Are You Thirsty? - The Dry Place
- Paul Downie
- Mar 26
- 18 min read
Updated: Mar 27
John 4:9-10 NIVUK
[9] 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.) [10] 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.’
Romania can have some incredibly hot summers. One day, while I was serving there as a missionary, it got so hot that the government had to order everyone who worked in an office without air-conditioning to stay at home. The heat was oppressive. I remember it being just so hot that I barely had the energy to get out of bed. I have never experienced heat like it – anywhere.
That evening, I’d had enough. I got out of my bed, had a wash and decided to go into town for some food, thinking that surely things would have cooled off by now.
And they had. A little.
I headed out. The heat was still fierce. I wandered from drinks stand to drinks stand, downing anything I could to stave off dehydration, until I reached the city centre, where the thermometer outside McDonald’s said the temperature was 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Farenheit). The time was 7pm.
I stared at that thermometer in utter disbelief, got what I needed from the shops, and steeled myself for a very hot walk home – via every drinks stand I could find.
It’s very important to drink plenty. They say a person can live for three minutes without oxygen, three days without water and three weeks without food. Dehydration is absolutely nasty – I’ve experienced it. I would not wish it on anyone.
But in the ancient Middle East, the ability to drink water, especially in dry places, could literally be the difference between life and death, both for human beings and their livestock.
So it’s easy to understand how wells – likely primitive boreholes down to the water table – could become communally important places. We see in Genesis that they were important landmarks for the Patriarchs – often disputed (Genesis 21:22-31; 26:19-33). They were also places where people met – two of the three Patriarchs met their wives either at or because of a well (Genesis 24:1-27; Genesis 29:1-13). Moses also met his future wife’s family at a well (Exodus 2:15-21).
So they were ‘well’ important places.
But could you imagine the crushing disappointment if you were to travel for a long distance, potentially even with livestock, and then discover that the well was dry?
It would be something that would almost break you.
This is where I believe our Western culture has arrived.
Nothing has worked.
We have tried religious fanaticism. Fascism. Communism. Vapid materialism. Empty modernism. We have turned every which way but loose and found nothing but dry wells.
And now, in deep nihilistic despair, we turn aside to wells we know have no water because it’s all we have.
We are like people in dry countries whose only alternative is to drink from dirty, mudded streams, risking cholera and who knows what other diseases because they have no source of fresh water. And that is a huge tragedy – a stain on the face of humanity.
It is no less a stain when people who have so much, and so much in their favour, feel such despair and depression because everywhere they turn, all they find are empty wells that do not satisfy their thirst.
Do you know something?
That is precisely the situation in which the occupants of Sychar found themselves.
Or at least it was, before Jesus arrived.
Let’s start exploring this beautiful encounter by first looking at The Water in the Well.
The Water in the Well
John 4:5-6 NIVUK
[5] So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. [6] Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
Many years ago, before I served in Romania for three years, a friend of mind went to Bucharest for a business trip. His colleague took him to Revolution Square. He showed my friend the bullet holes in the walls where the Communist police and army had shot at protestors. He pointed out the little shrines, with the candles still burning for the fallen. He showed my friend the balcony from where the heartless dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu fled before he was court martialled and executed.
When my friend came home, he told me, ‘You really got the sense that history had happened there, that something important had taken place. It sent chills down my spine.’
That is what this fountain and the nearby town of Sychar represented. Something historical happened here. Something really quite meaningful.
Actually, quite a lot of somethings.
It is believed, you see, that Sychar was a pejorative form for the town of Shechem – Sychar means ‘drunk’. Quite a lot of Israel’s formative history took place in or around this city – some of it X-rated:
Abraham had been there (Genesis 12:6)
Jacob’a daughter Dinah was raped here (Genesis 34:1-4) and the subsequent deception and revenge raid by Simeon and Levi led to the death of every male in the town (Genesis 34:5-31)
Jacob buried his household’s gods under an oak tree at Shechem (Genesis 35:5)
Joseph looked for his brothers, who were grazing their flocks near Shechem, but had moved on (Genesis 37:12)
Gideon had a concubine their, from whom he had a son (Judges 8:31) who went on to be a judge of Israel too (Judges 9)
Joseph’s bones were buried bear there (Acts 7:14-16)
Rehoboam, son of Solomon, was crowned king there, and it was there that the Northern and Southern kingdoms split apart (1 Kings 12; 2 Chronicles 10)
Shechem was a city of refuge for those who had been falsely accused of murder (Joshua 20:7)
It was there that Joshua gave his final speech to the Israelites (Joshua 24).
Shechem was an important place.
Or, at least, had been an important place.
