So why did Jesus “have to” go through Samaria when the Jews either didn’t go there at all or passed through as quickly as possible? The answer is simple and profound: Jesus went because he intended to meet this woman. He knew she would be coming to the well at precisely the moment he was sitting there weary from his journey. Nothing happens by chance in this story. Every detail is part of the outworking of God’s will. The woman isn’t looking for Jesus. All she wants is water. But Jesus is looking for her.
It wasn’t the normal time, and it was unusual for a woman to come to a well alone. But this woman was different. The Bible says she came from the tiny village of Sychar. We know basically where Sychar was. It was in Samaritan territory, nestled between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Sychar was built at the confluence of two trade routes, one that came up from Jerusalem on its way to Capernaum, and one that came west from the Jericho region toward the Mediterranean Sea. Sychar was thus located at a very strategic point in central Palestine.The well was about one-half mile outside the village near the point where the two trade routes came together. It was called Jacob’s Well, after the patriarch who had first dug it some 2000 years earlier. In every way, it is part of the story of Jesus. Weary travellers from throughout Israel knew it as a place where they might drink from the spring flowing some 150 feet below the surface.
As the woman looks at Jesus and he at her, four invisible walls stand between them. There is a religious wall, a gender wall, a racial wall, and a moral wall. Yet our Lord found a way through all of them. He found her … and then she found him!The desire for God is written in the human heart. We are created by him, but also for him. As the psalmist writes, like a deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God.The search for God is universal. Every human heart seeks God, but God is not outdone — he also seeks us. He draws us to himself like a thirsty woman going to fetch water from a well. She is going about the sixth hour when the sun is high in the sky noon. She is a woman of Samaria — a pagan place.
She is surprised to find a Jew there, already waiting by the well, without a bucket. He says to her, “Give me a drink.” She is startled by this gesture. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? The romance begins.The woman is a world of her own — a universe of the heart, thirsting for love, looking for it in all the wrong places! She has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband. Somewhere love has died — along the way, her bucket is empty. Love comes to meet her at the well — the thirst of the Father coming to meet us in Jesus Christ! If you knew the gift of God and who it was saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. It is an eternal love; it never ends! As Isaiah prophesied:Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come! Buy corn without money, and eat, and, at no cost, wine and milk! (Is 55:1)
The waters of God’s thirst flow through the heart of Jesus Christ! The woman at the well has met the heart of love! She will never be thirsty again: She has entered the bridal chamber. She has found what she was looking for all her life. He thirsts for our love. The woman has met love — love who would hang upon a cross that she would never thirst again, that she might have eternal life with him in the Father’s house. It is a wonderful love — a love the world has never known and it is yours in Jesus Christ! Come to the waters and never be thirsty again.The world is a wedding. Christ has come to bring us to the wedding banquet. Are we willing to give him one drop of our love, to enter into relationship with him, to begin to draw water from the well who is Christ, to continue the dance that this woman joins, this outcast of the outcasts who He searches for and finds? To search for more people to love and to be loved by them as well?