March 8, 2026, Year A, The Third Sunday in Lent

John 4:5-42, Psalm 95, Exodus 17🕖

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, on this Third Sunday in Lent.

Over these first weeks of Lent, the lectionary has been leading us on a purposeful journey through the wilderness. Two Sundays ago, the Spirit led Jesus into the Judean desert for forty days of fierce temptation. Hungry, isolated, assaulted by the devil at the precise points of human weakness—appetite, presumption, the lust for power—Jesus answered every assault with the word of God alone. He stood where the first Adam fell and won the victory we could never win for ourselves.

Last Sunday, we sat in the quiet of night with Nicodemus—a man of impressive credentials who somehow sensed they were not enough. Jesus told him plainly: the kingdom of God cannot be earned, managed, or improved into. It must be received as a gift, through a new birth from above by the sovereign, unpredictable work of the Holy Spirit.

Today the wilderness returns, but the ache shifts. Not temptation. Not theological confusion in the dark. Today it is thirst—a deeper, older longing for satisfaction, belonging, and a life that does not run dry. And we find Jesus sitting weary at a well in Samaria, offering living water to a woman the world had long since written off.

Our Gospel reading is John 4, verses 5 through 42, found on page _____ of your pew Bibles. It is the longest single conversation Jesus holds with any individual in the entire New Testament. That fact alone should command our attention—and we will return to it shortly.

The setting is loaded. Samaria was not simply a different region; it was enemy territory in the minds of most Jews. After the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 722 BC, foreign settlers intermarried with the remaining Israelites, producing a people and a religion that Jews regarded as a corrupted hybrid—worshipping at Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem, observing a partial Torah, claiming the God of Abraham while rejecting the prophets. The mutual hostility was deep and centuries old. Most Jewish travelers added miles to their journey simply to avoid walking through Samaria.

Yet John tells us in verse 4 that Jesus "had to pass through Samaria" (John 4:4, ESV). That word had to signals divine necessity—not geographical convenience, but mission imperative. The gospel refuses to be fenced in by old hostilities. Where prejudice says go around, Jesus says go through. We saw this same movement throughout the Epiphany season: Magi from the east arriving to worship the one Israel's own king sought to destroy; Jesus the light of the world refusing to be contained within any one nation's borders. Epiphany established the trajectory. John 4 is that trajectory in action.

He arrives at Jacob's well outside Sychar at noon—the sixth hour, the hottest part of the day, when sensible people stayed indoors. The women of the village drew water in the cool of morning or evening. To come at noon was to come when no one else would be there.

Now here is something a first-century Jewish reader would have recognized immediately. The Old Testament contains a well-established literary pattern scholars call the betrothal scene: a man travels to a foreign land, meets a woman at a well, water is drawn, and the encounter leads to a covenant. It happens three times in Genesis and Exodus alone—Eliezer finding Rebekah for Isaac (Genesis 24), Jacob meeting Rachel (Genesis 29), Moses meeting Zipporah in Midian (Exodus 2). The pattern is so consistent it functions as a literary signal: pay attention, something covenantal is happening here. And notice that in every case, the man goes out—beyond his own people, into foreign territory—to find the one he is seeking. That going-out is itself an Epiphany movement: the covenant reaches beyond its original boundaries to gather in the stranger.

John is invoking this pattern deliberately. Just one chapter earlier, John the Baptist has already identified Jesus as the bridegroom (John 3:29). Now the bridegroom travels to a foreign land, arrives alone at a well, and meets a woman. The marriage being announced is not a physical one. It is the new covenant union between Christ and his people—what Paul calls the mystery of Christ and the church in Ephesians 5, and what Revelation describes as the marriage supper of the Lamb. The divine Bridegroom has come seeking his bride, and he finds her not among the respectable and the well-connected, but alone at noon in Samaria, carrying the weight of five broken relationships. She has been looking for the bridegroom in all the wrong places. And he has come to find her.

A woman comes alone, carrying her jar in silence. We do not know her name. We know only her thirst—and the choices she has made trying to quench it.

Jesus speaks first in verse 7: "Give me a drink" (John 4:7, ESV). Three words, and every social boundary of the ancient world is crossed at once: a Jewish man speaking publicly to a woman, a Jew addressing a Samaritan, a rabbi initiating conversation with someone considered ritually unclean. The woman is understandably astonished in verse 9: "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (John 4:9, ESV).

Jesus does not back away. He reframes everything in verse 10: "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" (John 4:10, ESV).

