The Life of Jesus

but whoever drinks the water I will give him will never be thirsty again! On the contrary, the water I give him will become a spring of water inside him, welling up into eternal life!”

“Sir, give me this water,” the woman said to him, “so that I won’t have to be thirsty and keep coming here to draw water.”

He said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”

She answered, “I don’t have a husband.” Yeshua said to her, “You’re right, you don’t have a husband!

You’ve had five husbands in the past, and you’re not married to the man you’re living with now! You’ve spoken the truth!”

“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet,” the woman replied.

“Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you people say that the place where one has to worship is in Yerushalayim.”

Yeshua said, “Lady, believe me, the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Yerushalayim.

You people don’t know what you are worshipping; we worship what we do know, because salvation comes from the Jews.

But the time is coming — indeed, it’s here now — when the true worshippers will worship the Father spiritually and truly, for these are the kind of people the Father wants worshipping him.

God is spirit; and worshippers must worship him spiritually and truly.”

The woman replied, “I know that Mashiach is coming” (that is, “the one who has been anointed”). “When he comes, he will tell us everything.”

Yeshua said to her, “I, the person speaking to you, am he.”

Just then, his talmidim arrived. They were amazed that he was talking with a woman; but none of them said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you talking with her?”

So the woman left her water-jar, went back to the town and said to the people there,

“Come, see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. Could it be that this is the Messiah?”

They left the town and began coming toward him.

Meanwhile, the talmidim were urging Yeshua, “Rabbi, eat something.”

But he answered, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”

At this, the talmidim asked one another, “Could someone have brought him food?”

Yeshua said to them, “My food is to do what the one who sent me wants and to bring his work to completion.

Don’t you have a saying, ‘Four more months and then the harvest’? Well, what I say to you is: open your eyes and look at the fields! They’re already ripe for harvest!

The one who reaps receives his wages and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that the reaper and the sower may be glad together —

for in this matter, the proverb, ‘One sows and another reaps,’ holds true.

I sent you to reap what you haven’t worked for. Others have done the hard labor, and you have benefited from their work.”