Was Anyone More Alone?

[Murph]

Was Anyone More Alone?

I had read the account of the woman at the well countless times before, but never had it spoken so powerfully to a quiet pain I have often felt: loneliness.

I had always focused on the needs of the woman while reading John 4, but this time the needs of her Savior arrested my attention. In the familiar account, a weary and thirsty Jesus sits down beside the well of Sychar while his disciples, hungry after an exhausting journey, venture into the Samaritan town to buy food (John 4:6–8). In the next scene, a woman arrives to draw water from the well. Jesus asks her for a drink, and then he offers her a drink of another kind — a soul-satisfying draft of living water (John 4:13–14).

Presumably, Jesus drinks the water the Samaritan woman draws from the well, but after his disciples return with food, hungry as he almost certainly is, he does not eat. Instead, in another play on words, he tells his disciples, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32). The bewildered disciples conclude that someone else had given him food. Knowing their confusion, Jesus explains, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). Jesus had feasted on a spiritual harvest that day; so spiritually full was he that his physical hunger diminished.

www.desiringgod.org/articles/was-anyone-more-alone