Living Water (4:7–15)
The prophets had dared to hope that God’s presence would return. When the glory of the Lord departed the Jerusalem temple in Ezekiel 10–11, it was one of the most devastating moments in Israel’s history. But Ezekiel saw a future when a new temple would rise, and from its threshold, living water would flow outward, making everything flourish wherever it reached (Ezek 47:1–12). Zechariah shared this hope: “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem” (Zech 14:8). God’s return would bring nothing less than living water flowing from the new temple to renew creation.
It is into this stream of expectation that Jesus steps beside a well in Samaria and says something remarkable.
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” (John 4:10).
The woman hears a practical claim about water, but Jesus speaks about something much larger. John’s prologue had already set the foundation: “the Word became flesh and ἐσκήνωσεν [tabernacled] among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The tabernacling of God’s glory among his people, marked by filling of the tabernacle (Exod 40:34–35) and the dedication of Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11), has been fulfilled again in the person of Jesus. He is the new temple, the place where heaven and earth meet. And from this new temple, living water flows.
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 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” (John 4:13–14).
This exchange appears only in John’s Gospel. Its significance grows later in the Gospel, when Jesus proclaims at the Feast of Tabernacles, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37), and John clarifies: the living water is the Spirit (7:39). The water Jesus offers the Samaritan woman at this ordinary well is the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God that once filled the tabernacle and the temple, now flowing freely from Jesus and filling his disciples.
The woman went to draw water and met the one from whom the prophets said living water would someday flow. What Ezekiel and Zechariah envisioned as the great renewal of all things, Jesus offers in a quiet conversation beside a well in Samaria.
Forsaken (4:16–18)
It’s common to read John 4 and view the Samaritan woman negatively. She’s drawing water at an unusual time, which some interpret as an indication that she’s an outcast, and she’s had five husbands and is now with a man who isn’t her husband.
However, we must remember that men held all the power in her context. Having a husband was how women stayed out of poverty, and a woman couldn’t divorce her husband under biblical law. So, if she’s had five husbands, she’s either been bereaved or abandoned five times by presumably different men, and quite likely for her own protection, she is now forced to live with a man who is not her husband.
Maybe she’s not the sexually promiscuous woman most readers assume she is, but rather someone who has been abandoned and forsaken multiple times and has been forced to make a difficult choice for her own protection. We don’t have enough information to make a definitive judgment. Still, it’s always valuable to slow down and read familiar texts from different angles to see if any new insights emerge.
Since there are prophecies that water will flow from Jerusalem, is there also a connection here to when water flowed from Jesus’ side as he was crucified?