Sermon for March 8, 2026: Give Me a Drink based upon John 4:5-42

​John 4:5-42 New International Version

So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said 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.)

Jesus answered 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.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”

But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

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.”

---

     Several years ago, I tried overwintering a rosemary plant. It did not go well. The house was warm enough, but our cat Albite’s bad habit of chewing on plants meant I couldn’t keep it near the windows with the best light. I got it through January pretty well, and even was able to take a couple small cuttings to use in an altarscape during zoom worship (remember when I’d decorate our bar like our communion table when we were worshiping at home?). I kept the little sprigs in water, thinking I’d use them for a meal later in the week. Imagine my surprise when I saw tiny roots coming off the stems. I had no idea that you could propagate rosemary in water like that.

     After a failed attempt at transferring one of them to soil, I left the remaining one in a small jar, replacing the water when it needed it. It grew more and more roots and the stem grew longer and longer. It even bloomed a little purple flower for two or three seasons. The sprig is looking a little crummy right now... it may have finally run out of space or maybe I lost track of watering it or maybe it has just come to the end of what is possible for an eight-inch twig to do in a jar in the kitchen window. But, I am glad I added that little bit of water, and kept giving it water. Something delicate and beautiful grew out of it.

     “Water changes everything.” I read that in some Church World Service materials a few years ago. Water has been a theme in our readings for weeks now... waters of baptism. Water in a miracle at a wedding. The Living Water Jesus told Nicodemus about. In the book of John, water changes everything. This interaction over the well changes things, too.

     Last week, we spent some time with the story of Nicodemus, a well-respected leader in the community who felt like he had to go see Jesus in the dark, in order to ask him questions in secret. Today’s interaction between the unnamed woman and Jesus happens in broad daylight. That’s not the only way this woman will be different than the Pharisee who needs to be braver. In fact, in her book about the Gospel of John, Karoline Lewis says that “There can be no character more opposite Nicodemus than the Samaritan woman at the well.” It is too bad we don’t know her name. She and Jesus had a remarkable encounter over the water. I can’t help but think it changed both of them.

     In today’s story, Jesus is traveling through Samaria. He left where he was because his disciples had been baptizing people, garnering the attention of leaders who were suspicious of Jesus. See, water was already changing things. We should remember that Judeans of this era and Samaritans, though they both traced their lineage back through to Abraham and upheld Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as their holy texts, were in deep conflict, especially over where they understood the proper center of religious worship to be: Mount Gerizim or the Temple in Jerusalem.

     Judeans, descendants of the Southern Kingdom, like Jesus, and Samaritans, descendants of the Northern Kingdom, did not hang out, and, they didn’t spend a lot of time in each other’s cities, even if there were religiously significant sites, like Jacob’s Well, in those cities. And, yet, Karoline Lewis notes, here in John, where Jesus is said to be the expression of God’s love in the world, it seems appropriate that he would go right through a place and spend time with a people whom his community mistrusted. Lewis puts it this way, “There is nothing in God’s creation that God does not love, not even the least anticipated persons.”

     Wells are places where a lot of important men and women of the Bible meet. Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, and Isaac and Rebecca all meet at wells and later marry. What was going on at wells to make them such happening places? Most people didn’t have their own well dug at home. They relied on a communal well. Carrying water for a whole family is a difficult chore, often left to the women and girls to complete. This is a job often done in a group, with multiple women and girls, sometimes from more than one household, going out together. It is interesting that this woman has gone to the well alone. I read somewhere (and I don’t remember where) that some scholars wonder if she’s there alone because she is an outsider in her own community, ostracized by other women who refuse to help her. Why else would she be out at the hottest part of the day to get water unless she didn’t want to run into some folks who didn’t like her.

     Those details aren’t in the story though. If she is intended to function as kind of counter-example to Nicodemus, a respected Jewish leader who came to see Jesus at night, of course she, a Samaritan stranger, would talk to Jesus during the day, in a casual encounter that grows into an intimate conversation about faith. Also, Jesus’ strikes up a conversation with her, not the other way around. Because he asks for her help first. He asks her for a drink.

     It can be challenging to read tone, but I’m inclined to hear her response with some humor or incredulity. “Me? You’re asking me for water?” Yes, this Judean man is asking this Samaritan woman for water. Yes, this rabbi is speaking to this woman about faith. Yes, this single man is speaking to a woman who is not in his family while they both are alone, even though they are in a public place. None of those things are supposed to happen among respectable people. She is wise to ask for some clarification, because people like them do not usually hang out, much less share drinking utensils and talk about God.

     In her commentary on this text, Jennifer Garcia Bashaw notes that this conversation at the well is the longest conversation that Jesus has with any one person in any of the Gospels. She gently ribs Jesus about not having a bucket and also reminds him of both of their ancestral connections to Jacob, who long built the well to take care of his family. Water is a necessity that connects these two to their ancestor in the faith and to each other as humans who need water in this very moment. Something else beyond water is also necessary. Jesus indicates that he has the other necessary thing the “Living Water of eternal life.”

     Because seeing is believing in John, we see Jesus do something that is a little miraculous in this interaction... out of nowhere, he knows something about this woman’s marital history that one wouldn’t necessarily know about a stranger. Given that wells in the Bible are places where people get betrothed, according to Bashaw, it makes sense that something about marriage would pop up in this story. But, Jesus turns that expectation on its head. Rather than make a hasty proposal, he asks about her husband, to which she replies that she doesn’t have one. He goes on to say, “you’re right. You’ve had five and you aren’t even married to man you’re seeing now.” There’s no way a stranger would have known that. While their conversation about water and living water laid the groundwork for her belief, it is this miraculous bit of knowledge about her history that convinces the woman that Jesus is special and holy... that he is the Messiah.

     Water changes things. Had Jesus not been thirsty, he and this woman may not have met. Had he not been brave enough to reach out to someone he had been raised to avoid, and ask for help, he would have struggled on his journey. Had the woman chosen not to share a drink with this stranger, she would have missed out on a life-changing interaction. John goes on to tell us that she becomes one of the earliest preachers, going about Samaria, telling the people about Jesus who “told her everything she had ever done.” Many Samaritans grew hopeful because of what she had said and sought him out. Then, once they saw him, they heard for themselves and began to believe he was the Messiah. Water changed the Samaritan’s life, and helped something new grow.

     In the second half of the reading, we see the disciples not quite know what to do about Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan. Stumbling a bit, they end up asking him if he needed food. He said, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Dr. Sharon Fennema invites us to think about this food, and the harvest Jesus says is being prepared for the disciples. She says, “Seeds of relationships and dreams had been sown there at Jacob’s well. Seeds of hostility and division had been sown there too. But Jesus invited them to look around and see what possibilities were ripening in their midst, possibilities like the truth-telling, life-changing conversation he and the woman at the well had just had.”

     This time of year, many people are turning to planning our gardens. I’m passing around a bowl of seeds. Take a seed or a few seeds. In order for these seeds to grow, they need water. They need other things, too, but first they need water. I hope you’ll take these seeds with you and remember that water changes things, be it a cutting or a dry little seed, into something larger... something that will feed people. May you find the sustenance you need to grow in this season. And, may you find your way to labor alongside those who have gone before. There is much harvest to be done. We’ll need our strength to complete it.

Resources consulted while writing this sermon:
More information about Church World Services work to help people access clean water:  https://cwsglobal.org/learn/hunger-and-poverty/water-sanitation-and-hygiene/
Karoline Lewis' John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014)
Jennifer Garcia Bashaw: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-john-45-42-6
Sharon Fennema: https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/lent-3a-march-8/
​