Third Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2026

Prayer of the Day
Merciful God, the fountain of living water, you quench our thirst and wash away our sin. Give us this water always. Bring us to drink from the well that flows with the beauty of your truth through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The Gospel reading contains the longest conversation in the Gospel of John. The text was too much to copy into a bulletin and likely too much to hear in one sitting. So we will abbreviate the reading just a little.

Let two items of extra background mull in your mind and heart a little as you hear the Gospel read. First Samaria would be the last place any Jewish person would go. Second, the well was often a place in Biblical stories where a traveller would be betrothed to a local; and the community would take in the traveller—this pattern was true for Moses and Zipporah, Isaac and Rebekah, and for Jacob and Rachel.

GOSPEL:
John 4.5-42 5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.

SERMON
Some of us heard a sermon at St David’s on Wednesday about Jesus’ most unlikely visit to Samaria. One detail that Father Prakash highlighted really stuck.. For all the drawing water (likely several times a day) and the talk about water and living water, the Samaritan woman leaves behind her water jar after having an intimate and disarming conversation with Jesus.

My reading and reflecting on the woman leaving her jar behind led me to a very provocative question from Dr. Karoline Lewis. Her expertise is John’s Gospel and she definitely knows her way around the Greek language. She translates ‘left behind” as “let go”. Dr. Lewis asks, “What else did the woman let go of when she left her water jar at the well that day?”

The possibilities Dr. Lewis provides shove us right back into the interaction between the woman and Jesus. . .

A bit awkward that the well—a customary site of betrothals—is where Jesus asks about the woman’s husband. The woman’s honest and vulnerable disclosure that she has no husband suggests much of the pain and isolation the woman lets go of when she leaves her jar of water.

“What about the one she’s with now”? What about him? There are many more possibilities beyond the two shacking up. It’s highly possible the man she is with is a brother to a husband who has died. In these so-called levirate marriages, a male relative of the deceased would give a home to the widow without necessarily making her his wife.

What about those other husbands? Some could have died. Others would have divorced her—999 times out of a thousand the man divorces the woman. And a man could divorce a woman for any reason. One leading cause for a man to divorce a woman was because she couldn’t bear children. It’s probable the woman at the well had been rejected—several times— because she couldn’t bear children.

Besides not having a husband, the Samaritan woman may not have had children to take care of her either. She carries grief, loss and loneliness just as much as she carries heavy jars of water. After all, People the world over are hard-wired to be judgy and sometimes we really don’t know how to be around people who are grieving or have had a difficult life.

As the preacher we heard at St. David’s told us this week, there is a difference between being known and being exposed. Jesus knows without condemning the woman at the well. That kind of knowing is enough for her to sense her life is being transformed.

I have a few suggestions myself about what else the woman jettisons along with her water jar. Remember that Samaritans and Jewish people have nothing to do with each other? The woman’s prejudice against Jewish people might be something else she clings to and it shows with her preemptory challenges.

Can’t blame her, really. Her people’s collective memory holds trauma from some 120 years before Jesus and her time. Back then, the high priest of Judea who was also the head of the nation invaded Samaria, laying siege to their capital city and destroyed their sacred site, a Temple on Mount Gerazim. When it comes to things to let go of, I’m not sure this one is easily ditched.

Maybe the fact that Jesus shows up tired, hot, thirsty and vulnerable makes the encounter less lopsided— Jesus and the woman see more in each other than most other people see. The woman sees more in Jesus than a representative of a those ‘others’ her people fear and despise. She sees more than some sort of water producing wizard. Maybe she senses what Jesus sees in her too—Because God so loves the world, Jesus feels the necessity to travel to the last place his buddies want him to go and connect with with the last person they want him to hang out with.

This new way of seeing, while enough to make the disciples scratch their heads, compels this woman from Samaria to begin letting go her pain and defensive prejudices. Hearing Jesus talk about living water makes her yearn for something she can’t really explain. She thirsts for a new and abundant life that would be like springs of living water welling up from the depths of her being.

And even before she has it all figured out, she declares to her neighbours, that she wants them to meet someone who knows her—without shaming her.

We and the neighbours might discover that when this someone truly knows us without exposing or condemning us, we drop the things we’ve been schlepping and open our hands to the gifts God wants to give. When Jesus visits Samaria “on purpose” we and all the neighbours witness that there is no place God would not go to continue blessing and saving this world God so loves.