No detours

The Messiah will come and explain everything, a woman at the well in Samaria tells Jesus. His answer is short: I who speak to you am he. Nowhere earlier in this Gospel does he say it so directly. No riddle, no detour.

And who does he say it to? Not a priest or a scholar, but a Samaritan woman. He knew she had had five husbands. Yet in this Gospel she is the first to hear it from his own mouth. He makes himself known to someone nobody would choose first.