The Sunday of the Samaritan Woman #
Each Sunday from the day of Christ’s Resurrection until the leave-taking of Pascha is dedicated to a particular event that revealed His divine-human nature. The Apostle who touched His wounds and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”; the myrrh-bearing women who beheld the dazzling vision of angels at His life-giving tomb; the paralytic and the blind man who were healed — all of them, each in their own way, recognized in Christ the Lord and Savior, the Master of nature, One like unto us in humanity and yet fully God. The conversation recalled today between the Lord Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well near the city of Sychar was not accompanied by a miracle or any outward display of divine power; yet every word of it is full of deep meaning. This encounter became for the Samaritan woman a true revelation that transformed her life.
The Samaritans were a people who accepted the Law of Moses but did not acknowledge the unique sanctity of the Temple in Jerusalem. They prayed to the one true God at various sites associated with manifestations of His power. Over the course of more than five hundred years of separation between the Samaritans and the Jews, great differences arose in customs, so that the Jews considered the Samaritans to be unclean apostates with whom they should have no dealings. When the Jewish scribes wished to slander the Lord Jesus before the people, they called Him a Samaritan. In contrast, the Lord Himself, wishing to show His disciples that the essence of pleasing God lies in active love and not in the formal observance of the Law’s prescriptions, told them the parable of the Good Samaritan — in which the Samaritan, who saved a fellow Jew beaten half to death by robbers, proved more righteous and closer to God than the Jewish priest and Levite who passed by their wounded kinsman for fear of defiling themselves before prayer and ritual observance.
Thus today’s Gospel reading tells how Christ, wearied from a long journey on foot, sat down by a well near a city inhabited by Samaritans. His disciples had gone into the city to buy food, and He remained alone. When a Samaritan woman came to the well with a jar to draw water, Christ asked her for a drink. The woman was surprised that a stranger — who clearly appeared to be a Jew — would ask her for water, disregarding the deep hostility between their peoples. Then Christ said to her, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, ‘Give Me to drink,’ thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.” The woman saith unto Him, “Sir, Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast Thou that living water?” […] Jesus answered and said unto her, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:10–11, 13–15).
We Christians understand that the Lord was speaking of the Holy Spirit; but the Samaritan woman, hearing such words for the first time, thought He meant ordinary water. Nevertheless, the stranger’s words stirred her soul, and she paused to continue speaking with Him. In the further conversation, Christ revealed His divine insight by telling her even the number of men with whom she had lived. And the Samaritan woman — though not learned in the Scriptures and living in a way unbefitting a respectable wife — through the grace of the Holy Spirit that touched her heart in that moment, believed that her Converser was sent from God and knew the truth. “Sir, I perceive that Thou art a prophet,” she said, and began to ask the Lord Jesus about the nature of the disagreements between Jews and Samaritans — from which we understand that the question of true faith was deeply important to her. And the Lord answered her: “Believe Me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. […] But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21, 23–24). To this the woman said, “I know that Messiah cometh, which is called Christ: when He is come, He will tell us all things.” She did not want merely to follow the traditions of her ancestors or do what was customary in her tribe; she wished to know without doubt the will of God, so that she might fulfill it knowingly, with wholehearted devotion and love.
What a striking contrast this is with the Jewish scribes, who preferred the traditions of the elders and their self-serving interpretations to the truth. The chief priests and scribes not only refused to believe when the Lord told them He was sent from the Heavenly Father, but they did not even wish to hear such things — for to acknowledge Him as the Son of God would have demanded from them a complete transformation not only of their outward behavior, but of their entire inner life. But the Samaritan woman, as we see, was ready for such a transformation. Seeing her straightforwardness, her humility, the openness of her heart, and the purity of her longing for God, the Lord immediately revealed to her the truth about Himself — that He was the promised Messiah of the Scriptures, and that the time had come for a new worship of God and a new brotherhood among mankind, uniting all who truly love Him from every nation on earth.
Meanwhile, the disciples returned, and the woman went back to the city. In her excitement, she left behind her water jar, feeling that something far more important than her daily concerns had been revealed to her. She began openly speaking to the townspeople she met along the way, and the Samaritans, too, left their daily labors and went out to meet Jesus. The Evangelist writes: “And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on Him for the saying of the woman, which testified, ‘He told me all that ever I did’” (John 4:39). They invited the Lord to stay with them, and for two days they listened to His teaching. Afterward, they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
Church tradition tells us that the Samaritan woman, whose name was Photine (or Photini), became a disciple of the Savior after this encounter, and many years later, during the reign of Nero, she suffered martyrdom for the Christian faith, together with her five sisters and two sons.
We must now return briefly to the words spoken by the Savior to His disciples when they returned: “Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours” (John 4:35–38).
The episode with the Samaritans was that very sign by which Christ’s disciples could recognize how fully ripened the spiritual field had become for the harvest. Those who had labored and sown, Christ called the prophets and patriarchs, who for centuries had toiled to cultivate the soul of the people, a soul hardened and dry like parched earth, bringing them to the worship of the one Creator of heaven and earth and to obedience to His commandments. But just as the harvest depends not only on the plowman and sower but on the timely aid of sun and rain, so too the spiritual field ripened only when the Righteous Sun Himself came into the world — the Only-Begotten Son and Word of God. Under His life-giving rays, the fields of human souls turned white for harvest, and with the help and cooperation of the Holy Spirit, the apostles were able to reap their spiritual harvest, bearing the word of His Holy Gospel to the ends of the earth.
“Many seeds from that harvest were scattered and sown throughout all the lands of the world, and another harvest is growing, which shall be gathered at the end of the age,” writes Blessed Augustine, commenting on the Lord’s words. “Concerning this harvest it is said, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy’ (Psalm 125:5). And to this harvest it will not be the apostles who are sent, but the Angels (Matt. 13:39). […] This harvest grows among the tares and waits to be purified at the end of time. The same field to which the disciples were once sent, and where the prophets had labored before them, had already ripened. […] They labored in different times, but shall equally rejoice and together receive as their reward eternal life” (Homilies on the Gospel of John, Discourse 15).
Awaiting that final angelic harvest, let us keep watch with unwavering spirit and pray to our merciful Lord that He not cast us away among the tares to be consumed by the eternal fire, but rather gather us, as His good wheat, into the granaries of the Kingdom of Heaven.
At Great Vespers, at “Lord, I have cried,” Stikhera in Tone 1:
The Fountain of wonders came to the well at the sixth hour, to capture the fruit of Eve: for it was at that hour that Eve had departed from Paradise, deceived by the serpent. Then drew near the Samaritan woman to draw water, and seeing her, the Savior said: “Give Me water to drink, and I shall fill thee with living waters.” And running into the city, the chaste woman at once proclaimed to the people: “Come, see Christ the Lord, the Savior of our souls.”
At the Stikhovna, Stikhera (Glory… Tone 8):
When Thou didst appear in the flesh, O Christ God, by Thine ineffable dispensation, the Samaritan woman, having heard Thy word, O Lover of mankind, left her water jar at the well and ran, saying to those in the city: “Come, see the Knower of hearts. Can this be the awaited Christ, who has great mercy?”