Day 7 – Life revealed by living water

John 4:1-26

When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had been told that he was making and baptising more disciples than John (although Jesus himself didn’t baptise, his disciples did this), Jesus left Judea and went back to Galilee. He needed to pass through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had gone off into the city to buy food.

The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, “If you knew about God’s gift, and who 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 nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. So where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it, him and his children and his livestock?”

Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water that I will give them will never thirst again; the water that I will 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, or have to keep coming all the way here to draw.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”

The woman answered, “I have no husband.”

Jesus said to her, “You were right to say, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands; and the man you have now is not your husband. You have spoken truthfully.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You don’t know what you worship. We do know what we worship; for salvation is from the Jews. But a time is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such people to be his worshippers. 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 Christ, the anointed one. When he has come, he will tell us everything.”

Jesus said to her, “That’s who I am, speaking to you.”

For reflection

Is Jesus is starting a conversation with you?