Almost every religion has taught that God keeps an address. There is a right hill, or a right building, and right people who may come near it. Everybody else is told the door is not for them. A lot of people still carry that feeling, even people who stopped going to church years ago.
Jesus walked into the one region most travelers from Galilee went out of their way to avoid. He sat down at a well at noon and talked for a long time with a woman who was wrong on every count that mattered to the men of his time. Before it was over, he told her the right hill and the right building were finished.
John tells this story in chapter 4. It comes right after John the Baptist tells his followers that Jesus "must increase, but I must decrease," and just before Jesus heals a royal official's dying son in the town of Cana.
The road through Samaria
Jesus was traveling north out of Judea, heading home to Galilee. Samaria sat in between, the hill country in the middle, and the people who lived there were the Samaritans.
The Samaritans and the Jewish people shared some of the same ancestors and some of the same scriptures. They had split centuries before, and by this time the hatred ran hot on both sides. Samaritans worshiped God on Mount Gerizim. Jewish people worshiped God at the temple in Jerusalem. Each side counted the other unclean. Most Jewish travelers making this trip crossed the river and took the long way around rather than set foot on Samaritan ground.
The Gospel of John, one of the four accounts of Jesus's life, says Jesus had to go through Samaria.
He came to a town called Sychar, near a piece of land Jacob had given his son Joseph long ago. There was a deep well there that everyone in the region called Jacob's well. It was around noon. Jesus had been walking since morning and he was worn out, so he sat down on the stone edge of that well. His friends went into the town to buy food, and he was there alone.
Four words
A woman came out from the town to draw water, carrying her jar. She was by herself. The well was deep, over a hundred feet down to the water. Drawing from it meant lowering a vessel on a long rope and hauling it back up hand over hand. Then she had to carry the full jar home again.
Jesus said to her, give me to drink.
She stopped. She knew how strange those four words were, and she said so out loud.
Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. (John 4:9)
He had just broken three rules at once. She was a Samaritan, and the purity rules of his day said a Jewish man must not drink from a Samaritan's jar. She was a woman, and a teacher did not talk with a woman he did not know in a public place. She was alone, with no husband or brother nearby.
He knew all three rules. He broke them on purpose, and he spoke first, before she said a word. The purity rules said she would make him unclean. Jesus ignored those rules, because they did not come from God.
The water
He told her that if she knew the gift of God, and who it was asking her for a drink, she would have asked him instead, and he would have given her living water.
Living water was a plain phrase in her language. It meant moving water, a spring or a stream, the kind that runs on its own. Still water sat at the bottom of a cistern. So she pointed out the obvious. He had nothing to draw with, and the well was deep. Where was he going to get moving water from? Then she asked whether he thought he was greater than Jacob, who dug this well and drank from it himself, along with his children and his cattle.
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 4:13-14)
She was standing there holding an empty clay jar, in the hottest part of the day, having made the walk out from town that she made every day of her life. She told him she wanted that water, so she would not have to keep coming out here.
Her whole life, out loud
He told her to go call her husband and come back.
She said she had no husband. Four words, and nothing else offered.
For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly. (John 4:18)
He told her she had spoken the truth, and that she had had five husbands, and that the man she was with now was not her husband.
Then he kept talking with her. He said no name over her, gave her no instruction about her life, asked her for no shame. He stayed at the well and the conversation went on.
She said he must be a prophet.
The question about the mountain
Then she asked him the question that had split her people from his for hundreds of years.
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, she said, and you people say that Jerusalem is the place where a person must worship.
She was standing at the foot of Mount Gerizim while she said it. Her people had worshiped on that hill for hundreds of years. Down south in Jerusalem was the temple, and the priests there said her hill was worth nothing.
Jesus answered her straight.
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, 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... God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. (John 4:21-24)
He did not pick her mountain or his. He told her both were finished. That included the temple in Jerusalem, the most holy building his own people had. A teacher from that people, standing in Samaria, told a Samaritan woman that the temple did not matter to God.
In the middle of that answer, Jesus also told her plainly that her side was confused.
Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. (John 4:22)
He was not giving the prize to his own side. In the very next breath he said the hour was here when neither hill would matter. The old argument about whose people and whose hill was over.
She said she knew the Messiah was coming, and that when he came he would tell them everything.
Jesus told her that he was the one speaking to her.
What she did with it
His friends came back from town with the food and found him sitting there talking with her. John says they were surprised. Not one of them asked him what he wanted with her, or why he was speaking to her at all. They offered him the food. He told them he had food they knew nothing about.
She left her water jar sitting on the ground and walked back into Sychar. This is what she said to the men of the town.
The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ? (John 4:28-29)
The town came out to the well to see him. They asked him to stay, and he stayed there two days.
And said unto 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 Saviour of the world. (John 4:42)
God is a Spirit
The longest conversation Jesus has with anybody in the book of John is this one, with a Samaritan woman at a well. What he chose to tell her, and what she did with it that same afternoon, is its own teaching: The First Person Jesus Told Was a Foreign Woman.
God is a Spirit. He does not live on a hill or in a building. Nobody has to travel to reach him, or be born in the right town, or be clean by anyone's rules. The temple, its priests, and its purity laws were never God's. People built them and said they were God's. Jesus set them aside, out loud, to a foreign woman, in the middle of the day.
John tells it gently. But what Jesus said at that well ended the temple's claim on God.
So God is close to you wherever you are. If you are reading this in a car, or at a kitchen table at two in the morning, you are as close to him as anybody in any church in the world. He told a stranger that at a well.
Maybe you have stood outside a door somebody told you was not for you. Because of where you came from, or what you have done, or something about you that made people lower their voices. He went out of his way to reach a woman at a well in the middle of the day. He knew every part of her life before she said a word of it. And he kept talking.
So here is something for today. Talk to God right where you are, in your own words. You do not need a building, a ritual, or anyone's permission. He never asked for them.