Christian faith is not just a philosopy of life or a system of morality. It is about a person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is more than just a charismatic figure. He is the tangible expression in the world of the unseen God. The encounter with the woman at the well reveals God and his “thirst” for a human response to the love he freely gives. The author, Brother John of Taizé, spends much of his time introducing young people to praying with the Bible.
This book is based on a series of reflections on the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John, the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. They were given as Bible introductions during the international meetings which bring tens of thousands of young adults to the French village of Taizé each year to share the life and worship of the ecumenical monastic community located there.
After a preliminary section which situates the theme of wells and water in the global context of the Hebrew Scriptures, the book follows Saint John’s narrative step by step. Verses from the New Testament story are given in large print and followed by a commentary. When other Bible texts are quoted in the course of the commentary itself, they are always printed in italics.
In addition, three signs are employed to help make the layout more understandable. They indicate optional elements which periodically interrupt the main text:
■ placed to the left of the commentary, indicates Bible texts or references which are not part of the main argument but which complete or illustrate what was said.
refers to an explanatory note.
? refers to questions that help make the bible story relevant today. They can be used for personal reflection or as a starting-point for a small-group discussion.
The Well in the Bible
At the heart of the Christian faith there is neither a philosophy of life nor a system of morality but a person, the man called Jesus of Nazareth. The world has always been fascinated by this figure; countless books have been written to try and analyze the secret of his appeal. On the basis of his human characteristics he could be described in many different ways – as a teacher of wisdom, for instance, or a prophet, a charismatic leader, a revolutionary, a good man. Although all of these approaches undoubtedly contain part of the truth, for believers, when all is said and done, they remain insufficient. Starting from a completely different vantage point, a key phrase at the beginning of Saint John’s Gospel states the importance of Jesus for the eyes of faith:
No one has ever seen God;
the only Son,
pressed against the Father’s bosom,
has made him known.
(John 1:18)
From the perspective of faith, the key to understanding Jesus is not found solely on the level of his humanity. He is the only Son, the one who has a unique relationship with that Mystery at the heart of existence that we call God. As a consequence, his human life reveals fully the identity of this God. That is why Saint John can refer to Jesus as the Logos, the Word of God who comes into the world. He is, at the heart of human history, the tangible expression and communication of the unseen God.
■ Read John 1:1-18
? Who is Jesus of Nazareth for me? What Gospel texts are most helpful for me to discover his identity?
But the expression “the Word of God” is also applied to that collection of books we call the Bible. And we know that our Christian Bible is divided into two parts: the Old Testament, which tells the story of the people of Israel before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and the New Testament, which recounts the life and message of this Jesus. So the question naturally arises: what do we need the Old Testament for? If everything is given in Jesus Christ, cannot we simply discard the rest? This question is not a new one; it has been asked, often insistently, since the earliest days of the Christian faith. What makes it even more important is the fact that, in the eyes of many, the difference between the two Testaments appears striking. They readily oppose the God of the Old Testament, a fierce and bloody warrior-god, to the God of Jesus Christ, the so-called “god of love.” Another good reason, it would seem, to eliminate the first half of our Bibles and focus once and for all on the essential.
If we look closer, however, we will see that in fact things are not so simple. Understanding the relationship between the two parts of the Bible helps us better to grasp the way in which God enters into communication with our world. To say that, in Jesus Christ, the divine being and will are definitively revealed does not mean that God can only be known through Christ. On the contrary, through the creation of the universe and the history of humanity from its beginnings down to the present day, God has never ceased to communicate in a great diversity of ways. It is not in our power to limit God’s presence to what we have understood of it. Being Christian does not require us to refuse the quality of revelation to anyone or anything; it simply means believing that Jesus Christ recapitulates all that was fragmentary in other acts of revelation, clarifying them, confirming their truth and revealing their deepest significance. His person is thus the site of a discernment or, to put it in a more biblical fashion, of a judgment (in Greek krisis).
