When Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard he was making and baptizing more disciples than John — 2 though Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples did — 3 he left Judea and went back to Galilee. 4 He had to go through Samaria.[1]
5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the piece of land Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 His disciples had gone into town to buy food.
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask me for a drink — a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not share things with Samaritans.)[2]
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get this living water?[3] 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, along with his sons and his animals?”
13 Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again. 14 But whoever drinks the water I give them will never be thirsty — ever. The water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up into eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw.”
16 He said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back here.”
17 The woman answered, “I have no husband.”
Jesus said to her, “You’re right to say, ‘I have no husband.’ 18 You’ve had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband. What you’ve said is true.”
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you’re a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you people say Jerusalem is the place where people must worship.”[4]
21 Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you don’t know. We worship what we do know, because salvation comes from the Jews. 23 But a time is coming — and it’s already here — when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. The Father is looking for people like that to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (the one called the Anointed One). “When he comes, he’ll explain everything to us.”[5]
26 Jesus said to her, “I am he — the one speaking to you.”
27 Just then his disciples came back. They were surprised that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What are you after?” or “Why are you talking with her?”
28 The woman left her water jar, went back into town, and said to the people, 29 “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Anointed One?” 30 They came out of the town and went to him.
31 Meanwhile, the disciples kept urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”
33 So the disciples said to each other, “Did someone bring him food?”
34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Don’t you say, ‘Four more months and then the harvest’? Look, I’m telling you: lift up your eyes and see the fields — they’re already white for harvest. 36 The reaper is already receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper can celebrate together. 37 The saying holds true here: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap what you didn’t work for. Others did the hard work, and you’ve stepped into their labor.”
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony: “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them. He stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his own words. 42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said. We’ve heard him ourselves, and we know that this man really is the savior of the world.”
43 After the two days, he left there for Galilee. 44 Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own homeland. 45 When he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen everything he did in Jerusalem during the festival, since they had gone to the festival too.
46 He went again to Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. There was a royal official whose son was sick in Capernaum.[6] 47 When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea into Galilee, he went to him and begged him to come down and heal his son, who was about to die.
48 Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you won’t believe.”
49 The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.”
50 Jesus said to him, “Go. Your son lives.”
The man believed the word Jesus spoke to him and went on his way. 51 While he was still going down, his slaves met him and said that his boy was alive. 52 He asked them what time he had started to get better. They told him, “Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.” 53 The father realized that was the exact time Jesus had said to him, “Your son lives.” And he believed — he and his whole household.
54 This was the second sign Jesus did after coming from Judea into Galilee.
Notes
Note 1. Samaria lay directly between Judea and Galilee, so the shortest road ran straight through it. Despite the well-known hostility between the two peoples, this direct route was commonly traveled; those who wanted to avoid Samaritan territory could instead cross to the east side of the Jordan River, adding time to the trip. ↩
Note 2. The Greek verb here (synchraomai) is unusual and hard to pin down. Rather than a blanket ban on all contact, it more likely refers specifically to sharing vessels — cups, jars, and the like — which touches exactly on the moment: a Jewish man asking to drink from a Samaritan woman’s water jar. ↩
Note 3. The Greek word is kyrie — the same word rendered “Lord” when a disciple says it. It ran the whole range from a polite “sir” to a slave’s “master” to “Lord” for God. English has no single word that does all three, so we choose by context. ↩
Note 4. The mountain in view is Gerizim, overlooking the well, which the Samaritans held to be the true site God had chosen — not Jerusalem. They had built a temple there, which was destroyed by the Judean ruler John Hyrcanus around 128 BCE, more than a century before this conversation. ↩
Note 5. The Samaritans accepted only the five books of Moses, so their hope was not for a royal heir of David but for a coming prophet and teacher in the mold of Moses who would set things straight. ↩
Note 6. The word (basilikos) means literally “a king’s man.” Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, who governed as a tetrarch but was popularly called king, so the man was most likely one of Antipas’s court officials rather than a Roman soldier. ↩