“The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (John 4:11, English Standard Version)

I grew up on a farm. We didn’t have running water. We had two wells: one near the house and the other next to the barn. In the winter, when the cows and pigs were couped up in the barn, we had to draw water out of the well by the barn. Dad wasn’t into expensive, modern pumps. All we had was some boards over the well and a bucket on a chain. On a few occasions the chain slipped through my cold fingers and the bucket went to the bottom of the well. It’s hard to water the livestock when you ain’t even got a bucket.

The verse that leads off this missive is from the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Samaritans and Jews got along together about as well as two pit bulldogs—or as well as Democrats and Republicans these days. At best, Jews and Samaritans had no contact. When they did have contact, it often got ugly in a hurry.

So, Jesus engages this Samaritan woman in a conversation. He begins by asking a favor. “Can I have a drink of water?” But this gambit is designed to draw her into even deeper waters than Jacob’s well contained.

Here is the story in its entirety:

“³ he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. ⁴ And he had to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

John 4:7   A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ 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.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

John 4:16   Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people 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 (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

John 4:27   Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” ²⁸ So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ²⁹ “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” ³⁰ They went out of the town and were coming to him.

John 4:31   Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. ³⁶ Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

John 4:39   Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.” (English Standard Version)

Listening to this story this morning on my smartphone YouVersion, I was struck by the woman’s comment that Jesus didn’t even have a bucket. The Bible in general, and John in particular, has a tendency to make these seemingly throwaway comments that may mean a great deal more than they seem to be saying. While it was literally true that Jesus didn’t have a bucket, John may have been hinting at something much more profound. Jesus did not have a bucket to draw the living water of life. In fact, Jesus was the water, according to John’s Gospel.

Jesus didn’t and doesn’t need a bucket because he was and is the water of life.

I don’t understand this at all, but I am intrigued. And maybe intrigue is the first step toward understanding. Perhaps being intrigued is as muchunderstanding as I can pull off most of the time. Maybe Jesus is drawing me and you into his conversation with this outcast, “otherly” woman.