Third Sunday in Lent

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

After Eric and I graduated from seminary, my parents took us on a tour of the great national parks out West. One day, we were hiking along the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a typical day for that part of the country: hot, dry, slightly windy, arid.

We were happily hiking and chatting in German, when a group of three adults came towards us. They looked to be of early retirement age. They heard us speaking in German and stopped us for they were also German. Two of them were a couple that had moved to Arizona decades ago. The third was a sister to one of them, visiting from Germany.

We had been talking for a while, when the sister carefully sat down on a bolder. My father noticed that she didn’t look well. Her face was mottled with pale and red splotches, and she was a bit shaky. He offered her his water bottle, and she gratefully accepted it and drank in big gulps.

Her hosts felt terrible. They had lived in the desert climate for a long time and were used to it. They had completely forgotten how it was for newcomers. Their guest was so dehydrated that she almost passed out, and they hadn’t seen it. She was so very thirty, and they had not noticed the signs.

My father’s water and the rest on that bolder in the shade helped revive her, and they could continue their hike.

I had to think of that encounter when I read today’s gospel story. It opened my eyes to the results of real thirst. Not the kind of thirst that makes you get up from the couch and walk to the fridge, but the kind of thirst that makes you weak and shaky and desperate, the kind that can be life threatening.

The Samaritan woman comes to the well to get water. She is thirsty. She needs water for her household to drink, cook, and wash. All living beings need water.

This woman’s thirst, however, goes deeper. Yes, she needs water, but she needs more than that. Several pieces of information in the story hint at her thirsty situation.

She comes in the middle of the day, at noon, when the sun is high and the temperature is the hottest. Everyone else will have gotten their water in the cooler morning hours, or will get it later when the evening breeze makes it more comfortable. But this woman comes at noon, probably to avoid the crowds.

In her conversation with Jesus it emerges that she has had five husbands and is currently living with a man she is not married to. We don’t know why she was married so many times. It is important to note that neither Jesus nor gospel writer John shame or blame her for it. It is just the sad truth about her life that she has been either widowed or divorced so many times.

Whatever the reason, though, we can imagine the talk around town about this woman. Even today, such a marriage record would get tongues wagging. No wonder she rather takes the heat of the day than the stares and whispers of other women at the well.

How she must have longed for community, thirsted for love and acceptance. How lonely she must have felt, how overwhelmed by a life that didn’t at all turn out the way she wanted it to, how powerless to do anything about it. Her soul must have been parched, yearning for just a little bit of kindness.

She comes to the well and finds Jesus there. At first, she might have been disappointed that she wasn’t alone. Then maybe on edge because it was a Jewish man sitting there.

Jesus begins their conversation by asking her for a drink. It’s rather amazing: Here is a women with a parched soul, but Jesus shows her that she still has something to offer: She can give him a drink of water on a hot day. She can bless him with cool refreshment from the well.

The two start talking. It is a rich conversation, the longest conversation Jesus has with any person in the Bible. We don’t have time to get into all the nuances here. Join us tomorrow morning at 10:00 am when we dig deeper into this text. For today, I want to highlight two aspects.

Why does Jesus bring up the marriage situation? On one level, it shows her that he is someone special. This is almost like one of the signs in John’s gospel that points towards Jesus’ divinity. Yet something else happens here, as well. Jesus and the woman exchange truths about each other.

The woman’s life is opened up and her sad marriage history is revealed. Jesus doesn’t judge her for it at all, but still remains in conversation with her; still offers her his attention and concern.

Then Jesus opens up and reveals himself as the Messiah. Jesus’ truth is revealed. In the first of many “I am” sayings in the Gospel according to John, Jesus reveals for the first and only time that he is the Messiah.

They both share their truth. In this mutual sharing, trust develops and doors open and it dawns on the woman who it might be that is talking with her.

As soon as she gets that, she is on her way, back into town, telling everyone about this encounter she had with Jesus. This is the second aspect I want to highlight. Jesus had promised that he can give living water that gushes up inside people, gushes up to eternal life. In John’s Gospel, eternal life means life in the love and grace and presence of Christ in the here and now. It is not life after death, but life on earth that is touched by Jesus, that abides in Christ, that is enriched by the Spirit.

Jesus offers that water to the woman. She was parched in her soul, thirsty for someone to acknowledge her as a human being who mattered. Jesus gives her his full attention, shows that she can bless someone else, treats her like a disciple with an enquiring mind, and makes clear that her faith matters. In doing all this, Jesus fills her with water of life.

Right away, we see it gushing up to eternal life: The woman rushes back to town to tell everyone else. She is so excited, blessed, refreshed in spirit and soul, she wants others to receive the same gifts. “Come and see,” she tells the townsfolk. The exact same words Jesus had used to call his first disciples in chapter 1.

She received the living water through her relationship with Jesus Christ. Now that water is gushing up inside her and is changing her relationships with her neighbors. These are the people who had gossiped about her and looked down on her to the point where she rather walked to the well in the hottest time of the day than chance an encounter with any of them.

Now she seeks such encounters. She calls those people and invites them to come and meet Jesus for themselves.

Thanks to her excited invitation, they do come and meet Jesus, and they come to believe in him, and they invite Jesus to stay. The ostracized woman brings these people to faith. The Samaritans invite the Jewish rabbi to stay. All kinds of boundaries are being torn down, all because of living water gushing up in all of them.

Last month, our council and committee chairs met for a retreat. We were asked to identify the big rocks on which Calvary’s mission is called to be focused. Three groups met in separate rooms to discuss this, and all three groups came back with pretty much the same three rocks. One of them is “Deliberate Discipleship”. We feel called to be more intentional about growing as disciples and about making disciples.

This woman at the well is a wonderful model for us.

First, she spends time with Jesus, time in faith conversation, time to express doubts and hopes, time to reveal truth about herself, time to be honest about her shortcomings, time to hear the truth about Jesus – time to be filled with living water.

Then she lets the living water gush up inside her and spill over into the lives of other people. She is alive with the gospel. She doesn’t even need to be told to go and tell others, she just does it. Off she goes to share what she has received so that others might be filled with living water, as well.

This season of Lent is a wonderful time to ponder how Jesus’ living water has filled and refreshed us. What were the times in our lives when we were parched, thirsty for love and community and healing like the woman at the well?

Author Phillip Yancey wrote: “Grace, like water, flows downward…. No matter how low we sink, grace flows to that lowest part.” Isn’t that a lovely thought? The living water Jesus offers is God’s grace. It was poured into us in baptism and every day since. It is powerfully present in all of life, but especially in those places of pain and sorrow and loneliness and thirst. That’s where God’s grace flows like living water, washing away sin and shame and hurt and fear, bringing us from death to new life, becoming in us a spring a water gushing up to eternal life.

That’s what happens to the woman at the well. In her encounter with Jesus, she is fully known and fully loved. She is fully embraced by the grace of God in Christ, and that fills her with living water gushing up so powerfully that it spills over into the lives of others.

During Lent, I encourage you to give extra time to the disciplines of faith that let us feel the embrace of God’s grace. Through prayer, almsgiving, and fasting, through worship and Bible study, through service projects and loving deeds in daily life, through time spent in conversation with Jesus, let Jesus’ living water stream into us, heal us, and gush up in us, refreshing our souls and spilling grace into the lives of others.

May Jesus give us eyes to notice the parched people we encounter, and the love to share with them living water we have received. Amen.