The Samaritan woman at the well. “You’re a Jew,” she asks, “and you ask me for water?” “Go and get your husband,” he said. "I have no husband." His conversion-stopper. Savior of the world!
A gospel rewrite, translating a translation . . .
In a recent reading at an old-style mass, Jesus chooses a non-Jew to whom to reveal himself as the messiah.
It happened at “Jacob's well” in a city of Samaria, where he sat, “wearied with his journey,” at about noon, waiting while his disciples went for something to eat in the city.
Joining him at the well was “a Samarian woman,” there to draw water.
He asked her for a drink, which gave her pause: “You’re a Jew,” she asks, “and you ask me for water?”
“If you knew who was asking,” he responded, “you might not be surprised at this and he would have given you living water.”
"Sir,” she said, “Where will you get this ‘living water’? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank of it?”
"Whoever drinks water from this well shall thirst again,” he said, “but he that drinks of the water that I give shall never thirst again."
“Sir, give me this water of yours,” she said, “so I will never thirst again.”
“Go and get your husband and come back here,” he said.
"I have no husband," she said.
“I know you don’t,” he said,” because you’ve had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband. You spoke truly.”
“I see now that you’re a prophet,” she said. ”Our fathers worshiped on this mountain. But you say Jerusalem is where we must worship.”
“Woman, the time will come,” he said, “when you shall adore the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
“You adore now what you don’t know,” he said. “We adore what we know. For salvation is of the Jews.
“But the hour has come,” he continued, “when the true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth.
“God is a spirit: and they who adore him must do so in spirit and in truth."
"I know the Messiah is to come, she said, “and when he does come, he will tell us all things."
Jesus: "I am he."
Pow.
Right then his disciples came. They were disturbed, even shocked, to see him talking with the Samarian woman, but couldn’t bring themselves to ask him. What was he doing? Why was he talking to her?
Leaving her waterpot behind, the woman hurried back to the city and told her story to men of the city: "Come and see a man who has told me all things I have done. Is not he the Christ?"
They left the city to see him.
Meanwhile, his disciples urged him to eat from what they had brought. But he said no. "I have meat to eat which you know not," he told them. Puzzled, they wondered if someone had brought him something.
"My meat,” he said, “is to do the will of him that sent me, that I may perfect his work.
“Do not you say, there are yet four months, and then the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes, and see the nations. For they are white already to harvest.
“And he who reaps receives wages and gathers fruit unto life everlasting, so that one who sows and one who reaps may rejoice together.”
As for the Samaritans, many believed in him on the basis of the woman’s testimony, "He told me what I had done."
They asked him to stay, which he did for two days, preaching. Many more came to believe in him, not from her account, they told her, but from listening to him and realizing that “here indeed was the Savior of the world!"