Lent IIIA’26
8 March 2026
Rom.5.1-11; Jn. 4.5-42
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone <+>
Everliving God, whose will it is that all should come to you through your Son Jesus Christ:
inspire our witness to him, that all may know the power of his forgiveness and the hope of his resurrection;
who lives and reigns with you, and the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Amen. – The Book of Common Prayer p.816
One hot day in a middle eastern town called Sychar, a meeting took place between two people who couldn’t have been any more different. Jesus was a single, Jewish, male and a rabbi. The ‘other’ was a woman of mixed race called a Samaritan (a person who was half Jewish and half Arab). Jesus had been walking in the desert heat and was physically tired and thirsty, and sat down by a well. It was noon and suddenly a single woman appears to draw water from the well. Jesus asks her for a drink of water.
The first problem is that meetings like this between one man and one woman weren’t allowed in either Jewish or Samaritan cultures. The second problem is that Jews weren’t supposed to have any contact with a Samaritan and weren’t to touch them or anything that had been touched by them, so drinking or eating would have been a huge taboo. Knowing all of this made the shock of Jesus asking her to give him a drink even more startling. So already in this encounter we have a couple of strikes against anything positive coming out of this meeting. First you have the gender difference male and female. Second, you have the racial issue one a Jew the other of mixed race. And there was a third strike – a huge one, the woman was immoral and rejected by her own people. We know this because Samaritan women of good repute travelled as a group to the well to draw water in the morning, in the cool of the day. The woman standing before Jesus was coming at noon, in the heat of the day, and travelling by herself the sign of her status as an outcast.
As the author Richard Rohr puts it “Jesus knew how to break the rules in the right way.” The relationship is what mattered to him, he knew that this woman of Samaria was greatly loved and valued by God, he wanted to be able to share this great love, and for this he was willing to break all the rules of society. He was willing to cross the gender barrier, he was willing to cross the racial barrier, and he was willing to cross the sin barrier of her moral failings to make a connection of eternal proportions. Jesus’ crossing of the divides had made both of them vulnerable to the censure of both of their cultures. Jesus revealed the divine knowledge that she had a thirst beyond physical water but like all humans she had the need for living water that alone could satisfy the thirst of her parched soul.
In his presence thousands of years of prejudice melted away and what was left was a person made in the image of God. Jesus saw her, the real her that went beyond her gender, race, or religious status – the woman who was thirsty for the love and unconditional acceptance of God. Jesus let her know that he knew of her moral failings, she had been married five times and the man she was currently with was not her husband. Jesus knew all of this about her and more and still he saw her as God’s beloved daughter.
This wonderful meeting is then disturbed by Jesus’ disciples showing up and they are disturbed to find him alone with a Samaritan woman, but oh what transformation had occurred. She seizes the moment of interruption to take her leave back to the city center where she tells all who would listen:” Come and see the man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” inviting the townsfolk to come and experience Jesus for themselves. As Episcopal priest, Kathleen Miller notes, “By her faith, her willingness to engage in spiritual dialogue and to believe in the abundant life Jesus offers her, the woman at the well emerges from the image of a thirsty, careworn outcast, to a hopeful evangelist!” Jesus had done for her what Jesus will do for anyone who’s willing to sit in his presence and listen, and to make ourselves vulnerable enough to receive the living water.
There is a powerful hymn in our hymnal written by Brian Wren, that we will be singing a bit later, that describes the Way of Christ in the world:
When Christ was lifted from the earth, his arms stretched out above
Through every culture, every birth, to draw an answering love.
Still east and west his love extends and always near or far,
He calls and claims us as his friends and loves us as we are.
Where generation, class, or race, divide us to our shame,
he sees not labels but a face, a person, and a name.
Thus freely loved, though fully known, may I in Christ be free
To welcome and accept his own as Christ accepted me.1
We, dear friends are living in a divided world, one that is divided by differences of gender, race, socio-economic status, by religion and politics – and for all of these differences we are bombarded by various labels to stereotype them all turning a world of “We” into a world of “Us vs. Them.” This is not, was it ever the way of Jesus his way has been and always will be – love. Amen.
1 Wren, Brian A. “When Christ is lifted from the earth” The Hymnal 1982 (Church Publishing: New York) p.603