Preached on the Third Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 4:5-42.
Let’s review where we are in the story of Israel, and the story of Jesus. Under David and Solomon, the northern and southern kingdoms were united. They split, and then the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians. You may remember me talking about Isaiah, who was an active prophet during the Assyrian invasion. Both Samaria and Galilee were part of the old northern kingdom. Somehow, Galilee maintained a religious connection to Jerusalem and Judea, but Samaria adopted other religious practices even though they maintained a connection to the patriarchs. In fact, there are still Samaritans today, and they still have a Pentateuch that is parallel to our Bible but with different details.
One difference is the specification of the holy mountain. Our Bible specifies Mount Zion in Jerusalem, but the Samaritan Pentateuch specifies Mount Gerizim, near the location of the encounter that we read about in this story.
I think it’s important to always look at the larger story arc when considering any passage. The previous chapter of John opens with Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. Although he is a Pharisee, he is seeking Jesus’s wisdom and insight. And yet, although he is a Pharisee and a teacher of the Law, he cannot understand Jesus’s teachings. Or perhaps his preconceived notions of who God is and how God acts in the world block his ability to perceive God’s presence through Jesus. And so, Nicodemus visits by night, and leaves unenlightened.
After that encounter, Jesus’s disciples have some squabbles with John the Baptist’s disciples. Who has the greater authority? Who is following the right practices? John ultimately says, “I told you, I’m not the Messiah! Follow Jesus!”
There is a bit of additional conflict with other Pharisees, so Jesus decides to go home to Galilee. Now, he could have gone around, but the shortest path from Judea to Galilee goes right through Samaria. Right through enemy territory.
Well, it’s a long walk, so at midday, Jesus needs a break and a drink of water, so he stops at the well. Not just any well: Jacob’s well, one with a long history. Jacob lived more than a thousand years before Jesus, yet this region retains a memory of his life and travels. They remember that this well was the one mentioned in Genesis, the one where Jacob settled with his twelve sons who fathered the twelve tribes. An auspicious place to have an encounter with history-making ramifications.
It’s midday, and yet there is a woman out fetching water. This is a chore normally done at daybreak, not the hottest part of the day. All of the other village women would have come early in the day, so why does this one come at noon? Well, we find out pretty soon that this unnamed woman has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband.
I’ve given that some thought. Why would a woman in first-century Samaria have been married five times? Divorce was expensive. Basically, if a man wanted to divorce his wife, he had to return her dowry, except in the case of adultery. So perhaps, she had committed adultery and been divorced on that account. Another possibility is that she was barren. The main duty of a woman in that time and place was to bear children, so perhaps she was divorced because of her failure to produce heirs for her husband. Yet another possibility is that some of those marriages ended with her as a widow. Needing some source of support, she would have found a man who was willing to take her in.
We don’t really know why she had been married five times. Any of the reasons I can think of, though, would have made her an outcast. Perhaps she was adulterous, perhaps she was barren and therefore perhaps cursed by God, or perhaps she was bad luck and led to her husbands’ deaths. Not the kind of woman that other women would want to hang around with. Instead, they would shun her. They wouldn’t want her around their husbands, and they wouldn’t want to be associated with her bad luck or her curse. And so, here she is, high noon, fetching water alone.
That explains the woman, but why does Jesus speak to her? Why does Jesus choose her to receive his message? The first reason is convenience. He has a mission, to spread the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand, and that eternal life is available to us all. He sees someone who needs to hear this message, so he starts up a conversation.
But doing so transgresses a number of social norms. First, there is the fact that he is a Jew and she is a Samaritan. Jews believed that Samaritans were ritually unclean, and therefore contact would make them unclean, too. This is certainly not the only time Jesus welcomed contact with someone unclean! He crosses that boundary so many times that it seems like he does not acknowledge uncleanness as a real thing. Second, there is the fact that he is a man and she is a woman. Men did not speak to women as equals at that time. Are you familiar with the Billy Graham Rule? That was his policy not to be alone with a woman other than his wife. In the ancient Near East, there was a similar social convention. Plus, there are stories in the Bible where a man encounters a woman at a well and it ultimately leads to marriage—including Jacob, who met his wife, Rachel, at a well.
So there were plenty of reasons why Jesus would not, should not speak to this person. Regardless, Jesus did. Jesus did not see her ethnicity, gender, or religion as barriers between them. He saw her as a sibling in his eternal family, someone also made in God’s image, someone also worthy of his attention.
Why else did Jesus choose to speak to her? Her receptivity, perhaps? When he asked her for water, she could have just said no and gone about her business, or said yes, given him a drink, and been done with it. Instead, she was willing to engage in conversation with him. She let him draw her out of her shame-covered shell.
