Have you ever seen a well?  A real well? On my grandmother’s farm stood a real well. When I was young, we loved to go to the “old house” (as they had since built a new one down the road but kept the other one to rent out) for fall apple picking. While the adults stood on ladders gathering apples from the trees, I ran for the well with its black iron pump firmly planted into a covered base. In order to draw water from the well, you had to pump the handle. After a few pumps, the water would start to flow.

Now this was a “modern” kind of well compared to the ones in which you had to lower a bucket into a deep cavernous opening and then raise it up again to retrieve the water.

The kind of well that Jesus encountered that day that he met the Samaritan woman in our scripture for today was yet …