Context No. 2877 of 4322 · John

John 4:7-12: in context

7A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. 9The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. So where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”

Tired from the journey, Jesus sits at a well in Samaria and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. She is startled, because Jews and Samaritans had nothing to do with one another, and a man did not usually speak so to a woman. Jesus answers, if you knew the gift of God and who it is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.

See how many barriers Jesus crosses to speak with her, ethnic, religious, moral, and social, and how he turns the whole encounter around. He came asking her for water, and now he offers her a water she does not yet understand. She is stuck on the literal well: you have no bucket, and the well is deep. He is speaking of a thirst no well can reach. The conversation hangs on whether she will move from the water she came out to draw to the living water only he can give.

Am I settling for the ordinary water I came to draw, when Christ is offering a living water for a deeper thirst I have not even named?

Sources

John 4:10: "If you knew the gift of God... you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."
John 7:37: "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!"
Isaiah 55:1: "Come, everyone who thirsts, to the waters!"