"5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)10 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 4:5-10
One of the wonderful things about the Apostle John's testimony to Jesus is the way in which our Lord's humanity is placed side by side with His divinity. We stressed His foreknowledge of the woman's need in yesterday's Note, while here, in 6, it is His sheer humanity that stands out so clearly. He so completely shared human life that after a journey of some hours, He was weary enough to throw Himself down by the well to rest while His disciples fetched food from the town, and ask for a drink of water (7). This could be put another way: in effect, He was saying, 'I thirst', and we may well wonder whether John is thinking of that later occasion when the Son of God said, 'I thirst', as He hung on the cross, as if to suggest that here was a shadow of His sufferings and a faint adumbration of the miracle and mystery of redeeming grace. Different interpretations have been given of Jesus' opening words to the woman, and some have thought they were, so to speak, His 'opening gambit' in the religious discussion that was to follow. But this is to read something into them that is not there; He surely asked for a drink for no other reason than that He was thirsty. It is the sheer naturalness of His approach to her that is so striking, and this has something very important to teach us. In this case it was the truly human and natural that led to the truly spiritual and divine. But too often we fail to be simply human in our contacts with people; in our concern to be spiritual, we forget to be natural. This is often why we give them cause to fear that we will 'button-hole' them without possibility of escape. How different it was here, with Jesus and the woman!