■ After having spoken to our ancestors in the old days at many different times and in many different ways through the prophets, in these last days God has spoken to us through the Son…. (Hebrews 1:1-2)
And among all the ways in which God communicates, a unique and in some sense emblematic role is played by the tiny nation of Israel. Emblematic, because all the twists and turns of human history, with its glories and its miseries, are found there in a nutshell. Unique, because that history takes explicit shape on the basis of a relationship with the Mystery we call God. It thus offers the framework in which God’s only Son will be born; it provides the flesh which will be the bodily expression of the Word.
■The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)
In theological terms, we say that Christ fulfilled the Scriptures; in other words, he is the culmination that reveals the full and authentic meaning of what went before. But the same thing can be said starting from the other side: to understand Christ’s identity and message correctly, they must be situated in the context of an ongoing history that encompasses them on all sides. The two parts of the Bible, therefore, complete one another; each sheds light on the other. The more we try to understand one, the more we are led to deepen our knowledge of the other.
The text we are going to examine, from the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint John, offers a good illustration of what has just been said. It recounts a simple meeting between a man and a woman beside a well in Samaria, with the symbolism of water occupying a central place. Before turning to the Gospel story itself, then, we will find it helpful to examine the significance of these realities in the Hebrew Scriptures.
It is easy to see that after the air we breathe, water is the most precious substance for human beings on our planet. Without water, no life can last for a very long time. And today, in the so-called developed countries, to get water all we need to do is turn on the tap. Water is thus generally taken for granted, almost as much as the air around us, and as a consequence its symbolic significance is weakened.
But in most times and places, things are far from being that easy. Water does not arrive automatically; it has to be sought. If you are lucky you can find it on the surface of the earth, in rivers, lakes or springs. But in more and parts of the globe, such as Palestine, where the desert is never far away, it is not as simple as that. People are forced to dig beneath the surface to find an underground spring. That is what we call a well.
We should thus be able to understand why, in the world of the Bible, especially in the earlier periods, wells were important sites. They were literally sources of life, focal points that made possible the existence of human beings in society. Around these key sites, a whole network of life could spring up and develop. Wells were thus places where people gathered and, human nature being what it is, it was not rare that they were also places of conflict:
[Isaac] had so many flocks and herds and servants that the Philistines envied him. So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the Philistines stopped up, filling them with earth. (…) Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died and he gave them the same names his father had given them. Isaac’s servants dug in the valley and discovered a well of fresh water there. But the herders of Gerar quarreled with those of Isaac and said, “The water is ours!” So he named the well Esek, because they disputed with him. Then they dug another well, but they quarreled over that one also; so he named it Sitnah. He moved on from there and dug another well, and no one quarreled over it. He named it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land.” (Genesis 26:14-15,18-22)
Places of conflict and sometimes places of reconciliation, springs of water create around themselves a kind of microcosm of human society made up of individual thirsts and the need to take others into account, involving generosity and egotism.
But among all the possible encounters between people that can take place around a well, there is one that takes on particular importance in the Hebrew Bible, namely, the meeting between a man and a woman. In this respect, three texts form a mini-tradition that is very useful for understanding the Gospel story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman.
The first narrative is found in chapter 24 of the Book of Genesis. Its starting-point is Abraham’s desire to find a wife for his son Isaac. To accomplish this, the patriarch sends an old and trusted servant back to the country of his birth, far from the land of Canaan where he now lives. The servant stops to rest beside a well and says this prayer:
O Lord, God of my master Abraham, give me success today, and show kindness to my master Abraham. See, I am standing beside this spring, and the daughters of the townspeople are coming out to draw water. May it be that when I say to a girl, “Please let down your jar that I may have a drink,” and she says, “Drink, and I’ll water your camels too”—let her be the one you have chosen for your servant Isaac. By this I will know that you have shown kindness to my master. (Genesis 24:12-14)
A short time later, a girl named Rebekah comes to the well with her jar to draw water. The servant asks for a drink and things happen just as he had described in his prayer. The girl invites him to spend the night with her family, and to his surprise he discovers that they are relatives of Abraham. Following a long exchange of words, Rebekah agrees to leave with the elderly man to take Isaac as her husband.
