"4 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria."
John 4:1-4
It may be that John's selection and arrangement of his material is meant to make us consider the resemblances and contrasts between this chapter and the last. In the case of Nicodemus, our Lord was meeting with someone very much inside the covenants of promise, but here it is with an outsider, who was doubtless regarded as outside the bounds of respectability and decency also. Yet the same Lord deals with them both, and in the same way, with wonderful patience. Nicodemus was blind to the things of God; he could not understand. And Jesus led him to the Scriptures. The woman of Samaria was blind; she could not understand Jesus' words, but He led her on patiently, and one of the wonderful things in the story is the dawning of revelation on her soul, and the growing understanding that came to her.
The commentaries suggest, with regard to 4, that the Samaria route was the quickest way to Galilee. But would the Holy Spirit have recorded a mere geographical note here? May there not be a deeper significance? It is not difficult to see something more in it. This is the 'must needs' of grace, which speaks to us, at the least, of the foreknowledge of the Saviour and of His infinite love and compassion reaching out to a broken piece of humanity. The reason why He 'needs must go' through Samaria was that He was going to meet somebody that day by Jacob's well. And is it not wonderful that we have a Saviour God like that, thus sensitive to the needs of the broken and the lost?