It was still very important to the Samaritans, as we will read later on:
John 4:12 NIVUK
[12] Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?’
It defined them. It was part of their identity.
And clinging to that identity caused friction with their Jewish neighbours.
Notice what the Samaritan woman said: ‘our father Jacob’. The Jews disputed that. They saw them as the offspring of pagan peoples who had been resettled in the land after the Northern Kingdom had been taken into exile (2 Kings 17:24-41).
They were not, and never had been, Jacob’s descendents.
Perhaps this was why the Jews gave Shechem the pejorative name of ‘drunken’. Perhaps they despised what had happened, and the Samaritan claim to be co-inheritors of the Patriarchal blessings and covenant.
Yet – and this is important to notice – the Samaritan history, identity and claim to be the progeny of Jacob appears to have done them no good. It wasn’t enough.
They were still thirsty for something more.
They still longed for a Messiah.
People are eager to assert their identity nowadays, even when they really should not. They are quick to claim to be something they are not.
Building your life on being someone, on your identity, is a bit like fishing in the Aral Sea. That sea is shrinking year after year after year. Erstwhile coastal villages that were once right on the shore find themselves kilometres from it. Fishing boats lie beached far from the water’s edge. The sea bed is drying up and turning into a desert. Fish are dying.
That is what happens when you build your life on being someone. It’s great at first. Your life has meaning and purpose. But as time goes on, that purpose depletes until there is nothing left at all and everything seems empty and hollow.
To use another metaphor, it’s like a well into a depleting water table. Every year your bucket has to go deeper and deeper to find water, until eventually it fails to reach it, and your life becomes dry and lifeless.
It’s even worse if you build your life on a temporary identity, like a job or a career, and that is taken away from you.
This well symbolised everything this town thought it was, even if, in Jewish eyes, it was not.
And it was dry.
The water in the physical well might have still been there, but the water in the metaphorical well of their identity had long since dried up and left them spiritually thirsty.
But the Quencher of that thirst was nearby, because we move from the water at the well to The Man by the Well.
The Man by the Well
John 4:6-9 NIVUK
[6] Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. [7] When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’ [8] (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) [9] 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.)
You can imagine the picture. It’s noon. The sun is high. The heat is intense. People are, generally, off the street or in the shade.
One woman looks through her window and realises the coast is clear. So she quietly steps out of her house, closes the door, and sneaks as quietly as possible, doing her best not to be seen, down the street towards the well, a large ceramic jug on her head.
She makes it to the last corner to before the well without being noticed. Her heart is pumping inside her. Sweat is pouring off her brow. She wipes it with her robe, sucks in some air and turns the last corner.
And then... Oh no! There is someone at the well!
Worse, it’s a man.
Worse, it’s a Jewish man.
But hey, it was their problem, not hers. She was thirsty. She needed water. She could put ancient rivalries aside for the sake of a jug of water.
She walks towards the well, pretending that nothing was amiss.
‘He’s Jewish. He probably won’t even talk to me.’ she thinks to herself.
But then, in a disarmingly kind voice, He asks her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’
And suddenly her world as she knows it is shattered.
Of course, my re-telling is fictionalised. But there could be a ring of truth to it. Because a Jewish man at a Samaritan well at midday was already pretty unusual.
But a Jewish man at a Samaritan well at midday asking for a drink?
Well, that’s paradigm-shifting.
Because Jewish men didn’t even speak to their wives in public. Let alone to a single woman. A single Samaritan woman. A single Samaritan with (as we will see later) a dreadful love life. In a place where people would normally gather (albeit not so much in the fierce midday heat).
To us, someone asking for a drink of water is nothing. No biggie. Especially in places like Scotland, where it pours of the heavens in such quantities on some days that you could just hold a cup outside and let the thing fill up.
But in a hot climate, in a hot zone for poor international and inter-religious relations, and in a place where extended hospitality meant friendship, but also the difference between life and death, this was meaningful. Profoundly so.
We have to then ask the question: apart from the obvious fact that Jesus was thirsty and did not have anything with which to obtain water from the well (John 4:11), why did He do it?
Why ask this woman in particular for water?
The mystery deepens when we see these verses:
Matthew 10:40-42 NIVUK
[40] ‘Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. [41] Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. [42] And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.’
So Jesus was doing more than simply asking for water, He was actually extending an opportunity to this woman to be rewarded for extending hospitality to Him. This woman: a Samaritan living an immoral life.
In Jesus’ day, this was absolutely huge.
John records that the disciple were surprised by it (John 4:27).
No wonder.
So, you see, there is much more to this than just a thirsty man asking for a drink of water.
Jesus here is smashing down cultural norms and taboos. He is opening doors that were once locked tight. He is bulldozing gates, bars and walls that kept people out.
