“Who is wanted, Lord? Is it I?”
The Master calls, but the servants wait;
Fields gleam white ’neath a cloudless sky.
Will none seize the sickle before too late,
Ere the winter’s winds come sweeping by?
Who is delaying? Is it I?
As the people thronged the well to hear and see the Man who had revealed the hidden life of the woman, He must have taught this people with wise, loving words, for they forgot all about their prejudices and hate and begged Him, though of a race with whom the Samaritans had no dealings, to stay among them. And He graciously complied with their request, and it took Him two whole days to harvest that whitened field. And the record is, “Many of the Samaritans of that city believed on Him for the saying of the woman.”
But what a testimony is all this to that Samaritan woman. What, if her previous life had not been of good repute? What though she was a social outcast? One thing she discovered that noonday, as she came out to draw water from Jacob’s ancient well, that the Man who laid open her inner life in such modest words and patient forbearance, was none other than the long-expected Messiah, and she was altogether too generous-minded to lock up the glad tidings in her heart, but at once, without commission or priestly authority, witnessed for Christ, published the glad tidings of salvation through the streets of Sychar, and brought her whole city to a knowledge of her Saviour. And so this woman became the first gospel preacher in Samaria. That was before church councils had decided women may not speak for Jesus.
Jacob’s well is no longer used, and the grain fields, which “Stood dressed in living green” before the Saviour’s eyes, have long been trodden under foot of Islam’s hordes, yet the living spring of water which our Lord opened there to the poor, sinful, yet penitent woman, is as deep and fresh as ever, and has flowed on and out over the earth to remotest nations, and will quench the thirst of souls to the end of time.
We see also in this beautiful scene at Jacob’s well that Christ’s intercourse with women was marked by freedom from Oriental contempt of womanhood, and a marvelous union of purity and frankness, dignity and tenderness. He approached this woman as a friend who wished her well, and yet as her Lord and Saviour. And, to the good sense of womanhood be it said, when the light of truth broke over her inquiring mind, she believed! And behold how she loved Him! Forgetting her errand to the well, yea, even leaving her pitcher, she hastened to publish the glad news. Surely the Saviour “must needs go through Samaria,” on His way from Judea to Galilee, and His resting in the little alcove of Jacob’s well, for the moment sheltered from the glare of an Oriental midday sun, was more than a geographical “must.” It was the necessity of love laid upon His heart to meet and to help that woman who came with an empty stone pitcher to the well at the same hour of the day, but went away with a heart filled with “living water ... springing up into everlasting life.”