Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to John · About this commentary
Living Water
John 4:1-15
1 Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John · WEB
A tired man at a well asks a Samaritan woman for a drink, which was three kinds of impossible.
He needed to pass through Samaria John 4:4.
The word is had to — the same necessity this book uses of the cross and of being born from above. Geographically it was not true; Galileans routinely crossed the Jordan to avoid Samaria , and many considered the detour worth the extra days. The necessity lies somewhere else.
He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there John 4:5–6.
The writer places Sychar by patriarchal geography, which matters because the woman will appeal to it. Samaritans and Jews shared Jacob and disagreed about almost everything since.
Jesus therefore, being tired from his journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
Two details from a book that has just called him the Word who made all things. He is tired, and the account says so without embarrassment — the prologue's became flesh John 1:14 worked out at a wellhead. And it is noon, the worst hour to be walking or drawing water.
A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink" John 4:7.
Her timing is its own piece of information. Water was fetched in the cool of the morning and evening, in company; a woman at the well at midday is a woman avoiding the other women.
And the request breaks three conventions at once. A man did not address an unaccompanied woman in public; a rabbi did not converse with a woman at length; and a Jew did not share a drinking vessel with a Samaritan, which the writer explains for readers who would not know — for Jews have no dealings with Samaritans John 4:9.
He also begins by needing something. The whole conversation that follows is about what he can give her, and the door into it is a favor he asks.
"How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" Her reply is guarded and a little amused, and she names both barriers herself.
"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" John 4:10.
The answer reverses the transaction in one sentence. Two things she does not know are named — the gift, and the giver — and if either were known the roles would already have swapped.
Living water was ordinary usage for running water as against still, which is how she takes it, and it is also the prophets' phrase for God himself: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters Jeremiah 2:13. Both meanings are in play, and the flat reading is allowed to stand for a while, as it was with Nicodemus.
"Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep" John 4:11. The practical objection, and a fair one: it is a hundred feet down and he has no bucket.
"Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself?" John 4:12.
The question is meant as a challenge and it is the right question. She has asked the thing this Gospel exists to answer, and the answer she will get within a few verses is yes.
"Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again" John 4:13–14.
The contrast is not between two qualities of water but between two kinds of supply. Jacob's well is excellent and it has a defect built into it: everyone who uses it has to come back. That is true of every well and of most of what people arrange their lives around.
"But the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." The image moves inside. What is offered is not a better source to visit but a spring relocated — and the verb is one of leaping, which is not how wells behave.
"Sir, give me this water, so that I don't get thirsty, neither come all the way here to draw" John 4:15.
She asks, which is what verse ten said would happen. She is still hearing it flatly, and her reason is the one you would expect from a woman who walks to a well at noon to avoid her neighbors: she would like to stop making this trip.
settled What this mark means