In 2017, I visited Jacob's Well. We stood in a circle and read today’s Gospel text. John tells us what happened when the women encountered Jesus. But, as I worked with the text this week, I wondered what the story might sound like if it was told by the woman, rather than a narrator.
So imagine, for a moment, that she is the one telling the story. As you listen, notice the conversation is like a chess match—each question invites the conversation to deepen.
I did not go to the well that day looking for God.
I went because the jar was empty.
You know how life is. Morning comes, the sun climbs higher than you expect, and before long the ordinary tasks are piling up: Bread to bake; Water to draw. Work that does not ask what kind of person you are—it simply asks to be done.
So I took my jar and walked the familiar road to Jacob’s well.
It was the middle of the day. No shade, no breeze.
I preferred it that way.
If you go early in the morning, everyone is there. The conversations begin before the bucket even touches the water. People talk about crops, about marriages, about children. And sometimes about other people’s lives.
My life has been the subject of those conversations.
So, I go at noon. Alone.
But that day there was a man sitting beside the well.
At first, I thought he must be a traveler resting his feet. The dust on his robe said he had come a long way. But when I looked more closely, I saw something else.
He was a Judean.
Now you have to understand something about that. Judeans and Samaritans do not usually share wells, cups, or conversations. We have our mountain, they have their temple, and between those two places lies a long history of arguments.
So I lowered my eyes and went about my work. If I kept quiet, perhaps he would too.
But then he spoke.
“Give me a drink.”
I looked up. Surely, I had misunderstood.
“You are a Judean,” I said, “and I am a woman of Samaria. How is it that you ask me for a drink?”
He did not apologize. He did not withdraw the request.
Instead, he said something even more strange.
“If you knew the gift of God,” he said, “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.”
Now I have drawn water from that well since I was a kid. My parents did. My grandparents did. The well is deep, and the water is good, but no one
draws it without a rope and a jar.
I looked at his empty hands.
“Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get this living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well?”
He did not laugh at my question.
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give will never thirst. The water I give will become a spring inside you, giving eternal life.”
A spring inside me? That was a bold claim. And if it was true, it would change everything.
“Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Then he did something unexpected.
He said, “Go call your husband.”
Now that is the moment when most people begin telling my story as if it were only about my past.
I answered him honestly.
“I have no husband.”
And he looked at me—not the way people in town look when they think they already know who you are.
He looked at me as if he could see the whole of my life at once.
“You are right,” he said. “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”
He said it plainly. No accusation. Just truth.
This man knew my story.
All of it.
And yet he was still speaking to me.
“Sir, I see that you are a prophet.”
And if he was a prophet, then there was a question I had always wondered about:
“Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,” I said, “But you Judeans say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
I still don’t fully understand his answer. But I remember the way he said it—as if the world we thought we understood was already passing away:
“The hour is coming,” he said, “when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The true worshipers will worship in spirit and truth.”
Not here. Not there.
Something larger.
I thought of the promise our people had always carried.
“I know that Messiah is coming,” I told him. “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.”
And then he said it.
“I am he.”
Right there beside the well….in the middle of my ordinary day.
In that moment the world shifted.
The God our ancestors argued about on mountains and in temples was not far away at all. He was sitting beside me, asking for a drink.
About that time his disciples came back from town. They looked surprised to see him talking to me, though none of them said a word.
But by then I had forgotten why I came.
Somewhere beside the well my jar was still sitting on the ground.
Because suddenly the water I came for no longer seemed like the most important thing in the world.
I ran back to town….to the same people who gossiped about me.
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! Can he be the Messiah?”
They came.
Many believed because of my testimony.
But later they said something even better.
“It is no longer because of your testimony that we believe,” they told me. “Now we have heard for ourselves.”
And that is how encounter works.
You come to the well carrying whatever jar life has given you—your history, your reputation, the ordinary work of your days, the burdens that seem overwhelming…
And Christ meets you there.
He speaks your truth.
He offers living water.
And before you know it, the jar that once defined your life is sitting forgotten beside the well.
Because the water you were looking for is no longer something you carry in your hands.
It has become a spring within you.
God is alive.
God is among us.
God is here.
God is now.
Come and see.
