John 4:5-26
Lord’s Prayer 4th & 5th Petitions
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus comes to a city of Samaria called Sychar. It’s about the sixth hour, noon. Wearied from His journey, He sits by the well. He sits there, alone, for His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food, daily bread. Although Christ could have turned stones into bread for Him and His disciples to eat, He gives them their daily bread in the ordinary way. They go to the store and buy it from those who sell, who themselves bought it from those who planted and harvested. While they are in town at the market, a woman of the village comes to the well to draw water. She, too, is getting her daily bread. Daily bread, after all, is “Everything that pertains to the needs and necessities of this life, such as food, and drink.” God gives this woman her daily drink in the ordinary way as well. She goes to the well to draw water into her jar, which she’ll then take back to her home to drink. Jesus could have slit open a rock and brought forth water, as He did for the Israelites in the wilderness. Instead, He allows the woman to seek her daily bread through the ordinary means, and He will do the same for Himself. He says to her, “Give me a drink.”
Jesus teaches us that God provides daily bread to all people and He provides it through ordinary means. There are times when God provides daily bread in an extraordinary way. God can miraculously give us our daily bread without our work and labor. He did this for Israel in the wilderness, the widow at Zarephath, and others. On Sunday we’ll hear how Christ feeds about five thousand with five barley loaves and two small fish. But miracles are the extraordinary way that God provides daily bread. The ordinary way is through our work and labor, and through the work and labor of others. By allowing His disciples to go into town to buy food, and by asking the Samaritan woman for a drink of water that she will draw from the well, Jesus blesses the ordinary way God gives daily bread so that we recognize this and receive our daily bread from God with thanksgiving.
Of course, we know that daily bread isn’t just bread. It’s more than food and drink. Luther teaches that daily bread is “everything that pertains to the needs and necessities of this life, such as food, drink, clothes, shoes, house, yard, land, animals, money, property, a godly spouse, godly children, godly servants, godly and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, trustworthy neighbors, and the like.” Christ teaches us to pray for all these things so that, even though we receive them by our labor and the labor of others, we recognize that everything we have in this life is from the hand of God. This also means that if there is daily bread which we don’t have today, then it isn’t God’s will that we have that particular blessing today, and we should keep praying for that blessing and not lose heart. Thus, we give thanks for what God gives and trust that He gives us what we need when it is best for us, our neighbor, and His glory.
But this text isn’t just about daily bread and how God gives it. The answers Jesus’ request with a question, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” John parenthetically adds that Jews have no dealings with Samaritans so that we understand her comment. But Jesus moves the conversation past ethnicity and even past daily bread. Seemingly no longer interested in a drink of water, He tells her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” It isn’t that that drink of water isn’t important. It’s that daily bread is only one thing God provides. The other thing God provides—that which Jesus offers her here, living water—is more important.
The woman doesn’t understand living water, as least not as Jesus means it. She seems to understand it—in the sense that the phrase was used so often in the Old Testament—to mean running water. “You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?” Jesus distinguishes between the water of the well and the living water He gives. “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” The water Jesus gives is life itself, true life, animated by the Holy Spirit, which results in everlasting life, but still the woman cannot understand. “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” She is stuck in carnal, fleshly thinking. All she can see is her need for daily bread, “everything that pertains to the needs and necessities of this life.”
Jesus promises that God will provide everything that pertains to the needs and necessities of this life, but He has come to bring more than that. He has come to bring living water, water that brings life—life with God, life animated by the Holy Spirit. But living water can only be received by those who acknowledge that they are spiritually dead because of their sins. Before her sits the fountain of living water Himself—the incarnate Son of God—and she cannot even recognize her thirst. So Jesus tells her to call her husband and come back, to which the woman answers that she has no husband. It is this point that Jesus shows her need for living water. “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.” He reveals to her the sin in which she has lived and is still currently living, for God did not ordain the estate of living together without marriage, but the estate of holy marriage, and those who persist in living outside of what God has ordained will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:10).
The woman tries to distract, as most, if not all people do when someone points out their sin, by diverting the conversation. In this case, the diversion looks pious because it’s theology, but even this turns that back to the woman so that she may, by faith, draw from the fount of living water that sits right in front of her, receive the forgiveness of her sins and the Holy Spirit to amend her sinful life, worshiping God the Father in spirit and truth. When Jesus confesses Himself to be the Christ, she leaves her water pot there, goes into the city and tells them, and the result is that many believed in Him, and after two days of Jesus staying with them, said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world” (4:42).
The fourth petition—daily bread—is sometimes the petition we pray the most often and the most fervently. That makes sense because we experience our daily bread physically. Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman reminds us what Luther teaches us in the Small Catechism, that, “God surely gives daily bread to all evil people without our petition; but we ask in this prayer that He would allow us to recognize this, and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.” But as Jesus moves the Samaritan woman’s concern from physical water to living water—the forgiveness of our sins and the Holy Spirit’s presence and reign in our hearts—He shows how we, too, should not be stuck only on asking for our daily bread, but that we always pray for the water that gives life, His gospel, and faith so that we might daily draw living water from its source and fountain, Christ. We pray that “God would not look up on our sins or deny our petitions because of them, but ask that He would give it all to us by grace; for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment.” Since we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment, we confess our sins—those of which we are aware and those of which we are unaware—and believe that He forgives us and raises us to new life by giving us living water to drink.
And so it works well to think of these two petitions together. God gives daily bread, even to the evil. We daily sin much and deserve nothing but punishment, but—thanks be to God—He gives us daily gospel as we come to the fountain of living waters, Jesus Christ our Lord. Having this living water—the gospel and Holy Spirit by faith—we have all we need, regardless of what God gives us for our daily bread or withholds from us on any given day. Amen.
May the peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
