Yochanan John 4:1-32 literal     1 So when the Master knew that the Pharisees heard that the Yahshua makes and dunks more students that Yochanan 2 (though Yahshua himself dunked not, but his students dunked), 3 he left Yahuda[i] and went away again into the Galil.  And it was necessary for him[ii] to go through: through the Shomron[iii].

   5 So he goes to a city of the Shomronites called Shekhem[iv], close to the place that Yahqov gave to his son Yosef[v]. 6 And Yahcov’s fountain[vi] was there.  So Yahshua, having become tired from the trip, sat at the fountain then – about the sixth hour.

   7 A woman of Shomron comes to draw water.  Yahshua says to her, Give me some to drink; 8 for his students had gone away into the city that they might buy rations[vii].  9 So the Shomronite woman says to him, How is it that you being a Yahudahite, asks of me, a Shomronite woman, to drink?  (For Yahudaites do not get together with Shomronites.)

   10 Yahshua answered and said to her, If you knew the gift of the Almighty and who is telling you, Give me something to drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you a living water. 11 She says to him, Master, you have no bucket and the well[viii] is deep.  Where do you have the living water?  12 You are not greater than our father Yahqov who gave us the well and drank of it himself … and his sons … and his beasts[ix]!

   13 Yahshua answered and said to her, Everyone drinking this water will get thirsty[x] again.  14 But whoever drinks the water I will give him – it will become in him a water fountain springing up to ageless life[xi].

   15 The woman says to him, Master, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty nor have to come through here to draw. 16 He says to her, Go call that man of yours and come back here.  17 The woman answered and said, A man I have not. Yahshua says to her, It is good that you said, A man I have not.  For you have had 18 five men, and now the one you have is not your man! This you have spoken truly!

   19 The woman says to him, Master, I sense you are a prophet.  20 Our ancestors worshipped in this mountain, but you say that in Yerushalayim is the place where it is required to worship. 21 Yahshua says to her, Believe me, woman, that an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Yerushalayim will you all worship the Father. 22 You all worship what you know not.  We worship what we know so that the salvation[xii] is from the Yahudaïm.

   23 However, the hour comes and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks this kind worshiping[xiii] him.

 

SNEADS Literal translation: John 4:1-23 So when the Master knew that the Pharisees heard that Yahshua makes and dunks more students than John (though Yahshua himself dunked not, but his students dunked), he left Judea and went away again into the Galil.  And it was necessary for him to go through – through Samaria!

   So he goes to a city of the Samaritans called Sychar, close to the place that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. And Jacob’s fountain was there.  So Yahshua, having become tired from the trip, sat at the fountain then – about the sixth hour.  A woman of Samaria comes to draw water.  Yahshua says to her, Give me some to drink; for his students had gone away into the city that they might buy rations.  So the Samaritan woman says to him, How is it that you being a Judean, asks of me, a Samaritan woman, to drink?  (For Judeans do not get together with Samaritans.) 

   Yahshua answered and said to her, If you knew the gift of the Almighty and who is telling you, Give me something to drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you a living water. She says to him, Master, you have no bucket and the well is deep.  Where do you have the living water?  You are not greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well and drank of it himself … and his sons … and his beasts!

   Yahshua answered and said to her, Everyone drinking this water will get thirsty again.  But whoever drinks the water I will give him – it will become in him a water fountain springing up to ageless life.

   The woman says to him, Master, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty nor have to come through here to draw. He says to her, Go call that man of yours and come back here.  The woman answered and said, A man I have not. Yahshua says to her, It is good that you said, A man I have not.  For you have had five men, and now the one you have is not your man! This you have spoken truly!

   The woman says to him, Master, I sense you are a prophet.  Our ancestors worshipped in this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where it is required to worship. Yahshua says to her, Believe me, woman, that an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you all worship the Father.

   You all worship what you know not.  We worship what we know so that The Salvation is from the Jews. However, the hour comes and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks this kind worshipping him.

