Gospel Reflection on John 4:5-42
- Mar 5
- 5 min read
March 8, 2026
So he came to a city of Samar′ia, called Sy′char, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
There came a woman of Samar′ia to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” For his disciples had gone away into 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 Samar′ia?” For Jews have no dealings 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 nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?” Jesus said to 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 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 he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain;[a] and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But 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.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
Just then his disciples came. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but none said, “What do you wish?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar, and went away into the city, and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the city and were coming to him.
Meanwhile the disciples besought him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has any one brought him food?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest. He who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.”
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In the story of the woman that Jesus meets at the well, we're given a very contemporary snapshot of our own culture. Here is someone who's had a series of emotional failures, five different partners. It's an uncanny picture of our social media world where we search to be liked, to be friended, but finally end up lonely and parched.
She had drunk that water that never quenches thirst and Jesus has revealed it all to her, but she didn't feel judged by Jesus and said she felt understood, recognized. He reveals to her that he knows of her emotional incompleteness, her failed search for satisfaction. And so now she can begin to speak on a more profound level.
We all encounter this risk to go through life with a fixation on relationships partners who are not genuine accumulating incompleteness and dissatisfaction. Perhaps it's time to stop accumulating spouse idols who don't resolve our woes, to give up on these useless search for false sources of life.
These false sources are generally objects we accumulate, desires that torture us, fixations that alien us from but is good and true.
Jesus tells a woman that he's thirsty. She thinks she has met someone who wants something from her like all the others, but he turns to search around. It's not her search for a companionship that is at stake here. He says, 'if you knew the gift of God, if you knew how much God is thirsting for you, how much the real God seeks your heart, your spirit, the deepest truth of your life'; in short: God wants to be with us. To know this generosity of God is to know God.
The time is coming and this is it in which true worshipers will worship God in spirit and in truth and in Greek the word adore is the same as the word for kiss. Worship implies approaching God with an intimate attitude, not with ritual formality.
How could we meet God in an intimate way? Jesus says this doesn't happen in a particular place, but in a particular way, not here or there, but in an attitude that can be experienced and developed everywhere; not in a particular place, but with an attitude of trust and closeness.
God is proposing to us during these holy days. Can we lay aside our history of being taken advantage of our many experiences of betrayal, our serial disappointments, and accept the love that is being offered to us?
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