At Night, and at Noon

There was a man in Jerusalem called Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee, one of the men who kept the law of Moses down to the last detail, and he was a member of the ruling council — an important, careful, respected man who had spent his whole life studying the scriptures. He came to see Jesus at night. And he began politely, the way one teacher speaks to another: “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher. Nobody could do the signs you are doing unless God were with him.” Jesus did not answer the compliment. He went straight past it, as if the two of them had already been talking for an hour: “Amen, amen, I tell you: unless a man is born from above, he cannot even see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said, “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot go back inside his mother and be born a second time, can he?” And Jesus said, “Amen, amen, I tell you: unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot go into the kingdom of God. What is born from flesh is flesh, and what is born from the Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows wherever it wants to. You hear the sound of it going past — and you do not know where it came from, or where it is going. That is what everybody is like who has been born from the Spirit.” In the language he was speaking, one word meant all three things at once: breath, and wind, and spirit. So what he said about the wind he also said about the Spirit, and he meant both, and Nicodemus would have heard both. You cannot catch the wind, or steer it, or make it blow. You can only stand in it and feel it go past.

Nicodemus said, “How can these things happen?” And Jesus said, “You are the teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things? Amen, amen, I tell you, we talk about what we know, and we tell what we have actually seen — and you people will not take our word for it. If I have told you about the things down here and you do not trust me, how are you going to trust me if I tell you about the things up there? And nobody has ever gone up into heaven, except the one who came down out of heaven — the Son of Man.” Then he reminded him of something out of their own old story: the time in the wilderness when the people were dying of snake bites, and Moses was told to make a snake out of bronze and lift it up high on a pole, so that anybody who was bitten could look at it and live. “And just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man has to be lifted up, so that everybody who trusts in him may have life for ever. For God loved the world so much that he gave the only Son, so that everybody who trusts in him should not be lost, but have life for ever. God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world could be rescued through him. The one who trusts in him is not judged. The one who does not trust has been judged already, because he has not trusted in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judging: that the light has come into the world, and people loved the dark more than the light, because the things they were doing were bad. Everybody who does wrong hates the light and will not come near it, in case what he is doing gets shown up. But whoever does the truth comes toward the light, so that it can be seen plainly that what he has done was done in God.” He came in the dark and he went out again into the dark. But he turns up twice more. Once he stands up in the middle of the council, when they are all against Jesus, and asks whether their own law judges a man before it has heard him. And once, right at the end, he comes carrying a hundred pounds of spices to a grave.

Some time after that, the Pharisees began keeping count of how many people were going out to Jesus — more than were going to John now — and when he knew they were counting, he left Judea and set off north for Galilee. And to get there he had to go through Samaria. Samaria was the country in the middle, and the people who lived in it were the neighbors nobody in Jerusalem would speak to. Jews and Samaritans had been quarreling for hundreds of years — about which mountain God had chosen, about who had kept the law of Moses properly and who had not. They did not eat together, and they did not drink out of the same cup, and travelers going north would often cross the river and walk the long way round rather than set foot in the place. So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave his son Joseph long ago, where Jacob’s well is. And Jesus, worn out from walking, sat down just as he was on the low stone edge of the well. It was the sixth hour — the middle of the day, the hottest part of it, when the path from the town is usually empty. A woman of Samaria came out with her jar to draw water. And Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His followers had all gone into the town to buy food, so there was nobody else there. And there were two things wrong with that sentence at the same time: a man of his sort did not sit talking to a strange woman, and a Jew did not ask a Samaritan for a drink out of her jar. She heard both of them, and said so: “How is it that you, a Jew, are asking me for a drink — me, a Samaritan woman?” And Jesus said, “If you knew what it is that God gives, and who this is who is saying to you, ‘give me a drink’ — you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She said, “Sir, you have not even got a bucket, and the well is deep. Where are you going to get this living water from? You are not greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us this well, and drank out of it himself, and so did his sons and all his animals.” In ordinary speech, living water simply meant running water — a stream, a spring, water that moves — as opposed to the still, flat water that sits at the bottom of a well. She heard him offer her a spring. He meant something else, and he told her what: “Everybody who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again, ever. The water I give him will turn into a spring of water inside him, leaping up, into life for ever.” And she said — half joking, probably, and half not: “Sir, give me this water. Then I will not be thirsty, and I will not have to keep coming all the way out here to draw.”

And he said, “Go and call your husband, and come back here.” She said, “I have no husband.” And he said, “You are right to say you have no husband. You have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband. What you said is true.” So he knew. She had walked out to a well in the heat with a water jar on her shoulder, and a stranger sitting on the edge of it knew the whole of her life. He did not get up and go, and he did not tell her off, and he did not say one word more about it. He went on talking with her. She changed the subject, which is what anybody would do, and she changed it to the biggest question there was between his people and hers. The mountain was right there above them while she said it: “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped God on this mountain — and you people say that Jerusalem is the only place where anybody is allowed to.” And Jesus said, “Trust me, woman: an hour is coming when you will not worship the Father on this mountain, and not in Jerusalem either. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because the rescue comes from the Jews. But an hour is coming — and it is here already — when the true ones will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Those are the ones the Father is looking for, to be the people who worship him. God is spirit. And the people who worship him have to worship in spirit and in truth.” She said, “I know that Messiah is coming — the one who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us everything.” And Jesus said to her, “I am he — the one who is talking to you.” That was the first time he had said it straight out to anybody. Not to the council in Jerusalem, not standing up in the temple at a feast: to one woman, at a well, in the country nobody would walk through, in the middle of a hot afternoon, with nobody else there to hear it.

And just then his followers came back up the path with the food, and stopped dead. They were astonished that he was sitting there talking with a woman. Not one of them asked him what he wanted, or why he was talking to her; they simply stood there with the bread in their hands. And the woman left her water jar standing on the ground — she had come the whole way for water and she went home without it — and hurried into the town and said to the people there: “Come out and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” And they came out of the town and started along the path toward him. Meanwhile his followers were trying to get him to eat something. “Rabbi — eat.” And he said, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” And they said to each other, quietly, “Nobody brought him anything, did they?” And Jesus said, “My food is to do what the one who sent me wants, and to finish his work. Do you not have a saying — four months more, and then the harvest? Look. I tell you: lift up your eyes and look at the fields. They are white already, ripe, ready for cutting, now. The reaper is being paid his wages already, and gathering a crop for life for ever, so that the one who sowed and the one who reaps can be glad together. The old saying is true, that one man sows and another man reaps. I sent you out to reap a field you never worked in. Other people did the hard work, and you have walked in on top of it.” And while he was saying it, the road up from the town was filling with people coming out to see him.

A great many of the Samaritans in that town trusted him because of what the woman told them: he told me everything I ever did. And when they got out to the well they asked him to stay with them — a Jewish teacher, asked to stay in a Samaritan town — and he stayed there two days. And by the end of the two days a great many more of them trusted him, because of what he said himself. And they told the woman so: “It is not because of your talk that we trust him now. We have heard him ourselves, and we know that this really is the rescuer of the world.” Two conversations, then, a few days apart. A teacher of Israel who came in the dark with all the right words ready, and went home again with his questions. And a woman at a well at noon who had nothing to bring and nothing ready to say, and who left her water jar sitting in the dust and ran.