 

 

Wellspring of Wisdom

Wellspring of Wisdom, hear our cry.

The way ahead is harsh and dry.

We need a source to satisfy

Our thirst for sanctifying waters,

Wisdom for your faithful sons and daughters.

 

Dawn of a New Day put to flight

The terrors of a nuclear night.

We bearers of your loving light,

We huddle closer to your fire,

Lift the lamp of hope a little higher.

 

Garden of Grace, your gifts abound.

The sacred signs are all around,

The whole of earth is holy ground.

We learn from all of life expressing,

How to grow in sowing seeds of blessing.

 

Call to Compassion, help us bring

Our burning need for nurturing,

The emptiness of everything

To your embrace, as we endeavor

To proclaim your holy name forever.

Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi.

- Miriam Therese Winter, 1987.

 

Jacob’s and His Well

   Once upon a time, three thousand, seven hundred years ago, there was a great patriarch named Yahcov ben Yitzak.  We know him today as Jacob.  He started off as a slave, working to buy the woman he loved from her father.  Her father was a depression-minded cheapskate, so the gullible Jacob ended up slaving fourteen years for the girl he loved and her sister, whom he didn’t. 

   Jacob finally took his share from the herds and became a rich Bedouin, had twelve sons and who knows how many daughters.  He got into a wrestling match with the angel of Yahweh and won (Genesis 32:28).  Yahweh changed his name from Jacob to Isra-el, which means, “El-beater.” 

   After Jacob had done all he could do, he went to live in the hill country of a place known as Philistine (Palestine).  There he dug a well in the village of Sychar (Schechem / Askar) that’s still used to draw water today.  The whole land of Philistine later became known by his new name - Israel - when his descendants beat the native peoples in warfare.

 

The Making of Samaria

   Then, under several judges and three kings, Saul, David and Solomon, the descendants or ‘tribes’ of the twelve sons of Jacob lived united as Israelites.  After the death of King Solomon, there was a falling out between these tribes over taxes.  Israel split into north and south, with the southern tribes taking the name of Judea.  Israel became two countries under two dynasties. 

  To the south was Judea, under King Solomon’s son Rehoboam, which kept the capital city of Jerusalem, and continued in the traditional worship of Yahweh in the Temple.  Up north, Jeroboam, the new king of Israel, in order to keep his people from worshipping in Jerusalem, built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim just a short distance from Jacob’s well there in Sychar.  Jeroboam set up a gold statue of a calf for his people to worship (1 Kings 12:28-29).  He tested the Almighty’s mercy by insisting that the calf was Yahweh, thus breaking the first three commandments and ordering the people to follow him in his folly.

   After giving Israel plenty of time to repent of idolizing the calf, and sending plenty of prophets to warn of impending doom, Yahweh finally sent a succession of brutal conquerors – Chaldeans then Persians then Syrians – to devastate and depopulate the northern Kingdom of Israel.  The Syrians then repopulated Israel with ethnically-mixed people to assure there’d never be unity in Israel again.  Israel thus became known as Samaria, or ‘Watch Mountain,’ so-named after the pagan temple on Mount Gerizim that King Jeroboam set up generations before.

 

The Lost Tribes

   The Israelites were resettled in the Far East (in Bactria, i.e. Afghanistan).  These ‘lost tribes of Israel’ migrated far north, to what’s now known as Russia, then far west.  In thirty-seven hundred years, the ‘lost tribes’ became large nations in what we now know as Continental Europe, Scandinavia (Isaac’s Land) and Great Britain (Covenant Land).  The name “England” means “the Land of the Calf,” the golden calf, that is; and England’s version of Uncle Sam is John Bull.  “America,” the child of Western Europe, means the land of Machir,[xiv] the son of Manasseh, the son of Joseph, the son of Jacob.  The lost Tribes are lost no more.  We are them.

