John 4

1Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was making and baptizing more disciples than John. 2(In fact it was not Jesus himself who baptized, but his disciples.) 3So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. 4He had to pass through Samaria. 5So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, near the piece of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there. Jesus was worn out from the journey, so he sat down by the well just as he was. It was about noon.

7A Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8His disciples had gone off into the town to buy food. 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that a Jew like you asks a Samaritan woman like me for a drink?” (Jews do not use the same vessels as Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift God gives, and who it is that says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ it is you who would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. So where would this living water of yours come from? 12Surely you are not greater than our father Jacob? He gave us this well, and he and his sons and his animals all drank from it.” 13Jesus answered her, “All who drink this water will get thirsty again. 14But no one who drinks the water I will give will ever be thirsty again. The water I give will become in them a spring whose water leaps up into eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water! Then I will not be thirsty, and I will be spared the trip out here to draw water.”

16He told her, “Go and call your husband, and come back here.” 17The woman answered, “I do not have a husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right to say, ‘I do not have a husband.’ 18In fact, you have had five husbands, and the one you are with now is not your husband. You have told the truth there.” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. 20This mountain is where our ancestors worshiped; yet you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where worship must be offered.” 21Jesus said to her, “Believe me, Woman: an hour is coming when your worship of the Father will not be on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem either. 22Your people worship without knowing what they worship; we know what we worship, since salvation comes from the Jews. 23But an hour is coming, and in fact it has already begun, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking people like these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and anyone who worships him has to do it in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (the one called the Christ). “When he comes, he will make everything plain to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking with you.”

27At that moment his disciples arrived, and they were astonished that he was speaking with a woman. Yet none of them said, “What are you looking for?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28Then the woman left her water jar, went back into the town and said to the people, 29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have done. Could this possibly be the Christ?” 30The people went out of the town and began making their way to him.

31Meanwhile the disciples kept urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you are not aware of.” 33So the disciples said to one another, “Nobody has brought him food, have they?” 34Jesus said to them, “My food is doing the will of the one who sent me, and bringing his work to completion.” 35“Do you not say, ‘Four months more, and the harvest will be here’? Listen, I tell you: raise your eyes and look at the fields. They have turned white, ready for harvest. 36Already the reaper is being paid and is gathering a crop for eternal life, so that the sower may rejoice along with the reaper. 37For here the saying proves true: ‘The sower is one person, and the reaper another.’ 38I sent you to reap what you did not labor over. Others did the labor, and you have taken up where their work left off.”

39Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s word, as she testified, “He told me everything I have done.” 40When the Samaritans reached him, they kept asking him to stay with them, and he stayed there for two days. 41Because of his own word many more came to believe. 42They said to the woman, “It is no longer your report that makes us believe. We have listened to him ourselves, and we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”

43After the two days he left there for Galilee. 44Jesus himself had declared that a prophet is not honored in his own homeland. 45So when he arrived in Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him. They had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the festival, since they too had been there for it.

46So he went back to Cana in Galilee, the place where he had changed the water into wine. There was a royal official whose son lay ill at Capernaum. 47Hearing that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and kept pleading with him to come down and heal his son, because the boy was dying. 48Jesus answered him, “None of you will believe unless you see signs and wonders.” 49The official pleaded, “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.” 50Jesus told him, “Go. Your son lives.” The man believed what Jesus had said to him and started for home. 51While he was still on the way down, his servants met him with the news that his boy was alive. 52So he asked them at what time the boy had begun to recover, and they told him, “The fever left him yesterday at about one in the afternoon.” 53Then the father realized that it had happened at the very hour Jesus had said to him, “Your son lives.” So he came to believe, together with all his household. 54Jesus did this, his second sign, after he had come back from Judea to Galilee.