Sunday, March 8, 2026, Third Sunday in Lent
“Conversations with Jesus: The Woman at the Well”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 96:1-11; Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-8; John 4:5-26
Service Order: Divine Service III, without Communion, Lutheran Service Book
Hymns: “Drawn to the Cross, Which Thou Hast Blessed” #560; “How Wide the Love of Christ” #535; “Lamb of God” #550
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
I feel so sorry for the woman at the well. It wasn’t her fault; not all of it, anyway. Life just… does it to you sometimes. When she was young, she must have had dreams, like all young girls do; the wedding day every future bride has pictured in her head; a husband, a home, babies, a family, children to raise…
We don’t know what happened to her, to get her where she was. Scripture doesn’t say, and it’s not for us to assume or judge or fill in the blanks. We don’t know what happened with her husbands, whether it was death or divorce or some combination of those that caused her to lose them. We don’t know whether those husbands were good to her or bad to her, or what part of it may have been her fault. Even living with the man she was with might have been desperation, because she felt she had no other choice. Whatever the reason, she was where she was. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
The people and ‘good ladies’ of her town may have judged her or looked down on her, but you and I have no reason to do that. Life does what it does. Disappointment after disappointment, disaster after disaster, one heartbreak after another, and there you are. If she’d gotten a little bit cynical, who could really blame her for that? What she really needed was a little mercy, a little hope, a little good news for a change, but where was that going to come from? What she really needed, if her life was going to have any hope at all, was to come to know the love of God. A life without hope is a really hard life.
The backdrop for our Gospel story today is a world of politics, prejudice, and that ancient, long-standing hatred between the Samaritans and the Jews. Years before, the King of Assyria had conquered the Northen Kingdom of Israel, marking the end of it. He’d taken the populace and deported them to other places, and brought in people from other nations he’d conquered to take their place, who all brought along their own gods and idols.
2nd Kings tells us that the new arrivals didn’t know or fear Yahweh, the God of Israel, so God had sent lions among them to devour them; so they sent word to the king: “Please tell us how to please the God of this place, for we are being killed by lions.” The King responded by sending them a Hebrew priest to teach them how to worship Israel’s God. But instead of worshiping Him alone, they kept their other gods too, simply adding Yahweh to the mix. And they built an altar in Samaria for worship, rather than going to Jerusalem to worship God there. The Jews, rightly so, saw the Samaritans as idolaters and pagans; and the Samaritans saw the Jews as intolerant, unloving, uncompromising (and they weren’t wrong either). By the time Jesus came along, the two peoples had detested each other for years. That backdrop of hatred forms the background for the conversation between Jesus and the woman we call “the woman at the well.”
Jesus, says our Gospel, was returning to Galilee from Jerusalem, and directly through Samaria was the shortest route home. Most Jews would have taken the long way around, to avoid setting foot in that place, but Jesus didn’t hold with that particular prejudice. The journey brought Jesus and His disciples to an ancient place, the place Jacob had called home before there ever was a nation of Israel. It was the place where Jacob had his sons, and the place where Jacob argued with the pagan inhabitants of the land over water rights, fighting over well after well until finally he had one he could claim as his own. It was a very good well, still producing water after hundreds of years.
So Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, human like us, was tired from the walk, and thirsty from the heat and the dust of the road. It was noon, the hottest part of the day. Could He have snapped His fingers and brought up miracle water, all He wanted? Could He have brought up water from the rock, like Moses? Sure; He was God. But He wasn’t there for water, He was there for a conversation, with a particular person whom He always knew would be there. And who was it, shockingly enough, that He came to talk to?
“A Samaritan woman came to draw water.” A Samaritan (ewww), and a woman (lower still), and a woman, evidently, of poor reputation (scandalous!) The local well at sunrise in those days was a place for greetings, gossip, and conversation for the “good ladies of the town”; and it was also a place where they could turn up their noses and make unkind remarks about someone who “wasn’t living right.” Our woman at the well may have been drawing water in the middle of the day to avoid them.
Yet Jesus defies all social convention and sense of propriety to start a conversation with her. Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’” No respectable Jewish man would talk to a strange woman like that in broad daylight, unless his own intentions (wink, wink) were impure.A Jewish man would normally have ignored her, and pretended she wasn’t even there. But Jesus didn’t see her like everyone else saw her. Others may have looked at her and seen only a loose woman; He saw a child of God who needed saving.
The Samaritan woman replied to Him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) The prejudice ran deep. A Jew wouldn’t drink from a vessel a Samaritan had used, let alone accept water from a woman like her, no matter how thirsty he was (like “colored only” water fountains in the old south).
And yet, what does Jesus in His mercy do? He speaks to her! He starts a holy conversation with her. She no doubt expected the hateful, harsh words she’d grown used to. But instead He offers her a gift; and not just a gift, but the “gift of God.”
He says to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water."
“Living water” is water that’s pure, because it flows. If you’re walking in the woods, and looking for a drink of water, you wouldn’t drink from a stagnant pool, with the reeds and lily pads and frogs; you’d drink from a place where the water is flowing over the rocks, where it’s much more likely to be pure and clean. (Unless you want a case of dysentery or something!)