Shame is a powerful force. Shame is different from guilt. Guilt says, I did something wrong and need to pay a proportional penalty for my transgression. Shame says, I did something wrong and therefore I am a bad person. Shame says, my very inner being and character are corrupted. This woman was covered in shame, due to her marital history. Maybe she didn’t even do anything wrong, but the results were shameful, so much so that she could not associate with the other women of the village.
I bet everyone here has things in their past that cause them shame. Maybe it was the way you treated someone close to you. Maybe it was an episode in your career. Maybe it was a time when you should have spoken up in defense of the defenseless, but you didn’t. Maybe it was a time when you supported a person, a movement, or an institution, only to find out that they weren’t who you thought they were.
Shame reflects our deepest need to belong. We fear that our shame will lead to isolation, a loss of status or community that in our prehistoric days would have led to banishment and death. That’s not how modern society works, but that is how our brains still think it works. We still think that if our shame is revealed, we will lose everything, perhaps even our lives.
And so we hide our shame. We hide it from our colleagues. We hide it from our friends. We hide it from our family. We hide it from God. We even hide it from ourselves, not acknowledging the shame that is tearing us apart from the inside out.
Jesus knew the woman’s shame, and saw beyond it. Our deepest need is to belong, and true belonging requires us to be truly known. Otherwise, we cannot really feel safe in that belonging. We live in fear that one day, we will be found out, and then we won’t be welcome anymore.
I watched a TEDx talk by Kenji Yoshino called “Uncovering Talent: The Power of Authenticity.” He talks about three phases. First, conversion: we try to be something we are not. Second: passing. You fit your community’s norms well enough that nobody questions whether you belong. Third: covering. You know that you are different, that you don’t really belong, so you disguise your identity or some core attribute. You are ashamed of some aspect of yourself, so you hide it.
True authenticity means transcending shame. True authenticity means that you don’t have to cover any aspect of yourself. Covering will never end well. You can do almost anything for a day or a week, but over time, the fundamental disconnect between your inner and outer selves will lead to anxiety, depression, anger, or other negative emotions. It’s unsustainable. Maybe you hide something you’re ashamed of so that you can get through Thanksgiving dinner, but then Christmas comes, and then the next family gathering, and over time, hiding your shame wears you down.
The question is, where can someone experience enough psychological safety that they don’t have to engage in covering? How can we create communities where authenticity is valued? Jesus knew how. He named the woman’s shameful past, without judgment. It was a simple statement of fact, an affirmation that she was an honest person, and an acknowledgment of reality. But he didn’t stop there. He continued to engage with her in a serious discussion.
In fact, the discussion deepened then. They went beyond a surface-level exchange about the well and living water, and went on to a theological and religious discussion. I have found this to be true in my life, too: when two people can be their authentic selves, they transcend the mundane and are able to talk about the things that really matter. Rather than worrying about hiding something from each other, they can relax and enter into a deeper friendship.
I know how wonderful it feels to be truly seen and known and accepted for who I am, all the good, the bad, and the ugly within my soul. I know how it feels to have a friend with whom I can be truly authentic. And that’s just an ordinary human! Imagine encountering the Son of the Living God, whose very presence radiated God’s love, and being seen and known and accepted! The Samaritan woman had that experience, and so she became an apostle.
She believed in Jesus Christ and then ran to bring others to Him, just as Andrew brought his brother Simon Peter to Jesus. She was so overjoyed at her encounter with the Messiah that she could not contain herself. She set aside the shame and the ostracism she had experienced from her village, and went to share the good news that Jesus was the one who would bring eternal life. Her exuberant response prompted Jesus to remind his disciples: the fruit is ready for the harvest. The time is NOW to go spread the message of God’s love. He says, “You might think there’s plenty of time before the harvest, but there isn’t. People are ready to hear this message NOW, today.”
Everywhere, people hunger and thirst for righteousness. Everywhere, people are alone in their shame. Everywhere, people are afraid to share their authentic selves. They fear losing friends, family, the people closest to them. They fear losing their community, their support networks. They fear losing everything if they live their Truth. And so, they suffer in silence, lives of quiet desperation.
But into that desperation steps our Lord and Savior. Christ sees us completely. He knows our greatest triumphs as well as our greatest sins and greatest shame. Yet as Paul wrote in Romans, I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Too often, the church is a source of shame rather than a place of healing. Too often, we Christians expound on the ways that people fall short of what we believe to be God’s will, leaving those outside the church to feel that they would never be welcome, that they would never be worthy to enter into our fellowship. But if Jesus does not condemn them, neither should we. Jesus is like a physician, sent not to the healthy but to the sick. We too are sent to those who hunger for membership in God’s family. We too are sent to those who are isolated by shame, who need to connect to a community.
Jesus said that he would provide living water, an eternal well springing up within those who believe in him. Let us go forth from here and share that living water with everyone who thirsts, everyone who needs to be connected to the infinitely loving God that we know through Christ. Amen.
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