 

Israel Is Divided Into Three Parts

  By Yahshua’s time, greater Israel was divided into three provinces.  Judea, in the south, had Jerusalem as capital.  Judea was populated by Jews then and now.  Samaria was north of Judea; as we mentioned, the capital was Sychar aka Shechem.  Samaria was populated by mixed peoples who worshipped Yahweh, but retained old traditions originating with Jeroboam’s calf worship.  Galilee was yet north of Samaria.  This was where Yahshua’s headquarters was located.  Galilee’s capital was Sepphorus, of which Nazareth was a suburb.  Jews made up about a third of the population in Galilee.

 

Noon at Jacob’s Well

 

   Jews of both Judea and Galilee considered Samaria, sandwiched in between them, so unholy a place with such inferior, mixed-blood people that they wouldn’t step foot there for fear of being defiled.  Today we call that attitude racism.  When Galileans traveled to Jerusalem for the holy days, they went clean around Samaria.  But today we find some men traveling from Jerusalem to Galilee right through Samaria: Yahshua and the gang.  Now that you know the history, you can see how these men, dressed in the white linen of rabbis, might seem very out of place at Jacob’s well in the middle of Samaria.

   And it’s noon; and over a hundred degrees.  Yahshua sits down on the land of his ancestor to rest, sending his disciples to find vittles.  A woman pops out of the brush to draw water.  Now two things are unusual - the Jew at the well and the woman coming at noon.  The other women drew water in the morning or after sunset.  Noon was far too hot for that kind of heavy work.  This woman was evidently an outcast – a Scarlet Woman; a Scarlet Woman and a Jewish Rabbi sharing the heat of Jacob’s well in the middle of Samaria.

 

Gimme a Drink

 

   Scarlet knows by his clothes that this rabbi despises her; that he’s going to abuse her or insult her.  “Woman, gimme a drink!” says the Rabbi in a rough, tired voice.  The woman says nothing; she’s scared.  Jews and Samaritans didn’t use the same facilities; they’d never drink from a common bucket.  Furthermore, many rabbis thought it unclean to even look at a woman in public.  Today we call this sexism.  So as the lady whispers, fear and resentment choke her voice, “Since when does a Jew ask a drink of a Samaritan woman?”  The Rabbi Yahshua softens and answers her in a riddle, “Lady, if you knew my family, you’d be asking me for a drink, and I’d give you running water.”

   Today in many third-world villages, wells still supply water.  These wells aren’t like the wells here; they’re open ditches full of thick brown, stagnant muck.  The ones I’ve seen had all kinds of stuff floating on top.  One time I heard a goat fell into a well and drowned, but the people still drew water – they had no alternative.  Running water from a spring is much safer and tastes better than well water, but it’s not always available.  Spring water isn’t stagnant.  When Yahshua says ‘living water,’ he means ‘running water,’ like from a river or tap.

   Scarlet thinks Yahshua’s talking about the water moving in the deepest caverns of the well.  “Master, you don’t even have a bucket.  How you gonna get any running water?”  Nowadays at Jacob’s well it’s 125 feet from the top just to the goop floating on the surface.  She continues, “You’re gonna need a long rope!  Who do you think you are, Jacob, whose flocks drank here and left this place to us?” 

   Indeed, Scarlet doesn’t know to whom she’s speaking.  Yahshua was a direct descendant of Jacob (Matthew 1:2).  According to inheritance, the well actually belonged to him!  When he came to Jacob’s well, he came to his own property – to his own fountain. 

 

Pretty Dumb She Is

 

   “Drinkin’ this mud’ll never quench your thirst, lady.  I’ve got running water, forever gushing up life!  Drink mine and, as El is my witness, you’ll never be thirsty again.”   Scarlet’s not used to abstract concepts or higher reasoning.  Her life is full of toil and coarse reality.  She’s just a poor simpleton.  But she knows that a person has to drink water all the time to live.  She thinks one drink and that’s the end of this disdainful daily chore of carrying water.  “Mister, I’ll take some of that water.  I’m not well enough to come back here, tsk tsk.” 

