, I suppose, regard myself or pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets—that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Internal Revenue—that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions—that’s pleasure.
It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time—that’s fulfillment. Yet, I say to you—and I beg you to believe me—multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing—less than nothing, a positive impediment—measured against one draft of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are.
Allow me to leave you with one final thought. Jesus was thirsty. That’s one reason why he asked the woman at the well for a drink. He got thirsty seeking her out.
We read that Jesus had to go through Samaria. No Jew had to go through Samaria. The Jews hated the Samaritans because they were half-breeds, half-Jews. So, the Jews would normally walk around Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee or vice versa.
So why did Jesus have to go through Samaria? Because he had a divine appointment with this woman at the well. He got physically thirsty seeking her out, so that he could, in turn, quench her spiritual thirst. If you go home and read the rest of John 4, you will see how things turned out.
Jesus still thirsts today to quench your thirst and mine. The only question is: will we let him do that?
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