Will You Give Me a Drink?

Read‍

John 4:7-10 "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.'"

Think

She came to the well at the wrong time of day and everybody in her town would have known why.

Water was heavy and the walk was long, so women went early in the morning while it was cool, and they went together. It was the social event of the day. John notes a few verses earlier that it was about noon when Jesus sat down at that well, which means this woman was hauling water alone in the worst heat of the day.

People do that for one reason. She was avoiding somebody. Probably everybody.

So the first thing to notice about this story is that Jesus is sitting at a well in the middle of the afternoon in a place he was not supposed to be, waiting for one person nobody else wanted to be around.

And there were a lot of reasons this conversation should not have happened.

He was a Jewish man and she was a Samaritan woman, and John spells out what that meant in verse 9 for readers who would not know. Jews did not associate with Samaritans. The hostility went back centuries and it was real on both sides. On top of that, a rabbi speaking alone with a woman in public was the kind of thing people talked about, which is why the disciples come back later and are visibly thrown by it.

Every social rule in the situation said to keep walking.

Now look at how he actually opens. This might be the most surprising part of the whole passage.

"Will you give me a drink?"

He does not open by telling her about God. He does not lead with what is wrong in her life, and he certainly knew. He asks her for a favor.

Think about what that does. He puts himself in the position of needing something from her. He gives her something to give. For a woman who came at noon specifically so she would not have to interact with anybody, the safest possible opening was somebody needing a cup of water rather than somebody offering to fix her.

That is worth learning if you have a friend who is far from God and you have been trying to figure out how to start.

Most of us think the opening move is having something to say. Jesus opened by needing something. It is astonishingly hard to feel judged by a person who just asked you for help.

Then in verse 10 he shifts. "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."

He is telling her that the roles in this conversation are about to reverse. She is standing there with a bucket thinking she is the one with the water.

And notice he does not correct her about anything yet. No mention of her past. No lecture about Samaritan theology. He puts one strange, interesting sentence in front of her and lets her curiosity do the work.

She is going to ask him a question in a minute. He set it up so that she would.

Here is what this means for you today. God went out of his way, across a boundary nobody expected him to cross, at the hottest part of the day, to sit down with one person who was hiding from her own town.

He does that. It is not an exception in this story. It is the pattern of who he is.

Who is the person in your life you have assumed is too far outside for God to bother with?

Apply

Ask before you tell – Pick one person you have wanted to talk to about God and have not. Do not lead with a message this week. Ask them for something instead, help, advice, or their opinion, and actually listen to the answer.

Pray

God, thank you for coming to people everybody else avoided. I have written some people off without ever saying it out loud. Help me see them the way you saw her. Show me how to start a conversation instead of delivering a speech. In Jesus' name. Amen.