The Woman at Jacob's Well

Part 2 (verses 9-15)

The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

"Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"

Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him 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 and have to keep coming here to draw water."

The woman is surprised by the Jewish man's request, but she is not intimidated. She responds to Jesus' request by noting it is inappropriate. Samaritan and Jew are to avoid each other as much as possible.

Jesus responds obliquely. He speaks in the third person (at least in this translation) and suggests she should ask him for a drink of living water. She would do so, he says, if she knew the gift of God.

Once again she responds directly and practically. Again Jesus responds cryptically, claiming - contrary to all evidence - that he has great power.

I hear a deeply ironic, even dismissive tone when she says, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." Jesus speaks of eternal life. She is tired of coming to the well each day... and dealing with the troublemakers who linger about.

Jesus has chosen to bridge what separates his religious identity from the other by focusing on what each share in relationship to God. This is received skeptically, even cynically, but Jesus persists.