In this story, there are details that recall more specifically chapter 4 of John’s Gospel. After meeting the man at the well, “the girl ran and told her mother’s household about these things” (Genesis 24:28; compare John 4:28) saying, “This is what the man said to me” (Genesis 24:30; compare John 4:29). We should not assume that these similarities are a mere coincidence. The Christians of the first generation were mainly Jews who were quite familiar with the Scriptures of their people, and so it is normal that, in telling a story, they were influenced by traditional models. This in itself is not an indication that they invented the story in question, but simply that its form may have been determined in part by the tradition from which it came.
The well in John 4 is called “Jacob’s well,” and the second story we will look at (Genesis 29:1-14) is centered on Jacob, the son of Isaac. Traveling far from home, he stops beside a well covered with a large stone. Some shepherds are there, and they wait for all the flocks to arrive before they roll away the stone that covers the mouth of the well and give the sheep to drink. The reason for this is not clear from the text itself: do they wait because the stone is so heavy, or rather is the well covered because it does not give much water, and so they do not share the water until all are present in order to avoid dissension?
In any event, at that moment a girl arrives with her sheep. She is Jacob’s cousin Rachel. When he sees her, Jacob rolls the stone away from the well and waters the sheep that belong to his uncle Laban. He goes home with them and ends up staying there. Wishing to marry Rachel, he must first spend fourteen years in her father’s house. In the end, he remains in that land for some twenty years.
Just like his descendant Jesus, Jacob offers water to an unknown woman. The link with John’s Gospel becomes clearer, however, if we do not start with the narrative as it is written down in the Bible, but rather look at the way the Jews of Jesus’ time told the story in their own words. Fortunately, we have documents that provide us with these versions.
These documents are the Targumim, paraphrases of the Bible in Aramaic, the language of everyday life, for those who could no longer read Biblical Hebrew, as well as the Midrashim, commentaries or homilies explaining the books of the Bible, often by putting together different texts and weaving a new story out of them.
According to some traditions, when Jacob rolls away the stone, the water begins to gush forth and becomes a great fountain, so that from that day on there is more than enough water for everybody. This version of the story has the advantage of offering a plausible explanation for Laban’s “dishonest” behavior: he wants to keep Jacob with him as long as possible, fearing that if he leaves, the water will return to the previous level and the shepherds will have to work hard once again to water their flocks.
In the light of this version of the story, the Samaritan woman’s reply when Jesus promises her living water takes on new meaning: “Are you greater than our father Jacob…?” (John 4:12). In other words: “Are you going to perform a miracle like he did, or perhaps even do something more impressive? Just who do you think you are?”
The third account in this tradition of encounters beside a well concerns Moses (Exodus 2:15-22). Forced to flee Egypt after his unsuccessful attempt to establish justice, he stops to rest beside a well. When a group of girls, here seven sisters, come to water their flocks, they are intimidated by some shepherds. Moses comes to their rescue and then waters their sheep. Their father invites him to stay with them, and it should not surprise us that in the end Moses marries one of the daughters.
Here too, when they told the story, Jesus’ contemporaries added extra details. In one version, Moses performs a miracle like Jacob’s by causing water to spring up out of the well. This proves to his future father-in-law that he is indeed a descendant of Jacob. And the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus begins his account of the story in this way:
“When he came to the city Midian [Moses] sat upon a certain well, and rested himself there after his laborious journey, and the affliction he had been in. It was not far from the city, and the time of the day was noon….”
Jewish Antiquities II, ch. 11:1, translated by William Whiston.
These are details we will meet again in Saint John’s Gospel (John 4:5-6). In this way, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is in clear continuity with the patriarchs and Moses. As we shall see, Jesus brings to fulfillment what they prefigure on the level of the narrative itself and its literal meaning.
In addition to these stories of meetings beside a well that lead to a marriage, the theme of water takes on great importance during the Exodus experience of God’s people Israel. After the Israelites leave Egypt under the guidance of Moses, they must cross the desert before reaching the promised land. The desert is by definition the place where water is lacking, and so it is there that God can be revealed unambiguously as the Wellspring of life by miraculously giving the people to drink.