Living water. The prophets had claimed this language for God himself. Through Jeremiah, God laments: "My people have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, ESV). Through Isaiah: "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters" (Isaiah 55:1, ESV). The living water is always the life of God himself, poured out freely for those who will receive it.

Like Nicodemus, the woman takes Jesus literally in verse 11: "Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?" (John 4:11, ESV). Jesus answers with one of the most staggering offers in all of Scripture in verses 13-14: "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:13–14, ESV).

Not a cistern. Not even a well, however ancient and honorable. A spring—inside the one who drinks. Self-sustaining, ever-replenishing, welling up. John tells us later this living water is the Holy Spirit (John 7:38–39): the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who descended on Jesus at his baptism, who told Nicodemus he moves like the wind wherever he chooses. 

Here is the new birth Nicodemus heard about in the darkness—visible now in broad daylight, offered to a Samaritan woman at a midday well. The Spirit does not trickle in; he wells up. He does not merely assist the believer from outside; he takes up residence within, making the body itself a temple of the living God (1 Corinthians 6:19). This is not a secondary blessing reserved for the spiritually advanced. It is the birthright of every person who comes to Christ in faith.

She still thinks he means water from the ground. Jesus gently presses deeper in verses 17-18: "Go, call your husband." She answers simply: "I have no husband." And he replies: "You are right... for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband" (John 4:17–18, ESV).

He knows. Every chapter. Every failed relationship. Every choice made in desperation or loneliness or hope that slowly soured. He sees the full ledger of her life—and he stays. There is no accusation in his voice, only the clear, compassionate light of someone who sees us entirely and remains anyway. This is divine omniscience as the gospel presents it: God does not learn things about us that cause him to reconsider his offer. He knew before he sat down at that well. He knows before we walk through the door of this church. And still he offers. That is what makes his grace so astonishing.

She recognizes she is dealing with no ordinary man and pivots to the centuries-old dispute over sacred space: our mountain or yours? Jesus dissolves the terms of the argument entirely in verse 23: "The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him" (John 4:23, ESV). 

In Jesus, the new temple has arrived. Worship is no longer anchored to a mountain, ritual, or ethnicity. It is the whole person's response to the Father, enabled by the Spirit, centered on the Son. Spirit and truth is not a call to formless spontaneity on one hand, or cold doctrinal precision on the other. It means worship that is genuinely Spirit-animated and genuinely Christ-centered—the inner life set alight by the Holy Spirit, bowing before the one who is himself the Truth incarnate.

She holds to the last sure thing she knows in verse 25: "I know that Messiah is coming... When he comes, he will tell us all things” (John 4:25, ESV). And then—to this woman, at this well, at noon, in Samaria—Jesus speaks the words he will not speak openly again until his trial before the high priest: "I who speak to you am he" (John 4:26, ESV).

The first explicit messianic declaration in the Gospel of John. Not to a rabbi. Not to a crowd. To her. And here we must return to what I said at the outset: this is the longest conversation Jesus has with any individual in the entire New Testament. Not with Peter, who would lead the church. Not with Nicodemus, the great teacher of Israel. With a Samaritan woman whose testimony would not have been admissible in a court of law. Jesus invests his longest recorded personal conversation in the one person every surrounding social structure said was least worth his time. The kingdom of God inverts every human hierarchy of worth and access. The longest conversation is given not to the most qualified but to the most overlooked.

She leaves her water jar at the well and runs back to the village in verse 29: "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?" (John 4:29, ESV). Not a theological argument—just he saw me, all of me, and he was not repelled. Come and see. Those three words have been bringing people to Jesus since the Epiphany season, when Andrew and Philip used them to bring their friends. The oldest, simplest, most irresistible form of evangelism.

Many Samaritans believe because of her witness. They come, they stay, and their faith matures into something firsthand in verse 42: "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world" (John 4:42, ESV). There it is — the Epiphany declaration in its fullest form. Not the Savior of the Jews only. Not the fulfillment of one nation's hope. The Savior of the world. The Magi came from the east following a star and knelt before a Jewish infant. Now a Samaritan village comes to faith through the testimony of one broken woman and declares what the whole arc of Scripture has been building toward: this savior is for everyone. Every tribe, every tongue, every person who has ever come to a well alone at noon. The gospel has no borders.

Now we need to hear the Old Testament reading alongside this, because it is not merely background—it is the pattern this story completes.

