The Third Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2026

The Gospel readings for the Second through the Fourth Sundays in Lent are taken from the Gospel of John. In John, Jesus is frequently shown teaching by means of word-play. That is, Jesus uses a word or phrase that can be understood in more than one way. The person Jesus is speaking with takes the word in the easy and obvious sense; but then Jesus comes back with the other, more unexpected sense. The conceptual gap between those two senses creates what in process thought is called a “proposition”: a novel combination of experiential elements, a “tale that might perhaps be told,” a “lure for feeling.” The proposition invites the learner to make a leap of imagination between meanings – and in that creative act of imagination, the Spirit can join to co-create in the learner a new wisdom, a new consciousness, a direct experience of God’s presence and God’s gift. In these Lenten Gospel readings, Jesus interacts with four different characters, in each case using a word-play to bring them into a deeper, more life-giving relationship with himself.

Speaking to the woman at the well in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

The key teaching element in this verse is a play on the phrase “living water.”

In the genitive construction of the Greek phrase ὕδωρ ζῶν the word for “life” can be taken in two ways, as a noun or as an adjective. The phrase can mean “living water” or “running water,” as opposed to still water, or it can mean “water of life,” as in water that vivifies and enlivens and revives.

Jesus offers the woman a new kind of living. What she hears at first is a source of running water.

So, when Jesus says “If you knew the gift of God, you would ask and he would give you new life,” the woman responds “You have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get running water?” She is immediately skeptical of the claim.

Jesus tries again: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but the water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” It is pretty clear that he is not talking about liquid H2O.

But the woman is still skeptical. She still resists the larger meaning. At first she seems to be accepting – “Sir, give me this water!” – but she turns quickly to sarcasm, “so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” You can practically hear her thinking, “Yeah, right.”

Since she seems unwilling to make the leap from the simple meaning, Jesus changes the subject. When he says, “Go, call your husband,” he initiates a conversation that reveals to the woman that he knows a great deal more about her than she’d realized. He knows her marital history. He knows that she has been through serial relationships – whether by choice or by circumstance he does not judge – and he knows that none of them have turned out to have been life-giving for her. He knows why her “irregular” history has made her shun the company of the townspeople, and why she has come to the well in the middle of the day, when all the other women would have come to gather water and exchange gossip and be in community earlier in the morning. He knows why she has been so resistant to him. And he does not judge. He does not criticize. He does not condemn. He continues to invite her to be open to new possibilities for her life.

And she in turn perceives that Jesus is “a prophet.” For the first time she seems willing to accept that he is not just some random man who does not know better than to speak to an unaccompanied woman in public; he may perhaps be someone worth talking to.

Still, she is not ready to let him get too close. Having perceived that he is a prophet, she turns the conversation to religious debates: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus accepts the deflection, but he soon returns the attention to her, to a personal quality of worship and devotion, regardless of assigned religious identity. This is enough to bring her to the point of making a truly personal statement: “I know that Messiah is coming.” And Jesus responds with his truth in turn: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

The disciples’ arrival gives the woman an opportunity to slip away. But instead of hiding what this encounter with Jesus has revealed, she shares it. She runs to the town, leaving her water jar behind in her eagerness, calls the neighbors together – the very ones she had been avoiding and keeping secrets from – and invites them to come with her and meet a man “who told me everything I have ever done!” And she asks the key question, “ He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

This woman’s transformation from a shunned and sarcastic recluse to an eager advocate of a potential Messiah begins with the play on “living water.” She has been looking for sources of life outside herself – not only the water from the well, but also the opinions of her neighbors, the partners in her relationships, the identities conferred by race and religion – and none of those sources have been reliably life-giving for her. Jesus offers her something else – not only “water of life” in a symbolic or sacramental sense, but also her own experience of divine Spirit welling up within her, her own relationship with God in her inner self-constitution, her own access to co-creativity with God that can transform her relationships and her community and her sense of the value of her personal existence. As she is opened to the new possibilities inherent in the aims God gives to her in the actual occasions of her life, she can engage her concrete circumstances with new vitality and engagement in the practice of receiving and offering freely and graciously.

Lent can be for us a season to attend to the movements of the Spirit within us, the water of life that gushes up in us to empower us for Love. In a historical moment when the power of Love seems weak and insignificant compared to the machinations of politics, and the ambitions of empire, and the sheer petty cruelty of would-be tyrants and autocrats, we can grow skeptical or sarcastic about our works of Love making any difference in the world. The story of Jesus and the woman at the well reminds us that God’s Love is always there, always welling up within us, to empower us for new possibilities of Love that will, in God’s time, transform everything.

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and contributed essays to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God and Renewing Faith: Reigniting Faith and Ministry Through Process and Open & Relational Theologies. Other reflections and sermons can be found at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.