GIVE ME THIS WATER! 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” John 4:1-26 DEVOTION Winston Churchill once said, ‘People occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.’ The woman in our story stumbles over the truth; she bumps into Jesus as she goes about the routine business of her life. She was on her way to the well like she’d done thousands of times before, day after day. Not today. Her unexpected, unplanned encounter with Jesus completely changes the course of her life. The first thing to understand as you respond to the truth of Christ is that he promises to deal with your deepest needs. Jesus isn’t playing games with us. Water, apart from the air we breathe, is the most essential element of human survival. This gives a sense of how vital and urgent the issues Jesus deals with are; life, forgiveness, salvation, relationships, hope, new beginnings: these are what Jesus speaks to us about. A strange twist to our story is that the woman turns all religious on Jesus, ‘our fathers worshipped here, you Jews say we have to worship in Jerusalem.’ Jesus says to the woman ‘You want to talk about worship – God is actually interested in worshippers. In fact he is looking for them. ‘You want to talk about worship here or over there ... if you’re prepared to worship God with complete sincerity and utter reality then he is looking for you and people like you. By the way, the person you are talking to sitting by this well is the key to understanding all this - right now.’ FOR REFLECTION How can you be more aware of encountering God in the day to day ‘busy-ness’ of life in Hong Kong? How can you be the kind of worshipper that God is seeking? PRAYER Open our eyes Lord, we want to see Jesus.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 10:28:33 +0000
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