John 4:1-42 — Drinking Living Water and Feasting on Heavenly Food

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John 4:1–42 NIV

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John—although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. 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, 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.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” 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.” Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” 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?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him. Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.” 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. 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.”

Intro – Working with Emmaus – sitting with a man who was deep in the throes of drug abuse, depression, homelessness, and prostitution

This passage features an encounter between Jesus and a woman who was in a similar situation of shame and living on the margins of society.

Context

John 3-4: A series of encounters between Jesus and people from various different backgrounds

Nicodemus the respected and put-together Jewish teacher, Samaritan woman at the well, a disgraced outcast from both the people of Israel and her own people, and at the end of Jn 4 a Roman official—each equally spiritually needy

Historical/cultural

Who were the Samaritans?

Northern tribes had alternate worship sites for many years

Fall of Northern Kingdom in 721 BC to Assyrians

Assyrians repopulated Northern Kingdom with people from many nations

Cultural taboos about Samaritans and women

1-6 Setting the stage

Increasing tension in Judea

Jesus goes to Galilee to lay low for a while

7-14

Jesus crosses the social barriers - he doesn’t become unclean, he makes others clean when he comes into contact with them

The woman comes to the well at midday (the sixth hour/noon). Drawing water was normally a woman’s job, but in a culture in which women were normally quite socially isolated, drawing water provided an opportunity to socialize with other women. This would normally be done in the morning or in the evening, when temperatures were more tolerable, rather than in the sweltering heat of midday. Why then did the woman come to draw water at this time? We shall see.

Immediately opens up a spiritual conversation — even Jesus’ most basic human needs (sixth hour — hot and thirsty) are an avenue for Jesus to engage in the Father’s work

Natural vs spiritual planes and misunderstanding in John, the challenge of translating John

Here the spiritual meaning that Jesus is conveying hinges on the word “water/living water” — natural meaning: a spring, flowing body of water

Study of “living water” and water language in the OT and in John:

Jeremiah 2:13 NIV

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Jeremiah 17:13 NIV

Lord, you are the hope of Israel; all who forsake you will be put to shame. Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.

Ezekiel 36:25–27 NIV

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Isaiah 44:3 NIV

For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants.

Isaiah 58:11 NIV

The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

John 7:37–39 NIV

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

15-18 Getting to the Point

The woman is still thinking purely on a natural, material level. But Jesus is about to reveal her true source of thirst and need for living water. In v. 16 Jesus gets to the heart of the matter and exposes the open secret of the woman’s life, showing her why she needs living water.

Why did the woman come to the well at midday then if most women would draw water in the morning or evening?

she was too ashamed to come at the normal time, so she suffered through the difficulty of carrying water from the well alone in the sweltering heat. She was a serial adulterer who would have been considered unacceptable within her community. In a culture in which honor and shame are the primary responses to sin (as opposed to guilt/innocence or fear/power), honor is like a commodity that must be restored once it has been lost through becoming shamed for not fulfilling community expectations. This woman lived a life marked by shame. But here is Jesus confronting her shame

Man/Husband in Greek and Fwe

Greek - ἀνήρ; Fwe - mukwame (man, husband), kwasha (unmarried person)

The pun works in Fwe, not in English! But, the team originally had ‘the one you are married to now’ and changed it to ‘the one you have now’.

Another possible issue with verse 18: Did it sound like she was married to all five men at once? — have to be thinking about the possible ways of misunderstanding the text.

19-25

- Distracting or testing?

- Samaritan vs. Jewish worship and temples

- Jesus is clear that the Jewish temple is the correct place of worship at that time, which is important since salvation—which is found only in and through him—comes through the Jews, not the Samaritans

- This is all a bit irrelevant since Jesus is saying that the place where people will worship will no longer be a singular physical space, but it will be—and now is—in him; those who are united to him are the ones who worship in Spirit in truth, being motivated by the Holy Spirit and rooted in the truth of Christ, inseparable from one another

26 Climax – When all her questions come up short and her need is exposed, the penny finally drops

27-38 Feasting on Heavenly Food

This time the disciples are the ones thinking in purely earthly terms, and Jesus redirects their thoughts to instruct them

Heavenly food – doing the work of God

Illustration: Tombstone in Albion “I’ve completed the work you gave me to do”

Arrogant?

For Jesus the work of God includes everything up until giving his life for the world. Jesus is the only one who “finished” his work — and that is what Jesus is referring to in Jn 5:36

John 5:36 NIV

“I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish—the very works that I am doing—testify that the Father has sent me.

So can we say, apparently so arrogantly, that we have finished the work that God has given us to do? What about those who have gone before us? Stephen? Paul, Peter? Polycarp? William Tyndale?

Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian

John 12:24 NIV

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

And again, we can see Jesus’ finished work in his death on the cross sowing a seed that we have the joy of harvesting, eating the heavenly food of seeing others taste the living water of Christ and the Spirit of God.

Piper: “The question is not ‘will you die’, but whether the death you die will bear much fruit.

Let’s go to the grave and to our heavenly home with our spiritual bellies stuffed with the work of God, even if that means dying for the sake of Christ and for the lost

What is our work?

Believing

John 6:25–29 NIV

When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.” Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

Personal holiness (1 Cor 9:24-27)

1 Corinthians 9:24–27 NIV

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

The Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20) may be closest to the kind of work Jesus is talking about here

Matthew 28:18–20 NIV

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The one who plants and the one who reaps

John the Baptist and Jesus

Jesus and disciples here

This narrative and Phillip in Acts 8:4-8

Acts 8:4–8 NIV

Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the signs he performed, they all paid close attention to what he said. For with shrieks, impure spirits came out of many, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed. So there was great joy in that city.

Rachel Saint

Genadendal

George Schmidt, Moravian 1738 settled a small mission station at Baviaanskloof

Dutch Reformed didn’t believe that he could accomplish anything, were threatened by what he already had

Count Nikolas von Zinzendorf — ordination — baptized 5 native disciples

Locals took offense because baptizing the natives implied that they were equals to the settlers

Moravian ordination not recognized, sent home in 1744

Left a NT with Magdalena

Second mission not opened until 50 years later

By 1800 thousands of local people flocked to the mission station

in 1806 Governor Janssens changed the name of the town from Baviaanskloof (Baboon Gorge) to Genadendal (Valley of Grace)

39-42 Those drinking living water and those eating heavenly food in action

A harvest like Jesus has just talked about

Focus on v 42; the situation in many parts of the world, including Africa — people have come, the gospel has been shared, but there is still often little access to God’s Word.

Pioneer missions vs strengthening the church

BT is both preparing the soil and watering for a harvest

John 4:42 NIV

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.”

Situation in Southern Africa—many have gone before and sown the gospel, but many still wait for access to the Bible in a language they can clearly understand. How can the church have a healthy teaching ministry to help disciples grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ without this access?

Issues with false teaching in the church — prosperity gospel, domineering leaders, poor understanding and application of church discipline and qualifications for leadership

The Fwe now have this passage — along with the rest of John 1-11, available in their language.

Pastor David’s message

Universal scope of this passage – in John 3 Jesus is still ministering to the Jews; in Jn 4 he moves into Samaria – like Acts 1:8 – Great Commission — All Nations

What is the challenge to us?

Drink deeply from the living water today

Don’t be afraid to take your shame to Jesus. If he could overcome the shame of the Samaritan woman, can he not do the same for you? – ICC/”Go towards that”

Let the living water well up and flow from within you — for the benefit of others!

Feast together on the heavenly food of God’s work in the world

Isaiah 55:1–2 NIV

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.