   Scarlet seems as dumb as her bucket.  Yahshua tells her that, if she wants some of this premium water, she has to go get her man (andra) and bring him over. The obvious here is that Yahshua wants to sell her miracle water, and for her to buy, she had to get her man, because the man had the money.  But Scarlet cries poor; maybe she can get something FREE out of the deal.  (Demurely:) “Master, I’m so poor and I’m not even married.  I have to do it all for myself.  Nobody’s gonna help me, poor, poor Scarlet!”

   Yahshua’s equally coy.  “Oh, so you haven’t a man!  You are poor!  But you’ve already had five men; this guy now certainly ain’t one of them.”  You see, that’s why Scarlet drug herself out in the heat.  Besides being simple, she was an outcast even among outcasts, a disgraceful sinner, even among her own kind.  Nobody’d be seen with her.  Today we call this intolerance.

   Yet Scarlet’s a survivor.  Without missing a beat, she changes the subject.  “Oh, so you’re a prophet of some kind. Let me see … I have a religion question that’s been bothering me.”  Scarlet realizes the fundamental theological difference between Samaritan religion and that of the Jews.  And she just hasn’t seen many talkative Jewish rabbis around.

   Scarlet says, “Master Prophet, our bunch always worships up on that there on Mount Gerizim, but your bunch says we have to worship on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. Who’s right?”  This question goes clear back to King Jeroboam setting up the golden calf on Mount Gerizim seven hundred years earlier.  The ruins of the idolatrous temple could be plainly seen from where they were standing; in fact, Scarlet probably pointed them out.  We call that kind of idolatry tradition.

 

Truth and True Worship

 

   Yahshua’s answer to her question is completely unexpected – and unbelievable.  “Lady, in the first case, your bunch doesn’t know who to worship, period.  In the second case, my bunch knows who – and  far too well.  In either case, salvation still springs up from the Jews.” 

   His answer was mold-breaking because, when he speaks of Salvation being from the Jews, he’s speaking of himself: he is Salvation – in fact, his name means “Salvation of Yahweh” – and he did spring from Judaism.  We like to forget that Yahshua was a practicing Jew and wore the white and blue linen robe of a master Rabbi, a Bible teacher?  And we forget that the Bible he taught had only one Testament!  He said plainly that “The New Testament is in my blood.”[xv]  So when I call him Yahshua, it reminds me that he is a worshipper of Father Yahweh, and was so long before we made him our g*d.

   “Lady, this’ll be hard for you to believe, but the time’s coming when no one’ll worship the Father either on your mountain or on mine.”  Up on the hill, the Samaritan temple was already in ruins, and the Temple at Jerusalem would be likewise utterly destroyed in one short generation. 

 

Father is No Man!

 

   “Lady, I’ve got more news for you!  The Father in Heaven is not a man.  He is neither flesh nor full of deceit like a man.  He’s not a racist or sexist or traditionalist, nor is he intolerant like a man.  The Father is a spiritual being, full of truth.  There’s not one bit of fleshliness about him.  We only call him ‘him’ for lack of a more accurate word.  Words can’t describe ‘him’ accurately.  If the Father is fully Spirit and fully Truth, then how can any fleshly ritual, like sacrificing animals or making a pilgrimage to the top of that mountain there, possibly be considered true worship?  If worship isn’t true, then it’s false; and false worship is perpetrated by false worshipers.  The true will not stand for the false.”

   “OH!” Scarlet pipes right up.  “I’m not sure I understand any of that, but I’m so glad to hear that Gäd’s not such a mean fellow after all, Sir!”  Yahshua replies, “That’s OK, lady.  Somebody’ll understand this somewhere, some day; for the time’s coming when true worshipers will again worship.  They’ll know how to properly worship the Father, with true spirituality.  I’ll teach them how; and if they’ll submit to sound teaching, then they’ll understand it better by and by.” 

   Again, Scarlet says, “O yes, I do know about that.  Someday Messiah’s coming.  He’ll teach us all these things.  Is that right?”  “Lady, look at me!  Do you see this man who’s before you, talking to you?  I AM.” 