There are people all over our society who are outcasts just like this woman. I wonder, are there believers who bear the name of Christ and will do what He did to bring them home to Him?
After the water in the well and the man by the well, we also see The Woman in the Sun.
The Woman in the Sun
John 4:6-8 NIVUK
[6] Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. [7] When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’ [8] (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
There are cultures in this world who don’t appear to have much respect for time. In my wife’s village, for example, they have transport, but they don’t have timetables. Now, for the son of a railwayman, that has taken some adjustment. Standing outside in the tropical heat and humidity under a concrete shelter wondering if or when your bus is going to come was never high up on my bucket list of travel experiences to do before my days are done.
However, I got used to it.
In this passage, the time is important. It’s noon. It’s baking hot. The sun is searing. In my country, we call it ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen’ weather.
Yet this woman is out in it. Not only is she out in it, she is carrying a heavy jar, likely ceramic, on her head, which she intended to fill with water.
In the heat.
We have to ask the question: Why? Would it not be far better to fetch water in the relative cool of the morning or the evening?
There is a reason:
John 4:16-18 NIVUK
[16] He told her, ‘Go, call your husband and come back.’ [17] ‘I have no husband,’ she replied. Jesus said to her, ‘You are right when you say you have no husband. [18] The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.’
Theologians have long theorised that the reason why this woman was out in the midday sun with her huge, heavy jar to collect water was to escape the gossip and accusing glances of her fellow occupants of Sychar.
Why else would someone bear that heat, unless she had to?
This woman had lived a sinful life – was still living a sinful life. That was the problem.
But I want you to notice something – something very interesting:
Jesus knows about it. He tells her that He knows about it!
But He doesn’t judge her for it. This is not the time for judging; this is the same for saving.
As John noted:
John 3:17 NIVUK
[17] For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Jesus, in a dialogue with a woman who was even caught in the act of a serious, capital sin, said this:
John 8:10-11 NIVUK
[10] Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no-one condemned you?’ [11] ‘No-one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’
When He met the Samaritan woman, Jesus was not just reaching out to someone who was different from Him religiously, ethnically, linguistically and in her gender. No, He was also reaching out to someone who had been living a bad life, and still was.
And He knew it.
But He neither condemned her nor condoned what she was doing. He did not validate her behaviour nor convict her for it.
He did not use a slur or a derogatory term.
Instead, He offered to exchange her dry life for the living water of faith.
Those of us who call ourselves after His Name have much to learn from Jesus. There are many others who are beaten down by their own reputation – justified or not. There are many others who would go out in the midday sun to avoid accusing glances.
We have to realise that this is the Age of Grace, not judgement.
It’s not our place or time to judge.
It is our place to offer them the path to salvation.
We now move, lastly, from the water in the well, the man by the well, the woman in the sun, to The Living Water.
The Living Water
John 4:10-15 NIVUK
[10] 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.’ [11] ‘Sir,’ the woman said, ‘you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? [12] Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?’ [13] Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, [14] but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ [15] The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.’
Oh, how precious are these verses!
One of the most important warnings you receive when travelling in tropical countries is to stay well away from standing water. There is a very good reason for it. Mosquitoes congregate around standing water. Malaria spreads through mosquitoes. Even if you are not in a malarial zone, being bitten by those annoying little critters is not pleasant.
Polluted water is much worse.
When people have no choice but to drink dirty water, dysentery can result which, if not treated promptly and properly, can kill.
We all need water to live. But if we drink dirty water, or spend time around standing water, we can die.
That which should be good for us can do us great evil.
In this passage, Jesus talked of living water. That reference comes from the sometimes rather surreal prophecies of Ezekiel.
In his day, the spiritual leaders of Israel had become corrupt and idolatrous, to the extent that God abandoned both the Temple (Ezekiel 10) and His people to exile (Ezekiel 12:1-20).
But he later prophesied that the Temple would be restored (Ezekiel 40, 41, 42) and God’s glory would return (Ezekiel 43).
One of the most wonderful pictures of this restoration is a river that flows from beneath the Temple (Ezekiel 47). As we read this chapter, we must bear in mind that there was only a small spring – the Gihon Spring – beneath the city. It certainly did not produce anything like a volume of water that could be called a river. Also, the Dead Sea, which is mentioned in this prophecy, is so salty that nothing can live there, and it is currently shrinking due to evaporation and water usage upstream.
But look what God told Ezekiel would happen in those days:
Ezekiel 47:8-9, 12 NIVUK
[8] He said to me, ‘This water flows towards the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, where it enters the Dead Sea. When it empties into the sea, the salty water there becomes fresh. [9] Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live.
