The Well at the End of the World
This God thirsts for union with humanity and all creation.
Jesus is tired and thirsty, not only from walking since daybreak but from the sun’s full strength at noon.
The One who made the sun and all stars, now sweats and is parched. The One who faints not, who never grows weary, needs a breather. And he continues to thirst until everyone and everything is reconciled to God.
The fastest way home to Galilee from Jerusalem runs straight through a town in Samaria, right by the land and the well of his ancestor Jacob.
His feet dusty and sore from the road, Jesus sits down on the well. Wherever there’s water in the universe, he is its source and yet at Jacob’s well he has no means to get to its subterranean flow, some 100 feet down and fed by a spring.
The rabbis talk in the Targums of a time when Jacob rolled away the stone that capped this well and it geysered water for twenty years but now you need a skin and a long rope to get the water to your lips.
A woman approaches the well with a large pitcher on her shoulder and when she arrives, Jesus asks her for a drink.
There are layers of complication around this meeting, this moment, and this request for water.
Jesus’ request is in the world of the time far stranger than it is in ours. Jewish men of his culture almost never speak to women in public (even their wives), and this woman is a Samaritan, of “impure” genetics and a heretic.
Sometimes for humans no one is more “other” than the person who claims to worship the same God we worship but differently, and the Samaritans were “those people.”
Also, the woman is alone. Jesus breaks all conventions save the rule of love when he initiates a conversation with her but Love is getting ready to save the world and Love knows what Love is doing.
We are meant as readers of Scripture to recall that we have been here beside a well before: a man, a woman, and a well signals someone is getting married. Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, all met their wives at wells. Jesus is arrived at Sychar to initiate a courtship.
If we are paying scriptural attention, what unfolds in this encounter at a roadside well is the keeping of a deep-seated promise God makes to the world and to all humanity.
God desires to marry not just the woman but her people and not just the Samaritans but all nations, along with the lands and waters they inhabit. This God thirsts not only for water but for union with us and with all creation.
What’s more, God brings a wedding gift to the well.
The woman is surprised a Jewish man is asking a Samaritan woman for water and Jesus shows his hand: “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.”
It’s the only time this word for gift appears in the New Testament outside The Acts of the Apostles and, as in that history of the first Christians, here at the well the “gift” is the Spirit. Yet none of us receives the Spirit apart from Christ, the One who gives the gift, the One who is the gift (we will have more to say about this at the end).
“Living water” is moving water, like the waters of a spring, like the waters that feed this well. The woman wonders aloud how a man without a traveling skin with which to draw water from the well’s depths somehow has water to give her.
Jesus answers her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
These words bring to mind a moment just ahead in John’s gospel. It is Sukkot and Jesus has returned to Jerusalem. In the Temple, on the last day of the feast, he stands and says, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).
Here the narrator reveals that the living water is the Spirit but for the time being, at our well in Samaria, Jesus has things to say to the woman (and to everyone) about true worship.
The woman asks Jesus for his never-failing water. She assumes he means the stuff in rivers and oceans, the stuff we are made of, the stuff we need every day to survive, but Jesus wants to get to the heart of the matter. He asks the woman (the first Christians tell us her name is Photini, meaning “illumined one”) to go and get her husband.
We learn from Jesus that the woman has had many husbands and that she now lives with a man in the absence of any promise.
Perhaps this is why she is alone? Is she driven by their shaming to avoid the company of the women of her city, forced by their shunning to fetch her water unescorted in the midday heat?
In Antiquities of the Jews (93–94 AD), Josephus recalls that when the Assyrians invaded the ten Northern Tribes of Israel, carrying many of the Jews of that region into a captive exile, the Assyrians brought in peoples from five other nations they had conquered, each with a different god they worshipped, and that these peoples intermarried with the Jews who remained.
The Samaritans were the people who emerged from that invasion, that displacement, and that mingling, and while the Samaritans still observed Torah, they were unwelcome at the Temple in Jerusalem, so they built their own temple in the fifth century BC (a temple that a Jewish ruler destroyed almost three centuries later).
The Samaritans were despised by their cousins because of their proximate-but-tainted ancestry and religion (again, we sometimes have no love for the ones closest too us who are also somehow different).
This has led both ancient and contemporary readers of John’s gospel to speculate that when Jesus refers to the woman’s husbands, he means the gods worshipped by the five Assyrian-conquered peoples, and to surmise that “the man she lives with now” is Caesar, for whom Herod had built a temple in the Samaritan capitol dedicated to the worship of a living human emperor.
These interpreters recall that the rabbis allowed for two (and in rare cases three) marriages, and assume that there’s no reason to believe that the Samaritans were more permissive. Five legal husbands? Very unlikely, they say.
And anyway—let’s be clear—the ancient world was not a place where women made decisions for themselves, however much influence they might have had underneath the surface of things. Marriages ended for all sorts of reasons but women were rarely if it all free to decide what was happening to them.
Ephrem the Syrian (306–373) chooses the wiser path when he instructs us to ponder this woman’s many misfortunes, perhaps surviving the death of many companions and caregivers. What in the text tells us she is not a victim of a broken world?