In Exodus 17, the Israelites have crossed the Red Sea, eaten manna every morning, seen the power of God more vividly than any people in history. They arrive at Rephidim, find no water, and turn on Moses immediately: "Is the Lord among us or not?" (Exodus 17:7, ESV). The moment need arises, they forget everything. God commands Moses to strike the rock at Horeb, and water flows abundantly. But he names the place Massah and Meribah—Testing and Quarreling. Their faithlessness is carved into the geography as a warning for every generation that follows.

Psalm 95 takes that memory and turns it into a living invitation: "Oh come, let us sing to the Lord... For the Lord is a great God" (Psalm 95:1, 3, ESV)—and then the urgent turn: "Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah... when your fathers put me to the test, though they had seen my work" (Psalm 95:8–9, ESV). The Israelites in the Exodus were not ignorant pagans, but people who had witnessed miracle after miracle and still could not trust when the next need arose. Psalm 95 is a today psalm. The invitation is perpetually fresh. The danger of hardness is perpetually present.

Set the two stories side by side and the contrast is piercing. The Israelites were thirsty and complained; the woman was thirsty and stayed in the conversation. The Israelites tested God's presence; she questioned, pushed back, and finally opened her heart. The Israelites received water from the rock but remained spiritually parched; she received living water and became the vessel of faith for an entire village.

At Jacob's well, the true Rock sits down—thirsty in his humanity, yet the inexhaustible spring for all who come to him. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 10:4 that the rock struck at Horeb was Christ. He will be struck once and for all at Calvary—"one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out" (John 19:34, ESV). The early church fathers saw in that moment the birth of the sacraments themselves—water and blood, baptism and eucharist, flowing from the wounded side of the new Adam. The fountain has been opened. It will never run dry.

We know this thirst. There is the professional who has built the career she always wanted and sits in the parking lot some mornings wondering why she feels so hollow—still going to the well, still drawing the same water, still going home unsatisfied. There is the man who has learned to medicate his loneliness so efficiently—scrolling, a third drink, the comfortable noise of the television—that he has almost stopped noticing the loneliness itself. There is the retiree who stayed busy enough for decades to outrun certain questions, and now, in a house grown too quiet, those questions have caught up. And there is probably someone, maybe many, in this room today carrying the weight of a story they have not told anyone, convinced that if anyone truly knew, they would not stay.

Jesus is already at the well. Already sitting in the heat of our particular noon hour. Already knowing every chapter of the story we are afraid to tell. He knows — fully, completely, with nothing hidden — and still he offers. That is what makes this grace and not merely sympathy. The living water is not for people who have cleaned themselves up. It is for the ones who have been coming to the same well for years, still thirsty, quietly hoping that this time might be different.

The Samaritan woman shows us three movements that are ours to follow. First, she stayed honest. She did not dress up her thirst in respectable language. When Jesus pressed her, she gave the shortest possible true answer and let the conversation continue. Lent invites exactly this honesty—name the longings, stop managing the symptoms, and let Jesus speak to the source of our restlessness. Augustine, who knew something about broken cisterns, wrote in his book Confessions: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee." The restlessness, just like the wilderness, is not the enemy. It is the invitation to come to, or return to, the well of living water.

Second, she received the gift. She left her water jar at the well—the thing she had carried every day of her life—because she had found something that made it irrelevant. Receiving the living water means setting down what we have been carrying in its place: the shame, the coping strategies, the performance of respectability. It means letting worship become real—in spirit and truth—not a duty to be managed but a thirsty soul arriving at the only spring that does not run dry.

Third, she went and told. She did not wait until she had it all worked out. She had questions still, was not even certain: Can this be the Christ? But she had enough. “Come and see.” Our testimony does not need to be polished or comprehensive. It only needs to be true. One honest invitation from one ordinary person can be the bridge someone in our life has been waiting for.

In a few moments we will come to this Table. Bread and wine—ordinary things, made signs and seals of his body broken and his blood poured out. Here we receive the living water in a different element. Here we are not merely told about grace; we eat it, we drink it, we carry it home, and possess it as we enter the world with the work he has given us to do. The eucharist is not just a memorial but a genuine encounter with the risen Lord who still sits at the well, still initiates, still offers the living water. Leave your jar here. Come to the Table. Drink deeply of the Savior of the world. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

The wilderness is never the end of the story. It is where God so often meets us most clearly, when the noise has been stripped away and there is nothing left but need and the voice of the one who says: I who speak to you am he.

Come to the well. Receive the living water. Leave the jars behind. And then go—with whatever imperfect words we have—and tell someone: “Come and see.”

Let's pray…