Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus
was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did
not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for
Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria
called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 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.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her,
“Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)
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.) (John
4:1-9)
Years ago, my
journey through Jesus’ visit with the Samaritan woman led me to see the way
Jesus would say something to her that made her thoughts go HIGHER than ever
before, but that led to her having to look DEEPER into herself than she had
ever done. Ever since, this HIGHER/DEEPER way of relating to God in his word
has richly blessed me.
So, coming again to
John 4 is like a return trip to Ucluelet, BC. There is a history of visits to
this passage of Scripture, an anticipation of seeing things I haven’t seen before,
and the expectation of experiencing it as the person I am this time through the
journey.
The first
Higher/Deeper experience came in the opening scene of the drama. We have what
appears to be a typical Jewish man resting by the local well. Enter stage right
is a not-typical Samaritan woman. Typical in being Samaritan, yes. Typical in
being a woman, yes. But not-typical in coming to the well all alone.
Think of the shock
and strangeness to this woman when a lifetime of animosity between Jews and
Samaritans is blasted with something she could never have expected. The
cultural stereotype of prideful and hateful Jewish men relating to despised and
hated Samaritans (and the feeling was mutual) was being utterly broken by
Immanuel, God with us, the Word who became flesh to dwell among us.
The first
application of this is to encourage you to have a daily time with God in his
word and prayer where you listen for what he is saying, look for how he is
working to accomplish his will in those things, and diligently join him in his
work as best as you know to do. As much as we can learn from someone else’s
sharing from the word, we always learn more from attaching to God for ourselves
in the two-way relationship of his word and our prayer.
The second
application is to consider our own experience with encountering God’s Highers
and our Deepers. Every time we read God’s word, he will be revealing something
to us that is Higher than what we have learned about him. When we say, “I’ve
never noticed that before,” or “something stood out that I never considered,” or
“Why have I never noticed that verse!”, or even just, “What stood out today was…”,
we are describing a Higher. And, since God says that “as the heavens are higher
than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your
thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9), we sure better expect that when we meet with him,
seeing “higher” things is a way of life for his children.
The Deepers to look
for are always where God points his spotlight inside us. What do we suddenly see
inside ourselves that tells us how we are doing? What clash do we feel between the
Higher thing God is showing us in his word and our “blessed are the poor in
spirit” acknowledgement of how sadly we aren’t experiencing what is written, or
we just don’t know him like that. This is the gift of the Deeper, seeing where
we are in relation to what God is saying and doing.
In the case of the
Samaritan woman, her Deeper was the inescapable feeling of being despised and
rejected by the Jewish people. She had to feel that before discovering that
this was the Messiah who “was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was
despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).
Do you see that? In
the first-step of the Higher/Deeper she encounters a man who is willing to
break all the barriers of custom and culture to give her the honor of helping him
out with a drink of water, and she feels this strange event on the Deeper of a
heart that has borne the shame and disgrace over her ethnicity in the eyes of
Jewish men. And that, we will see, is the genius of the Savior who has
compassion on the people living in darkness because he saw them as sheep
without a shepherd.
I am truly looking
forward to the rest of this journey through John 4 and the gift of meeting with
Jesus and this woman who becomes my sister in Christ before the scene is
finished. I am in awe and wonder that John takes us from Jesus’ one-on-one with
Nicodemus, a good, Jewish religious leader who struggled with Jesus’ teaching
on being born again, and leads us through Jesus’ one-on-one visit with a sinful
Samaritan woman who entered the kingdom of heaven on the same day she just went
to the well for water.
In all of this, as
John put front and center in his prologue, “…we have seen his glory, glory
as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… For from his
fullness we have all received, grace upon grace… No one has ever seen God; God
the only Son, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known” (John
1:14-18).
This is what was
happening to this poor and unsuspecting Samaritan then, and it shines even more
brightly for us today as we get to see the whole scene in just a few minutes of
reading (and hour-upon-hour of meditating!). Can you see how God is doing this
very thing with you today?
© 2025
Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
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