A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John.

Jesus stopped at Sychar, a town in Samaria, near the tract of land Jacob had given to his son Joseph, and Jacob’s Well was there. Jesus, weary from the journey, came and sat by the well. It was around noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” The disciples had gone off to the town to buy provisions. The Samaritan woman replied, “You’re a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?”—since Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.

Jesus answered, “If only you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him for a drink instead, and he would have given you living water.”

“If you please,” she challenged Jesus, “you don’t have a bucket and this well is deep. Where do you expect to get this ‘living water’? Surely you don’t pretend to be greater than our ancestors Leah and Rachel and Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it with their descendants and flocks?”

Jesus replied, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give them will never be thirsty; no, the water I give will become fountains within them, springing up to provide eternal life.”

The woman said to Jesus, “Give me this water, so that I won’t grow thirsty and have to keep coming all the way here to draw water.”

The Good News as spoken through John.