Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

Sunday 8th March 2026

Lent is a time of unknowing ourselves. Years of anxious wandering in the wilderness exposed the Israelites to their assumptions about who they thought God should be for them, and who they thought they were. Somehow this required the desert, and great thirst.

It is not surprising, then, that wells became places of respite from such exposure, places of great importance to the ancient people. They were gathering and meeting places, places for communities to tell stories about who they were and what they should want. Places that were bought and fought over, signs of prosperity and covenantal blessing.

As a Jew, Jesus would have been encouraged to believe that this well, Jacob’s well, belonged to him, to his people – to the Jews. But this well is now in a Samaritan city. The Samaritans saw themselves as descendants of Jacob, too, something the Jews vigorously disputed. Tensions had reached such a pitch between these two related groups of people that they had become violently hostile to each other’s holy sites. They had become places of identity and destruction. Only a hundred years before Christ, the Jewish king had destroyed the Samaritan temple at Mount Gerizim.

Now this Samaritan woman bears all the marks of someone who Jesus should want to avoid completely. Men were expected not to speak with women they were not related to for any noticeable period of time. This woman is alone, and as women usually travelled in groups to draw water, Jesus would assume she had been shunned by her own people. She is, it would appear, in her own wilderness. She is, in a profound way, alone. The narratives that have shaped these two lives have primed us, we might say, for an awkward silence, for

aggression, for two people to talk to each other for a short time, in a blunt way, and

completely across purposes.

But almost impossibly, Jesus asks her for a drink. And this is a shock, because it would have been perceived as a violence to the stories about who they were, and what they should want. Samaritan women were considered unclean and, therefore, so were their drinking vessels. Uncleanliness was passed on very much like a virus. If you touched it, you got it. So Jesus is threatening to make himself unclean, which would bar him from all holy places. And for what? Some commentators have argued that she may have thought that the only reason this man would risk such a thing was if he had somewhat shady romantic intentions.

And, it is true, we are witness to a series of misunderstandings. Something about the Presence of Jesus seems to bring these to the surface and expose them. When Jesus says, ‘living water’, she thinks he means ‘flowing water’, which ‘living water’ was an idiom for in Aramaic, a highly prized resource, particularly during hot and dry periods such as these. Once Jesus implicitly tells her that he means something more than this, she seems to think access to the ‘living water’ will mean she will never have the need or desire to drink any literal water again. She may be being sardonic. She may be teasing him.

In other words, she doesn’t quite recognise, or cannot quite believe in, what is being asked of her, and what is being offered to her, because what she thinks she wants, and who she thinks she is, has been formed in her by a particular language, by a set of cultural and religious assumptions that have been passed on to her, and which she is expected to desire and protect, even as they shame her. And we are being invited to recognise something of this in ourselves. Because there are consequences of not knowing who we really are, and what we really want, especially for those closest to us. This is particularly true if the reason is shame.

And that is why, I think, Jesus asks her about her husband. If we think we hear him chastising her, and saying that her husband is not really her husband because she has had handful before him, I want to suggest that this our own mishearing. The cultural assumptions of the day were that she must have done something repeatedly wrong to have had that many husbands. Even if she had been divorced for failing to produce a child, this would have been seen as evidence of past sins, and deeply shameful. This may be why she is alone, and why she is evasive. But as Jesus has consistently exposed these cultural assumptions as mistaken, I think he is asking us to hear something different. In Hebrew, to know and to love are intimately connected. The verb to know, ‘yada’, also means to make love, the hallmark and fulfilment of marriage. Thus, when Jesus says ‘Your husband is not your husband’, he might be saying: ‘You have never known him, or the others you have loved, because you do not know who you are, or what you really desire. And that is why you are hurting’. This is not condemnation. He is saying he understands her suffering. He is helping her to come to terms with her shame.

And so at the very same moment he exposes all this in her, Christ recognises and welcomes who she really is, and what she really wants. And the answer to both those questions is standing before her. Jesus is both the desert and the well. He is the disclosure of hermistaken self-understandings, and the fulfilment of her deepest needs and desires. It is only in light of Christ’s recognition of who she is at heart, and his gift of himself in love, that her unknowing of herself can take place, and she can see herself anew. In fact, she experiences herself as so seen and so heard that she tells people that she has met a man who knows everything she has ever done. This is not because she has had an experience with a gifted psychic. Rather, it is the joy of a person who has been radically alone and unseen, and who, on meeting someone she had learned to expect she would frighten and disturb, and who should frighten and disturb her, found herself disarmed of the prejudices that inform her about who she is, and what she most wants. She has become strange to herself. She met with Love Himself, the Living Water. She has been known.

Notice too that the followers of Jesus were astonished. It was exactly the kind of anxieties and beliefs that they had about their place in the history of redemption, about who they thought God and the Messiah should be for them, about how and where to worship, that had erected a barricade between this woman of Samaria, and the God who loves her, even in the midst of her brokenness. Their eyes had been on another well. Their eyes had been on Jerusalem.

The relationship, then, between exposure, deep recognition, and right worship is one for all of us who consider ourselves followers of Jesus today, as we inhabit and pass on, in a time of violence and war, an anxious and polarising culture, a culture with an increasing desire to diminish and destroy all it refuses to see or understand. Liturgy, confession, Scripture, silence, charity, the Eucharist - these are all desert places, places where we begin to unknow ourselves, places where our pictures about who we think we are, and what we want, are brought to the surface and exposed. They are places of learning how to long, and what to long for. But they are also wells, places of respite, of reconciliation, places where our most

precious longings are met. They are encounters with Christ. They are our continual Lent. It is an ever-present risk that we continue to tell stories about them, about ourselves and about God, that obscure who we really are, and what we really want. Stories that come to host and enlarge our distorting fears and anxieties. And yet it is only by way of such broken stories that we can still say, as the Samaritans said to the woman, even as we unknow ourselves, that we know, and we love, because we have been loved, and we have been known. William Hier