The Life of Jesus · Part Three

Year One: Samaria to Tabernacles

The woman at the well, and the pool of Bethesda

After the scene in the temple He judges it unsafe to stay in the south. So He travels back north — and takes the road most Jewish travellers went out of their way to avoid.

“Year One” and “Year Two” on these pages count Passovers. John names three of them, and that is what gives the ministry its roughly three-year length and lets the four Gospels be laid alongside each other in order. The framework is set out on Year One: Baptism to the First Passover.

The well at Sychar

“Jesus had to go through Samaria. He arrived at a city in Samaria called Sychar… Jacob’s Well was there.” (John 4:4-6).

“Had to.” The road through Samaria was the direct one — but plenty of Jewish travellers crossed the Jordan and went up the far side rather than set foot in it. So the necessity is not the mapmaker’s. John’s word here is the one he uses elsewhere for what God requires, and most readers take it that way: He had to go because someone was waiting.

She comes at noon, alone, which is not when women drew water. And He asks her for a drink — which the narrator stops to explain “How can a Jewish man like you ask a Samaritan woman like me for a drink of water?” (Jews, of course, don’t associate with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9).

What follows is the longest recorded conversation Jesus has with anybody. He offers her “a spring that gushes up to eternal life” (4:14), names her five husbands without accusing her, and when she raises the old quarrel about which mountain is the right one, He answers by abolishing the question “A time is coming when you Samaritans won’t be worshiping the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem… the time is coming, and it is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-23).

And then He does something He has not done with anyone else:

The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will tell us everything.” Jesus told her, “I am he, and I am speaking to you now.”

John 4:25–26 · God’s Word

Stop on that. This is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jesus states outright who He is. Others have said it about Him — Andrew, Nathanael, the Baptist — but He has not said it of Himself. He says it first to a Samaritan woman with five failed marriages, alone at a well at midday. Not in the temple, not to the council, not to His own.

She leaves her water jar — the thing she came for — and fetches the town. And the ending is one of the best lines in the Gospel “Our faith is no longer based on what you’ve said. We have heard him ourselves, and we know that he really is the savior of the world.” (John 4:42).

Read the whole account: John 4:1–42. He is likely still living in Nazareth at this point.

Cana again — the second sign

Back in Cana, where He had turned water into wine, a government official comes because his son is dying twenty miles away in Capernaum. Jesus first says something that sounds like a rebuke to the whole crowd — “If people don’t see miracles and amazing things, they won’t believe” — and then “Jesus told him, “Go home. Your son will live.” The man believed what Jesus told him and left.” (John 4:50).

He believed the bare word and started walking — no evidence, and a day’s journey between him and any proof. Confirmation comes later and produces a second, wider belief: “the official and his entire family became believers” (4:53). He is the exact counter-example to the sentence Jesus had just spoken.

Note also who he is — not an obscure villager but a man with rank. Word of Jesus is reaching people with standing. John 4:43–54.

The pool of Bethesda — and the first death threat

He returns to Jerusalem for a festival and finds a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years lying among the crowd at the pool. “Jesus asked the man, “Would you like to get well?”… “Get up, pick up your cot, and walk.” The man immediately became well, picked up his cot, and walked.” (John 5:6-9).

The healing is not what causes the trouble. The day He chose to do it is. And when challenged, His answer escalates things beyond anything He has said so far:

Jesus replied to them, “My Father is working right now, and so am I.” His reply made the Jews more intent on killing him. Not only did he break the laws about the day of rest—a holy day, but also he made himself equal to God when he said repeatedly that God was his Father.

John 5:16–18 · God’s Word

This is the hinge of the whole year. Two charges, and the second is far heavier. Until now the opposition has been argument; from here it is intent to kill. And the reason is not that He healed, nor even that He healed on the Sabbath, but that He made Himself equal to God — the leaders’ own inference from His words, which John never disputes.

Which festival was it? John does not say — only “a Jewish festival” (John 5:1). Commentators have proposed Passover, Purim, Pentecost and Tabernacles, and there is no agreement; the manuscripts are split on whether it reads a feast or the feast. This study leaves it unnamed, because the text does. (Tabernacles is named outright later, at John 7:2.)

The chapter closes with a warning to men who knew their Bibles better than anyone: “You study the Scriptures in detail because you think you have the source of eternal life in them. These Scriptures testify on my behalf. Yet, you don’t want to come to me” (5:39–40). Read John 5.

Retreat to Galilee

Jerusalem is now more dangerous than before. He is a marked man in the south, and He withdraws north to Galilee — where the next and busiest stretch of the ministry begins.

Where to go from here

Read the text itself: John 4 in one sitting — about six minutes, and the conversation at the well repays going slowly.

Read next: Year One: Galilee.

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