The woman wondered that, being a Jew, He spoke to her. As I have said,
our Lord's first utterance is simply the expression of a real physical
necessity. But it is none the less what the woman felt it to be, a
strange overleaping of barriers that towered very high. A Samaritan, a
woman, a sinner, is the recipient of the first clear confession from
Jesus Christ of His Messiahship and dignity. She was right in her
instinct that something lay behind His sweeping aside of the barriers
and coming so close to her with His request. These two, the prejudices
of race and the contempt for woman, two of the crying evils of the old
world, were overpassed by our Lord as if He never saw them. They were
too high for men's puny limbs; they made no obstacle to the march of
His divine compassion. And therein lies a symbol, if you like, but none
the less a prophecy that will be fulfilled, of the universal adaptation
and destination of the Gospel, and its independence of all distinctions
of race and sex, condition, moral character. In Jesus Christ 'there is
neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, neither bond nor free'; ye 'are
all one in Christ.' If He had been but a Jew, it was wonderful that He
should talk to a Samaritan. But there is nothing in the character and
life of Christ, as recorded in Scripture, more remarkable and more
plain than the entire absence of any racial peculiarities, or of
characteristics owing to His position in space or time. So unlike His
nation was He that the very _elite_ of His nation snarled at Him and
said, 'Thou art a Samaritan!' So unlike them was He that one feels that
a character so palpitatingly human to its core, and so impossible to
explain from its surroundings, is inexplicable, but on the New
Testament theory that He is not a Jew, or man only, but the Son of Man,
the divine embodiment of the ideal of humanity, whose dwelling was on
earth, but His origin and home in the bosom of God. Therefore Jesus
Christ is the world's Christ, your Christ, my Christ, every man's
Christ, the Tree of Life that stands in the midst of the garden, that
all men may draw near to it and gather of its fruit.
Brother, answer His proffer of the gift as this woman did: 'Sir, give
me this water, that I thirst not; neither go all the way to the world's
broken cisterns to draw'; and He will put into your hearts that
indwelling fountain of life, so that you may say like this woman's
townspeople: 'Now I have heard Him myself, and know that this is indeed
the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'