 

A Commercial
 

   Now we interrupt this story for an important announcement.  Our Bible translations have Yahshua’s words as, “I that speak unto thee am he” in John 4:26, with the ‘he’ in italics.  That means that the word ‘he’ isn’t in the source language, but was put there to clarify the meaning.  The actual recorded words of Yahshua are, egw eimi (ego eimi), I AM.  This is the English translation of the meaning of the sacred name, Yahweh: I AM, I WAS, I WILL BE. 

   Scarlet asks Yahshua, “Messiah will come and teach us.”  And he replies, “I AM.”

 

Her Name and the Name of Your G-d

 

   Throughout the Gospel of John, Yahshua reveals two things through signs:

 

(1) his identity as Yahweh’s Anointed Messiah and

 

(2) the sacred name of his Father, I AM, designating that Messiah is here!  When the Scarlet Woman says the Messiah will come, Yahshua proclaims, “I AM.”  Throughout the Gospel of John, we read this over and over.  I AM the bread.  I AM the light.  I AM the door.  I AM the good shepherd, I AM come in my Father’s name.[xvi] 

 

The fact that Yahshua proclaimed I AM over and over then is extremely significant for our times, since the only name by which we may be saved has been rediscovered in this present generation. 

   The Bible tells us that to know one’s name is to have that one’s power.  Yahshua has revealed the Father’s name and character to us so that we might have the same power as he – in spirit and truth.  This woman, who was no theological genius, still could recognize her personal golden calves – and slay them.  Shouldn’t we do the same with our idols?  Yes we should.  For Yahshua prophesies that some day real worship may be spiritual and truthful, and that the Father’s name and identity would be restored. 

   This is that day! Will we not appropriate the blessing of the latter days?

 

A Leaky, Nameless Evangelist

 

   The I AM opened this woman’s eyes.  The spiritual blinders of her simplicity, poverty and ignorance fell right off at the revelation of the identity of the Son.  Scarlet was transformed immediately, in miraculous fashion, and she became living, running water.  And she went running, leaking water all the way back to Sychar, flooding the village with running water.  She didn’t care who saw her leaking or even that she’d left that old empty bucket behind.  The wellsprings of her eyes burst forth water – she was full to the brim with new knowledge and now, new life. 

   Yahshua became an instant sensation in Samaria on account of her testimony.  Yet what was “our Yahshua” doing, taking up residence with these despised people?  The big kahuna of the village explains that question, “We don’t have to believe he’s the Savior just because she said so.  Now we know the I AM for ourselves!”

 

One Final Observation

   One final observation:  In John chapter 3 (which we’ve either looked at or will soon), Yahshua reveals truth to the great teacher of Israel, Nicodemus.  But Nicodemus is too saturated with tradition to stretch his mind or heart and inch for the new, living and true approach to worship.  It seems natural for Yahshua to explain lofty truths to an educated, respected, ‘man of the cloth’ like Nicodemus.  Yet because what Yahshua taught him was beyond his limited experience, he could receive nothing.  He turned on his heals and stomped back to his mountain in the darkness.

   In the next major incident, Yahshua reveals himself to a sinful woman of a despised minority.  The pitiful woman not only understood, but believed and received.  She got a bucketful and a new bucket to hold it all in.  She was forgiven and born anew.  She received a mission and purpose in life other than just slaving for things that don’t satisfy anyway. 

 

And Scarlet cried, “As El Is My Witness, I’ll Never Be Thirsty Again!”

 

   Examine yourself.  With whom will you stand – with the prideful minded Nicodemus, religious but unsurrendered?  or with a simple woman who listened and capitulated to the good news?  The next time you gaze up at your golden calves half hidden in the rubble of a ruined hilltop shrine far above the stagnant cistern of dead religion, consider this - the wellspring of living water is here if you will take some.  LIFE is here!  I AM is here. Get you a drink and never thirst again.

 

 

 

 

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