It is the third Sunday in Lent and I am preaching at St Andrew’s Church, Clayhidon. You will be welcome to join me for Holy Communion at 10am.

There is something beautifully delicious in today’s Gospel passage from John, living where we do, with streams of living water being a very real part of the landscape. Jesus meets a woman at a well and asks her for a drink of water. It seems a natural enough event: one person is thirsty, another has access to well water, but nothing ever seems to be what it looks like.

To begin with, Jesus and his disciples have chosen to walk through an area which most Jews would have avoided like the plague. Samaria lies within Israel, separating the North form the South. Samaritans and Jews, despite both being faithful, both having origins with the wandering Israelites, despite both regarding Jacob and Joseph as their ancestors (Jesus and the unnamed woman meet at Jacob’s Well), the two did not see eye to eye. They disrespected each other, were antagonistic towards each other, and even at times violent towards to each other. Previously Jesus and his disciples have avoided the area, but this time they travel through Samaria.

It is lunchtime, the peek of the day, the disciples have been sent off to find food, and Jesus settles himself at the well, ostensibly to find liquid refreshment, but actually this is a predestined divine encounter. It is no accident that Jesus and the woman spend time together. Unheard of in their shared encounters, but not unplanned. Jesus sees potential and invests in this woman others have cast off time and again.

By all rights (rites?), Jewish and Samaritan, this encounter should not have happened. The woman comes to the well in the heat of the day knowing that everyone else would have drawn their water earlier when it was cooler, however she is avoiding potential ‘situations’ with other women who would chastise her for being, well… Everyone knew how many husbands she’d got through, and the current one wasn’t even prepared to marry her. It wasn’t a man’s job to draw the water so she should have been safe from them, and anyway, men should know not to approach a lone woman, especially one like her.

Jesus knows all this. However he also knows, like the proverbial bear in the woods, that a woman is not a temptation to men simply by existing. Jesus knows that men are responsible for their own actions (didn’t he say elsewhere that if your eye causes you to lust and sin, it is better you pluck it out?), he knows that he can trust himself not to act on impulse just because he can, just because no-one else is around to notice. So he asks her for water, for a drink, then engages her in conversation.

She is taken back by Jesus’ behaviour, she warns him of her reputation, but he already knows, and has still chosen to engage with her. He allows her to refresh him with well water, then offers her living water.

Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.

John 4:15

The world translated ‘living’ is the word used for ‘running’ as in a stream or river, not a stagnant well or pool. Jesus offers that which is the freshest and most pure, and alive. The thing with running water, as we well know here abouts is that it doesn’t just gently flow through brooks and streams, it flows down hills and mountains too; it bursts up from underground streams. Living, running, water isn’t convenient. It creates potholes and carries debris with it washing away that which is in its way.

The woman (Jesus I am sure knew her name), accepts this living water, it inconveniently causes her to speak with the very people she has been avoiding, becoming an evangelist for a Jew amongst Samaritans. That is quite some pothole to trip you up.

So where do we fit into this story?

Are we just going about our daily lives having collected our allocation of well water for the day, fairly happy with who we are and our situations in life, feeling better than ‘her next door’, the woman across the street, on the school run, at the supermarket, on insta who has made a mess of her life? Do we look askance at women out on their own in the heat of the day, ‘asking for it’, keeping our distance to make sure we are safe from contamination, or giving in to lustful desires? Are we the woman at the well, downtrodden by life and everything that seems to have gone wrong, friendless and lonely, knowing that something needs to change, just not what, or how? Or are we like the woman who leaves the well, having opened up to Jesus about everything and holding nothing back, seeking to be refreshed by the living water which only Jesus can provide?

If you identify yourself as anything other than the woman who leaves the well, perhaps it is time to reassess your faith? To reassess your relationship with Jesus, and not just sip at the tap water, but dive into the living water.