What’s your main concern right now? Maybe with fewer of your colleagues able to come to work because of COVID, you’re just trying to get through the day. So maybe you just don’t have time to pay much attention to “church stuff” – and maybe because of some of the decisions you’ve made in your past, you’re not at all sure you’d be welcome there anyway.

The woman in today’s passage would understand. Her personal life was a mess, having given up on marriage after five failures. And when Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, showed up to talk with her about “church stuff,” she didn’t understand why he was even talking to her, as Samaritans and Jews didn’t get along. And so her focus remained stubbornly on the needs of the moment, drawing enough water from the local well to cook her daily meals, or perhaps to do some washing.

But the good news is that even if she didn’t really have time for Jesus, he took time for her. He put aside their ethnic differences and promised her, not just running water for her house, but living water to clean her soul (4:14). He invited her to give up her preoccupation with the things of this world and to worship God in Spirit and in truth (4:24). And He revealed Himself to her as God’s promised Messiah (4:26) – well before He told the same thing to any of His disciples.

And that’s the good news for all of us too. It doesn’t matter who we are or what we’ve done. Jesus still comes to us, still welcomes, still calls us into a fuller experience of God, into eternal life. Will we stop what we’re doing long enough to listen to Him?

John 4:1-26 (ESV)

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.
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.”
11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”
13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”
17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’;
18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”
26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”