Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-january-23-2026
John 4:27-42
The Disciples Rejoin Jesus
27 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?”
28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.
31 Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
33 Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Don’t you have a saying, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 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 Samaritans Believe
39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.
42 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.”
In yesterday’s Reflection, we thought about the first part of this story – a story in which Jesus encounters a woman in the heat of the day at a well outside the village of Sychar in Samaria. In thinking about this story, we noticed that there were a number of surprising things about it — things that would have surprised the first people who heard or read the story, and also things that would have surprised the Samaritan woman in it.
Yesterday we noticed that at the beginning of the story, Jesus was traveling through Samaria, which was a region most religious Jews refused to set foot in. Sitting alone at the well while his disciples had gone into the town to buy food, Jesus asked for a drink from the jar of a Samaritan woman who showed up to draw water in the heat of the day. Jesus then talked with her about her life and his role in God’s plan for the world.
As they talked, Jesus had offered the woman “living water.” That phrase was used in the ancient near east to refer to running water – fresh water from a cool stream that was more refreshing than the muddy water that flowed through lots of Middle Eastern rivers – and even from some wells. But it seems that in this case, Jesus was speaking metaphorically about his teachings and about the new life that comes to those who “drink deeply” of those teachings. He was offering a kind of spiritual refreshment that was available nowhere else.
Jesus also responded to questions the woman had about the relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans — and especially about the religious prejudice that was directed toward the Samaritan people. Then he went on to tell the woman that the time had come when the longstanding quarrels between the two peoples about where and how to worship God would no longer matter. From now on, all that mattered was that people worship truthfully and with their whole heart – as he put it, “in spirit and truth.”
And finally, when the woman mused that all questions of matters of faith would be resolved when the Messiah arrived, Jesus had revealed that he was, in fact, that Messiah.
In today’s part of the story, the Samaritan woman runs back to the village to tell her neighbors about the conversation with Jesus. John tells us that in her excitement, the woman left her water jar at the well. The jar would have been one of the woman’s most valuable possessions, so leaving it behind shows how excited she is.
It strikes me that we’re meant to notice the way the woman bears witness to her encounter with Jesus when she returns to her town. She starts out by telling her neighbors that Jesus seemed to have supernatural knowledge – he had known things about her history that he had no normal way of way of knowing. Actually, she exaggerates a little; Jesus had not really told her ‘everything she had ever done,’ just the part about her unusual marital history. But a little exaggeration is probably understandable since the woman believes she has just met the Messiah.
It also seems significant that in telling her story to the other townspeople, the woman doesn’t just announce that she had met the Messiah. Instead, she suggests it in a way that invited people to come and judge for themselves: “Could this be the Christ?” (And you might remember that Christ is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Messiah – they mean the same thing, which is ‘anointed one,’)
The woman told the others what she had personally seen and heard. Then she asked the question: Could this be the Messiah? And combined with her obvious excitement, that’s all it took. Her neighbors followed the woman out of the village with belief ‘half-formed’ in their minds and hearts. And when they came to Jesus and listened to him, their second-hand faith became more powerfully personal to them.
When you think about it, it would be hard to imagine a more unlikely person for Jesus to recruit as an evangelist. She was a woman, she was a Samaritan, and she was a person who seems to have been regarded with suspicion by the people of her town. But in her encounter with Jesus, this woman was transformed from an object of scorn into an agent of God’s grace. Her witness brought a whole community to Jesus. And she did it without any sort of theological jargon. She just told the story of what she had experienced personally, and asked her neighbors to consider whether Jesus might be what they had been waiting for.
Doesn’t this woman seem like an ideal model for the rest of us as witnesses to Jesus? All of us who have experiences of faith can bear witness to those experiences. We can invite others to encounter Jesus. And we can invite them to consider whether he might not be what they’ve been waiting for – someone to rescue them from the burden of their own sins and mistakes, to open their hearts to a new relationship with God based on spirit and truth, and to offer them a new and abundant way of life.
If Jesus can do all this through such an unlikely evangelist, he might just do surprising things through people like us, too.
Let’s pray together. Lord, inspire us by this woman’s example. Move us to imitate her excitement at encountering Jesus, and her determination to tell others what she had seen and heard. Use us to invite others to decide for themselves if Jesus is the Christ they’ve been waiting for. By your Spirit, let us be as useful to you as she was. Amen.
Have a great weekend, and worship God joyfully on Sunday,
Henry
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