Whatever the case—gods or husbands, personal tragedies or male-centered society—Photini was (and her people were, we often are) looking for authentic love in all the wrong places. Photini is (they are, we are) lost and lonely in the search for redemptive love.
When Jesus reveals that he knows her story better than she knows herself, she calls him a prophet. Prophets back then didn’t make a lot of hay over sexual histories, but they cared a lot about whom you worshipped.
Jesus, her prophet, perhaps looking up from the well to the ruins of the Samaritan’s demolished temple on nearby Mount Gerizim, seeks her well-being: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father … the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Photini, filled with the Spirit (and with anticipation) after Jesus tells her everything she has ever done, replies, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things.”
Jesus responds, “I who speak to you am he.”
Or, as John Behr renders the Greek, “I AM, the one talking to you.”
Jesus invokes the divine name spoken to Moses from the burning-but-not-consumed bush and something called forever happens in Photini, something true.
She drinks a water that does not pass through us, that never evaporates, a water that remains, that stays with and in us all in all the dark and hard places, even in death, and that keeps us for and through eternity.
Photini, like Paul, sees and hears Christ and is converted, and becomes, like Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, for “with [Christ] is the fountain of life.”
She sees the glory of the unseen Father shining on the face of the Son and, like her names suggests, her heart is illumined. She is able to worship the Father in spirit and truth because she has encountered his pure image in the Son by the Spirit.
She returns to her city, leaving her water pitcher behind as the disciples left their nets (for she now has the forever water flowing from her), and bears witness to everyone that Christ is now here.
Yes, it’s a question she poses to her neighbors—“Can this be the Christ?”—but we sense this suggestion is rhetorical, is proclaimed from a sure and certain hope that if they by the Spirit drink the water given to her they, too, would be changed.
At Photini’s inspired invitation, the people of the city go out to the well with her to see the Anointed One for themselves, and as they cross the open fields, walking toward Jesus and the disciples (now returned from their grocery run), Jesus points to the approaching crowds and says, “…lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest.”
Jesus finds a bride in Photini and in the whole Samaritan people, who see him not only as the savior of the Jews and their savior but here (as also in 1 John 4:14) “the savior of the world,” a title attributed to the Caesars, and they welcome him to stay with them. And he did. And he does.
We heard Jesus say to Photini, and later to the gathered crowds in the temple in Jerusalem at Sukkot, that he has living water to give anyone who is thirsty, for any person who wants a drink. And we remember that the Evangelist tells us in John 7 that this living water is the Spirit.
Yet the source of this living water (this gift) is the new temple that is Christ’s body.
The rabbis believed that all of the waters of the earth were stored under the old Temple in Jerusalem and that in the last days they would pour up and out and fill the world from the Temple’s right side.
The rabbis are remembering the words of Ezekiel (47:1ff), which also the older church takes up in its antiphon at Easter, in the Vidi Aquam, where, as Ezekiel foresees, waters flow out from the Temple and gradually flood the whole world, bringing verdant life and healing to everything they touch. Zechariah also prophesies about a “living water” that “will flow out from Jerusalem.”
At the first Passover in John’s gospel, after the cleansing of the Temple, some of the leaders asked Jesus for a sign to give warrant to what he had done in turning over the tables. And he said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
John tells us that Jesus “spoke of the temple of his body.”
When we stand with the women and with John at the cross, as Jesus exhales his last breath and releases his Spirit, and as the soldier lances the post-mortem body of Jesus and water flows from his right side, we begin to see that here on Golgotha the Holy Spirit is being poured out on all flesh, and the living waters are filling all the world, from the right side of Christ’s body, the true temple, and in the glorious words of the Vidi Aquam “all those who drink are saved.”
In the end that Love is bringing to all things, John sees a city descending out of heaven from God, a New Jerusalem, like a bride adorned for a husband, a city where God dwells with and in all, where there is no pain or tears or death.
And there is a throne and the One who sits on it says, “Behold, I make all things new. Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true. It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment” (Revelation 21:60).
This fountain of water flows from the body of Christ.
Finally, we remember that Jesus calls us temples of the Holy Spirit, that we are together his body in the world, and promises that his living water now flows out from us.
I was telling this to our children: you are fountains of living water in the world, bringing life and healing wherever you go.
I am grateful that the Spirit of Christ is now visiting young people in various places. I am always glad to hear that people are encountering God, wherever and whenever that is happening.
But I don’t need to go to Wilmore, Kentucky, or Cleveland, Tennessee, or Rome, or Mount Gerizim, or Mount Zion to encounter the living water that is Christ.
His body returns and appears to me in people I meet every week.
In our congregation we have an elderly man named Ted. He is 85. He often wonders out loud how long he has left to live. He is a fountain a living water in this place and for me, a source of the presence of God for us.
I think this is what Jesus is trying to get across to Photini and to the Samaritans and to the Jews and to us: God wants to live in and through us, wants our lives to be a prayer.
Paul tells the Corinthians “…we have all been made to drink the same Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13), and by this drinking the Spirit has made us all temples of the presence of Christ in the world, his living water flowing out from us to bring his life everywhere, in all the difficult circumstances this existence presents.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I have relied on Robert Alter, John Behr, Dale Bruner, Lynn Cohick, and Augustine, Origen, and other patristics in this reading of John 4.