John 4: 1-26 contains a wonderful story of an encounter with Jesus. He's on a journey; it's noon, he's tired and he sits down for a rest by an old well. There's a woman there and he asks her for a drink; they talk, and it is the most amazing experience of her life. He tells her all about herself, even though they've only just met. He challenges her about the deep things in her life and won't let her change the subject.
The story shows us two things.
First, it shows how Jesus breaks down the walls between people. There were all sorts of reasons why they shouldn't even have been speaking at all. She's a Samaritan, and that puts her on the wrong side of a Jew from the start. It goes back way into history; they were in the North, in a part of the country from which Jews had been deported. Assyria, the great power of the time, had resettled people from all over its empire in the region. So Samaritans were regarded as a hybrid people who didn't really belong. If a Samaritan woman gave a drink to a Jewish man it would contaminate him, religiously; he'd have to perform various rituals before he could go to the Temple again.
And even the fact that she was a woman was a barrier. Jesus was a Rabbi, a teacher; he was supposed to be respectable. A single man who valued his reputation would not start up a conversation with woman in a lonely place – especially one with a past like hers. But neither her gender nor her race matter to Jesus. He simply sees a person.
There are all sorts of walls between people today – walls between rich and poor, old and young, believer and unbeliever. But for Jesus, walls didn't exist – he just saw people.
Second, he won't let her hide from the truth. The conversation Jesus and this woman have is about water, on the face of it. "I'm thirsty, can you give me a drink?" says Jesus. "Anyone who drinks this water is going to be thirsty again. But there's a different kind of thirst and I can quench that forever."
She doesn't understand, of course, and the conversation goes backwards and forwards until she says, "Hold on, I'll get my husband." That's when Jesus gets personal. "You've been married five times, and you aren't married to the man you're living with now."
We don't know her history. Perhaps she'd been widowed five times. But the chances are that she was something of an outcast from her village; she was fetching water at the hottest part of the day, when she wouldn't meet anyone else, and this well was half a mile away from the village. She was a woman with a dubious past, an irregular present and an uncertain future. And Jesus tells her: "Whether you know it or not, you are thirsty for more than water. You have needs that are more than just physical. You are a spiritual person, and your spirit isn't satisfied. I can satisfy your soul."
Western society is very good at satisfying material needs. But it often seems as though many of us have a lot of possessions, and not much else. It sometimes feels as though we are surrounding ourselves with the things we can buy or the things we can do or the places we can go on holiday, because don't want to look inside ourselves and ask, "Who am I? What's the purpose of my life? What about eternity?"
There's nothing wrong with enjoying life. But if we try to use possessions to quench a spiritual thirst, we'll never do it.
Jesus is trying to get this Samaritan woman to look at her life and see it from a spiritual point of view. St Augustine said 1600 years ago, "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find rest in you." The Bible says that God has "set eternity in human hearts", and only Christ can satisfy that.
When Jesus challenges the Samaritan woman about how many husbands she's had, she panics and tries to shift the discussion onto theology – the different truth claims of Samaria and Jerusalem. Jesus says: "The time is coming when that won't matter. The time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks."
In other words: we can't hide behind questions. There's nothing wrong with asking questions. God doesn't expect us to turn off our minds when we become Christians, and they don't stop after you've made that decision. But sooner or later we have to decide: whatever Jesus is offering, do we want it?
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
