1 When the Lord learned that the Pharisees had been told that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John
2 (though it was not Jesus himself who baptized, but his disciples),
3 he left Judea and set off once more for Galilee.
4 His route had to take him through Samaria.
5 So he came to a Samaritan town called Sychar, close to the plot of land Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
6 Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out from the journey, sat down just as he was beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me something to drink."
8 His disciples had gone off into the town to buy food.
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew God's gift, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me something to drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."
11 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. So where do you get this living water?
12 You are not greater than our father Jacob, are you? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, along with his sons and his flocks."
13 Jesus answered her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again;
14 but whoever drinks the water I will give him will never be thirsty again, ever. The water I will give him will become within him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I will not get thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."
16 Jesus told her, "Go and call your husband, and come back here."
17 The woman answered, "I do not have a husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right to say, 'I do not have a husband';
18 you have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband. What you have said is the truth."
19 The woman said to him, "Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you people say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem."
21 Jesus said to her, "Believe me, woman, an hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because salvation comes from the Jews.
23 But an hour is coming, and is here now, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such are the worshipers the Father is looking for.
24 God is Spirit, and those who worship him have to worship in spirit and truth."
25 The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming, the one called Christ. When he comes, he will explain everything to us."
26 Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one speaking to you."
27 At this point his disciples came back, and they were surprised that he was talking with a woman. Yet none of them asked, "What do you want?" or "Why are you talking with her?"
28 Then the woman left her water jar, went off into the town, and said to the people,
29 "Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he be the Christ?"
30 They left the town and began making their way to him.
31 In the meantime the disciples kept urging him, "Rabbi, eat something."
32 But he told them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."
33 So the disciples began asking one another, "No one has brought him anything to eat, have they?"
34 Jesus told them, "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to bring his work to completion.
35 Do you not say, 'Four months more, and then the harvest comes'? Look, I tell you, raise your eyes and see the fields: they are already white for harvest.
36 The reaper is receiving his pay and gathering a crop for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.
37 For here the saying holds true: 'One sows, another reaps.'
38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have come in on their labor."
39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's word when she testified, "He told me everything I ever did."
40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they kept asking him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.
41 And because of his word many more came to believe.
42 They told the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world, the Christ."
43 After the two days he left there and went on to Galilee.
44 For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet is not honored in his own homeland.
45 So when he reached Galilee, the Galileans received him, because they had seen everything he had done in Jerusalem during the feast; they themselves had gone to the feast too.
46 So he came once more to Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. There was a royal official whose son lay sick in Capernaum.
47 When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and begged him to come down and heal his son, who was at the point of death.
48 Jesus said to him, "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe."
49 The official said to him, "Sir, come down before my little boy dies."
50 Jesus told him, "Go; your son is alive." The man believed what Jesus said to him and set off.
51 While he was still on his way down, his servants met him with the news: "Your boy is alive!"
52 So he asked them at what hour he had begun to recover, and they told him, "The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour."
53 The father realized that this was the very hour when Jesus had told him, "Your son is alive." And he and his whole household believed.
54 This was now the second sign Jesus performed after coming from Judea to Galilee.