■ Read Exodus 17:1-7 and Numbers 20:1-11. See also Isaiah 41:18; 43:20; 48:21; Psalm 78:15-16; 105:41; 114:8.
In this respect, an enigmatic text found in the Book of Numbers takes on great importance in the later tradition:
From there they continued on to Beer, the well where the Lord said to Moses, “Gather the people together and I will give them water.” Then Israel sang this song:
“Spring up, O well!
Sing about it,
about the well that the princes dug,
that the nobles of the people sank—
the nobles with sceptres and staffs.”
Then they went from the desert to Mattanah,
from Mattanah to Nahaliel, from Nahaliel to Bamoth,
and from Bamoth to the valley in Moab
where the top of Pisgah overlooks the wasteland.
(Numbers 21:16-20)
What is this text about? There is a well in the desert, a song sung to the well, and a list of places the people have to pass through on their journey. At first sight, the meaning of all this is far from obvious. And yet precisely because such a text is not immediately clear, it opens up a vast field for investigation and reflection.
Traditional Jewish exegesis has always been fascinated by such passages. The lack of clarity, of surface rationality, is heard as a call to go deeper, to look for treasures hidden beneath the surface of the text. The early Christian theologians, in their own way, walked in the footsteps of the Jewish rabbis by distinguishing the different senses of Scripture. If to us today their interpretations sometimes seem farfetched, we should not lose sight of their basic insight, which remains valuable. They understood that the meaning of the Scriptures is not exhausted by remaining on the literal level, or simply by discovering the conscious intention of the inspired author; the Bible is a gateway to the unfathomable Mystery of God.
The rabbis explained these verses in the following way. The water given by God in the desert was in fact the gift of a well, a well that had been dug centuries earlier by the patriarchs (the princes in verse 18). It was thus the very same well as that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And this miraculous well accompanied the people as they journeyed in the wilderness; that is the meaning of the itinerary in verses 18b-20. In the final analysis, then, there was only one well, a miraculous spring given by God to provide water for the nation during its pilgrimage.
Basing themselves on this interpretation, some rabbis took a step further. If this is the case, they reasoned, the passage cannot be referring to a literal well that dispenses ordinary water. So they looked for an allegorical meaning to the story. They concluded that the well was in fact the Torah, the Law or Teaching given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, a wellspring of life that constantly accompanied the people throughout its history. By the gift of the Torah, the nation was brought into contact with God’s Word, with divine Wisdom. This shows us, it should be mentioned in passing, that a “spiritual” interpretation of material realities does not arise exclusively with the Gospel of Jesus Christ; it is also found in the earlier Jewish tradition.
It is clear that Saint Paul, a Jew educated as a Pharisee, was familiar with a similar tradition. Reflecting on the situation of the Israelites in the wilderness, in order to explain to the believers of Corinth that their precursors also experienced a kind of baptism, and even a Eucharist, he writes:
You should be aware, my brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. And they all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that accompanied them; but that rock was Christ. (1 Corinthians 10:1-4)
We can see here that Paul, while also attributing a non-material significance to the story, transformed the rabbinical interpretation. For him, the spring or rock in the desert was in fact the hidden presence of Christ, who was already among his people as the Source of their life. Saint Paul thus approaches from another angle the theme which Saint John sketches out in the fourth chapter of his Gospel and which we are going to investigate.
This rapid journey through the Hebrew Bible was an attempt to situate a Gospel story by investigating the symbols of water and of the well. Source of life; gath eying-place; site of conflict and reconciliation; meeting-place, notably between a man and a woman with a view to marriage; symbol of a God who takes care of his people: the well possesses a density of meaning that makes it a privileged place for understanding the relationship between God and human beings. Jesus profits from this background to transform a simple encounter into a magnificent expression of his message. He reveals in fullness what these human and biblical symbols always wished to communicate. Let us now turn to the Gospel, in order to see how it brings up to date and completes the biblical teaching concerning the gift of water.
? Read Exodus 17:1-7, the story of the water from the rock in the desert, a classical example of faith being put to the test. When confronted with such a difficulty, how do the people react? How does Moses react? In a similar situation, how did I or would I react? What is God’s response? What does this response tell us about God?
