Today’s reflection comes from “Today’s Christian Woman” website. I found it to be one of the best commentaries on the story from John 4:1-42 of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman.

You can read the reflection in full HERE.

Instead of pasting the entire passage here, I’m highlighting the main points of the story.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 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 livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them 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.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”  “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Fit In Your Faith Today:

My own personal reflections that might be of interest to some of my readers are the following:

• Do I see that Jesus is evangelizing to this Samaritan woman as I myself should evangelize to others?
• She sought to quench her thirst. But it was so much more – She had taken that thirst to all kinds of relationships that didn’t satisfy her. (She was married to 5 men and the man she has now is not her husband) How can this relationship be applied to my personal life? Who or what do the husbands in this passage symbolize in my life?
• What/Whom/Where do I go to quench my thirst when I need to seek the gift that Jesus gives instead?
• How can I learn to redirect my desires according to God’s design?