Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”
Comment: Although a Samaritan, and it will prove later a wayward woman, she must have had a reasonably good understanding of moral and religious things. If Jesus had said what He did to most people in Australia today they would think that He had lost the plot! She is still thinking largely about not having to come and collect the needed water repeatedly; plus she saw the difficulty of Jesus getting water when this was the only well in the area. Not understanding much, but nibbling at the thought of a nice gift she takes the bait and asks Jesus to give her the water.
It may seem cruel, but Jesus knowing that much in her life had to be sorted out, sprang the trap. ‘Go get your husband and bring him so that you can enjoy this as a family,’ The immorality that seems normal in the West these days was shaming in both Jewish and Samaritan thinking, and very definitely contrary to God’s LAW, even the Samaritan understanding of it! She tries to hide her sinful past by telling the truth but covering the facts! Jesus simply said, but not nastily, not hurtfully ‘I know the whole truth!’ Where will this lead?
Prayer: Help me to trust You enough to be honest with You, my God!
As I read it! 