John 4

1So when Jesus found out that the Pharisees had heard the report that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John

2(though in fact it was his disciples who were baptizing, not Jesus himself),

3he left Judea and went off once more to Galilee.

4He had to pass through Samaria.

5He came, then, to a Samaritan town named Sychar, close to the piece of land Jacob gave his son Joseph.

6Jacob’s spring was there, and Jesus, worn out from the journey, sat down just as he was beside the spring. It was about the sixth hour.

7A woman from Samaria arrived to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”

8For his disciples had gone off into the town to buy provisions.

9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me for a drink when I am a Samaritan woman?” For Jews do not share things with Samaritans.

10Jesus replied, “If you knew God’s gift, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have been the one asking him, and he would have given you living water.”

11“Sir,” the woman said to him, “you do not even have a bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this living water?

12Surely you are not greater than our father Jacob? He gave us this well, and he drank from it himself, along with his sons and his flocks.”

13Jesus answered her, “All who drink from this water will get thirsty again,

14but whoever drinks the water I will give him will not be thirsty ever again. Instead, the water I give him will become a spring of water within him, leaping up to eternal life.”

15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so I will not get thirsty and will not need to keep coming out here to draw water.”

16He told her, “Go and call your husband, then come back here.”

17“I have no husband,” the woman replied. Jesus said to her, “You put it well when you said, ‘I have no husband,’

18for you have been married to five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. You have told the truth in this.”

19The woman said to him, “Sir, it is clear to me that you are a prophet.

20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, yet you people say that Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.”

21Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman: an hour is coming when it will be neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem that you worship the Father.

22You people worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation comes from the Jews.

23Yet an hour is coming—in fact it is here now—when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. Indeed, the Father is looking for people like this to worship him.

24God is spirit, and the ones who worship him must do so in spirit and truth.”

25The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming” (the one called Christ). “When he comes, he will make everything known to us.”

26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

27At that moment his disciples arrived, and they were surprised that he was speaking with a woman. Yet no one said, “What are you looking for?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

28The woman then left her water jar behind, went off into the town, and told the people,

29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have done! This could not be the Messiah, could it?”

30They left the town and began coming to him.

31In the meantime the disciples kept pressing him, “Rabbi, have something to eat.”

32But he told them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

33So the disciples began asking one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”

34Jesus said to them, “My food is doing the will of the one who sent me and completing his work.

35Do you not have a saying, ‘Four months more, and the harvest will come’? Listen, I tell you, raise your eyes and look at the fields; they are already white for the harvest.

36The reaper is collecting his wages and gathering a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper can be glad together.

37For in this the saying is true: ‘The one who sows is one person, and the one who reaps is another.’

38I sent you to reap a harvest you did not work for. Others did the hard work, and you have entered into the benefit of their labor.”

39From that town many of the Samaritans believed in him because of what the woman said when she testified, “He told me everything I have done.”

40When the Samaritans came to him, then, they kept asking him to remain with them, and he remained there for two days.

41And because of his message, far more of them believed.

42They were saying to the woman, “Our belief no longer rests on your words, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man truly is the Savior of the world.”

43After the two days he left there for Galilee.

44For Jesus himself had testified that in his own homeland a prophet has no honor.

45When he arrived in Galilee, then, the Galileans received him, because they had seen everything he did in Jerusalem during the festival; they themselves had also gone to the festival.

46He came back to Cana in Galilee, then, the place where he had changed the water into wine. In Capernaum there was a certain royal official whose son was ill.

47Hearing that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, this man went to him and pleaded with him to come down and heal his son, who was close to death.

48Jesus said to him, “If you people do not see signs and wonders, you will certainly not believe.”

49The royal official said to him, “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.”

50Jesus told him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus had said to him and started on his way.

51While he was already on his way down, his servants met him and told him that his boy was alive.

52He asked them what time the boy had started to improve, and they told him, “The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour.”

53Then the father realized that it was at that very hour Jesus had told him, “Your son will live.” So he himself believed, and his whole household with him.

54This was the second sign that Jesus performed, again after coming from Judea to Galilee.