The woman said, “Sir, give me this water so I won’t ever get thirsty, won’t ever have to come back to this well again!”

16 He said, “Go call your husband and then come back.”

17-18 “I have no husband,” she said.

“That’s nicely put: ‘I have no husband.’ You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re living with now isn’t even your husband. You spoke the truth there, sure enough.”

19-20 “Oh, so you’re a prophet! Well, tell me this: Our ancestors worshiped God at this mountain, but you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place for worship, right?” (The Message)

Yesterday we were thinking about this woman’s quest for life. She kept drinking from a well that did not satisfy. This was particularly true of her love life. Someone observed that ‘she had lived with a passing parade of men.’

So when she asked Jesus for the satisfying gift He offered (15), Jesus abruptly raised the issue of her ‘idolatry’. Men had been her ‘gods’. This was where she had been looking for meaning, but failing to find it. Jesus’ words, as someone else noted, ‘precipitated a crisis in the conversation.’ It seems it was this prophetic knowledge of her that so affected her (see v.29).

In Revelation 1, in John’s majestic vision of the risen Jesus, he says, ”…his eyes were like blazing fire” (14b). One preacher, speaking about that passage, said, ‘Jesus has X-Ray vision.’

Indeed He does. This woman experienced it. So have many of us He kindly convicts of sin, and brings to repentance that we may know ”the life that truly is life” (1 Tim.6:19).