[12] Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.’
The dead, salty sea would be made fresh. The flow of the river would bring life.
This prophecy is echoed in Revelation:
Revelation 22:1-2 NIVUK
[1] Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb [2] down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
But Jesus is not promising that this woman will drink of the water of life then, He is promising that she can drink of it right now.
Instead of the depleting waters of identity, nationality and religion, she can drink of the water of life now.
Instead of the thirst-causing waters of failed human relationships, she can drink the water of life now.
Instead of the dehydrating waters of shame and embarrassment, she can drink the water of life now.
Instead of the drowning waters of sin and disgrace, she can drink the water of life now.
And what is the water of life?
John 7:37-39 NIVUK
[37] On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. [38] Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ [39] By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.
It is the Holy Spirit. The Comforter. The Counsellor. The deposit guaranteeing our salvation (Ephesians 1:14) – the fact that we win. The bringer of joy. The teacher of truth (John 16:13).
The One who makes our lives worth living and brings fruit that touches and changes the lives of others.
This is the living water. This is the Healer of Nations.
This is the healer of this woman’s life.
Is it any wonder she replied:
John 4:15 NIVUK
[15] The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.’
Now, she was likely mixing up Jesus’ metaphor for living water with the actual water that both she and He needed to drink. However, her point still holds – and is something we all must remember:
If you focus your life on identity and nationality, history and religiosity, you will be thirsty.
You will always be thirsty. You will never be satisfied. And that will either drive you deeper and deeper and deeper into them, like a drug addict seeking a high, or you will give up and become cynical, writing them off in a nihilistic frustration, and will choose to live a life of meaningless drudgery until you die.
Because only Jesus saves.
Only Jesus makes life worthwhile.
Only Jesus lifts your life above the norm, renews it like you never thought was possible and uses it to touch the lives of others.
Only Jesus.
Nothing else.
No-one else.
Conclusion
Jeremiah 2:13 NIVUK
[13] ‘My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Something quite wonderful happens in countries like Israel.
Summers can be fiercely hot. River beds dry up. Vegetation dries. Those who need food for their livestock often have to take their animals into the mountains to find pasture.
But during the winter, it rains. And on the mountains, it snows.
In the springtime, as the weather begins to warm up again, melt water from the mountains begins to trickle down dried up river beds. Plants that had lain dormant beneath the soil spring up. The once-dried-up valleys are verdant once more. As the Psalmist wrote:.
Psalms 65:8-10 NIVUK
[8] The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy. [9] You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with corn, for so you have ordained it. [10] You drench its furrows and level its ridges; you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
This natural picture is a beautiful symbol of what Jesus has done for this woman.
One of the biggest bands from my home city of Glasgow, Del Amitri, wrote some great, but depressing, songs about life lived without Christ. In one of their songs, they confessed ‘We are the dead-life’. In other words, they existed, but they didn’t feel truly alive.
In this passage, we see a woman who has tried so hard to live a worthwhile life. She has bought into everything her world offered her: a strong national and cultural identity, the history of a proud nation, religious worship and, as we will see in my next post, human love – and boy, has she tried to grasp onto that!
But it hasn’t worked. She is still thirsty. She is still dry.
She is still living a ‘dead-life’, to use Del Amitri’s term.
But she is about to come alive.
Because, as we have seen as we’ve progressed from the water in the well, to the man at the well, the woman in the sun and the water of life, the only way to find true joy and satisfaction is in Jesus.
Nowhere else.
There is a message in this passage. It is a message that is relevant for every single human being.
For those of us who have found Jesus, it is to stop hiding in our Christianised ghettos and be prepared to cross boundaries and barriers. There are people like this woman in every street and every neighbour. They aren’t hard to find. Like her, they may be living lives that cause them shame and disgrace. They may not want people to pry and peer into their lives.
What they do not need is our judgement. Now is not the time for that.
What they need is Jesus.
And if we have now found Jesus yet, we have to know that nothing else and no-one else will satisfy like Him. If we look for the same level of joy and fulfilment in other things and other people, we will commit a dreadful act of self-harm, and may also burden other people with expectations they cannot meet.
If we seek joy and fulfilment elsewhere, we will always come up thirsty and dry.
But in Jesus we will always find what we need.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, thank You for this wonderful encounter. Thank you for showing me that I will only find what I need in You. I will not turn to another to find it, and I will share this amazing blessing with others. Amen.
Questions
In these verses, what was the woman turning to for joy and fulfilment and satisfaction? Why did they not work?
What was so unusual about this encounter? What does this teach us about how Christians should react to those who aren’t living a good life?
What is ‘living water’? Why does it quench our thirst?
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