“Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.’ …Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. Could this be the Messiah?’” (John 4:13-15, 28-29)
I’ve always thought that the opening of the conversation with the woman at the Samarian well shows an understandable suspicion on her part: ‘What is this Jewish man doing here and why is he talking to me?’ Perhaps she was weighing up a ‘fight or flight’ response? She also has something of a sassy streak, perhaps a learned response as the butt of gossip in her home village. Her first response to Jesus’ mention of “water welling up to eternal life” seems to me to carry a tone of cynicism and mockery: “give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water…” I may be imagining it, but I can almost ‘hear’ an unspoken continuation of her thought process: “…and so that I won’t have to have to engage with oddballs like you!”
And yet, as the conversation continues (and of course we don’t have a full, verbatim script and we don’t know everything that was said) it is clear that she does respond to Jesus’ implied offer of ‘living water’. That first rather mocking “give me this water” at some point turned into a genuine acceptance of what Jesus was offering. It’s the observation of the detail that she left her water jar behind (v.28) when she ran back to the town to speak of meeting with the Messiah. She obviously would have come again to the well out of physical thirst in the days that lay ahead but the abandoned water jar speaks of her deepest thirsts – the emotional and spiritual – having been satisfied in her encounter with Jesus.
A simple thought then: whatever thirst we have that leaves us always vulnerable or restless or unsatisfied can be resolved in encounter with Jesus. In accepting Him and whatever He wants to pour into our lives we too can leave redundant vessels behind.