Biblically speaking, living water is the gift of the Holy Spirit. It’s the water of Baptism, given to wash the sin out of your soul; it’s the gift of forgiveness, mercy, and grace.
What Jesus is offering this dear woman is a life made new. Take the living water God is offering you, and all those sins of the past will be washed away and forgiven and forgotten forever, and the future ahead of you will be bright and full of hope. The living water is a gift of grace, one God offers in Christ for free, to her, and to you, and to me, and to everyone. All you have to do is open your hands and open your heart and let the God of mercy pour it in.
This lady at the well had reasons to be suspicious and skeptical; she’d been lied to before. People had made promises to her and broke them. It had even gotten hard for her to trust God, for all that she’d been through. “Sir,” she says, “You have nothing to draw with, you have no bucket -- and a Jew like You certainly isn’t going to want to use mine. This is a deep well; where is this water of Yours going to come from? Are You claiming to be greater than our father Jacob, who dug this well and drank from it himself, and gave it to us?” The fact that He’s a Jew is enough for her to mistrust Him, and to think He’s just another man who’s come along to make big promises He’ll never keep. It’s hard to learn to trust again, once your trust has been broken.
You and I might have been inclined to give up and end the conversation at that point, thinking there’s no way we’ll ever get through that cynical shell to the hurt and pain underneath. But Jesus doesn’t give up; not on her, or on you and me, or on anyone. Instead of turning away, Jesus goes right back to telling her about the water.
“Drink the water I give you, dear lady, and you’ll never be thirsty again.” And of course, it’s not physical, dry-throated thirst He’s talking about. It’s the thirst for hope, the hope that somehow, some way, there will be a time and a place where things will be better for me. In the end, it’s a thirst for the living God, a thirst for knowing there’s a God somewhere who will love me and care about me. Everyone has that hope somewhere inside them; it’s just that some of us have given up on it or buried it kind of deep. Like I said, life does that to us sometimes. The woman responds with roll-your-eyes, cynical sarcasm, which I guess we can expect: “Sir, give me some of this wonderful water of Yours, so I won’t have to keep coming out here every day to get water from this well.”
Now, Jesus does something here that you and I can’t do. We can assume that we know all about people, but we shouldn’t do that, because we don’t; nobody really knows somebody else’s heart. But Jesus knows us all, mind, body, heart, and soul. Jesus knew this dear lady before they ever met at this well. “The Lord counts all our tears,” the Scripture says.
What Jesus tells her next goes right for the truth. It’s a truth that stings, but that kind of truth is necessary sometimes. Jesus goes right to the heart of the place she’s found herself in; “Go call your husband and bring him back here,” He says. And she has to answer, “I don’t have a husband.” And then, all-knowing God that He is, He lays out her life before her eyes: “You’re telling the truth. You’ve had five husbands, and now you’re with a man who isn’t your husband at all.” He knows her, hurts and sins and all. She has this cynical shell she wears to guard her heart from the world, but He sees through it all.
"Sir," the woman replies, "I can see that You’re a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." Oh, she’s tough, isn’t she? She’s had to be. Sir, I can see You’re a prophet, since You seem to know me so well. But… You’re a Jewish prophet, and I’m a Samaritan, so why would You want to have anything to do with the likes of me? We worship here, You Jews worship there, and there are miles and miles and years of hurts between us; why should I believe that You care about someone like me?
Jesus’ answer explains why He chose to walk through Samaria, instead of taking the long way around: He goes where His love is needed most. It doesn’t matter to Him if you’re a Jew or a Samaritan, or a man or a woman. He isn’t coming to accuse you about where you’ve been or what you’ve done. He only wants to pour on the living water of forgiveness and grace that will reconcile you to God and bring you home to Him.
So a time is coming, Jesus tells her, when all the things that are dividing us today won’t matter anymore. Salvation is from the Jews, that true, because God planned it to be that way. God promised the fathers and patriarchs – Jacob included – that the Savior would come from the Jews. But there’s a time coming when it won’t matter, because all of us will worship together in the Spirit of truth. (Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!)
The woman answers, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When He comes, He will explain everything to us." She shows, by what she says, that there’s still hope buried in her somewhere, beneath all the stuff that’s been piled on top of it. She desires, she wants, she needs a Savior; she just doesn’t know who He is or where to find Him. Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am He."
What happens next in John’s Gospel is important to the story. (It’s not in the bulletin because it was too long to fit!) But the Gospel says this: “The woman left her water jar and ran back to town and told everyone, ‘Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could this be the Christ?’ And they came out of the town to meet Him. Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Him because of the woman's testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’ So when the Samaritans came to Him, they urged Him to stay with them, and He stayed two days. And because of His words many more became believers. They said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.’”
A beautiful story, now made more beautiful still. One woman at a well, hurting and broken and running out of hope, found by Jesus and brought to saving faith. Then not just her, but her friends and neighbors -- and maybe even that guy she was living with.
It’s a redemption story, a story of hope, one that tells us that none of us are ever so far from grace that the love of Christ can’t bring us home again.
Come, you who are thirsty, come to the waters! In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com