February 1, 2026 John 4:1-42 The Woman at the Well: A Gospel According to Thirst

This story of encounter starts by saying that Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John. The Gospel notes, however, that it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So, as he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee, there is a fundamental water association to what is about to happen. The scripture Jesus follows is filled with holy men who had found their wives at wells. For a reason he himself knows, he must go through Samaria. near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there.

Then Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down by this well. It was about noon. Those details matter. This is not the Christ of lofty abstraction or untouchable holiness. This is a thirsty, weary body resting on the edge of a shared human need. Revelation begins not in triumph but in fatigue. The well is an ordinary place, common and utilitarian. And yet Scripture often locates transformation in such spaces. Wells are where people come because they must. You can delay many things, but not thirst. And it is there, in that place of necessity, that Jesus meets a woman who has learned to live with both physical and social scarcity.

Jesus breaks the silence with a request: “Give me a drink.” This is not an instruction or correction. He begins with vulnerability. He places himself in her debt and anticipates the evangelist she will become after this encounter- a source of living water. This is already about a reversal of power. Jesus is a Jew speaking to a Samaritan, a man to a woman, a rabbi to the socially suspect. He does not cross these boundaries to make a point; he crosses them because love goes where it is not supposed to go.

The woman is startled, rightly so. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me?” Her question is the sound of history speaking. It carries centuries of exclusion, hostility, and inherited distrust. Jesus does not dismiss her concern. Instead, he opens a deeper conversation, not about who belongs where, but about what truly satisfies.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

This is not a promise of escape from need, nor a denial of the body’s limits. It is an invitation to a different source. In John’s Gospel, living water is not doctrine or moral achievement. It is about a relationship with the world. It is a life rooted in the inexhaustible generosity of God, a well that opens within a person, even one who has been told again and again that she is empty.

Jesus answers her question of why he would speak to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” She responds by asking about the source of living water.

It is the moment she is open to becoming one source. He calls for her to call her husband, and she replies she has no husband. Jesus acknowledges that she is right about her five previous husbands and that the man she is with now is not her husband.

The number five is important in the Bible.Pastor Emillie guided our discussion with details that many of us did not previously know. Obviously, having five husbands is central to who she is. Yet it is doing far more work than it looks like on the surface. John rarely accidentally throws in a number. At the literal level, this names her lived reality, complex and painful. She is likely socially stigmatized, given her appearance at noon, but John rarely stops at biography. He uses personal stories as theological symbols.

Here, Pastor explaoned the Samaritans accepted only the first five books of Scripture (Genesis–Deuteronomy). They rejected the Prophets and Writings that Jews embraced. So when Jesus names five husbands, many scholars hear an echo that the Five “husbands” are the five books that have shaped Samaritan religious life. The “one you now have” could represent a religious system that claims covenant, but lacks fullness. In the Hebrew Scriptures, covenant faithfulness is often described as marriage. Idolatry is adultery. Jesus isn’t shaming her; he’s naming Samaria’s spiritual history with uncanny precision.

And, after the Assyrian conquest, five foreign groups were brought into Samaria, each with their own gods. Israel “married” itself to these influences. So here, five husbands could refer to the five foreign allegiances of Samaria, a people spiritually fragmented, not evil, wounded, and mixed

Jesus stands at the well as the true bridegroom, offering not condemnation but restoration. There is also a Johannine theme of moving from partial truth to fullness. John’s Gospel constantly contrasts Signs vs. fulfillment, Law vs. grace, Seeing vs. believing. Here, Jesus is the one, the Messiah, who knows her fully and still asks for a drink. And, quietly, this woman becomes one of the first evangelists in the Gospel  

Jesus named her story, not to expose her, but to see her. “You are right,” he says, affirming her honesty. This is one of the most astonishing moments in the Gospels: a woman who has been misread by society is read truthfully by God. There is no condemnation here, only clarity. And clarity, when offered in love, becomes freedom.

This also illuminates what Jesus might have meant when he replied to Nicodemus, "I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit." and last week's John 3:18 passage. Rather than this being a condemnation of those who did not believe in God's one and only son, together with  Pastor Emillie's sermon last week of "just in case" altar calls, this is an observation of humanity's nature. In those moments when it is hard for us to believe in Christ as Messiah. That is when we lose our connection to living water  

The woman responds to Jesus' clarity, not with shame but with theology. “I see that you are a prophet.” And then she asks the question that has divided communities for generations: Where is the right place to worship? Which mountain? Which tradition? Which people get it right?

Jesus refuses to be conscripted into that false choice. Worship, he says, is not about geography or pedigree, but about truth and spirit. God is not contained by our boundaries. God is already present, already active, already nearer than we imagine.

Then comes the turning point. The woman speaks of the Messiah, the one who will come and explain everything. And Jesus says to her, plainly and without disguise, “I am he.” This is the first unambiguous self-revelation of Jesus as Messiah in the Gospel of John. And it is given not to a religious leader or a disciple, but to a Samaritan woman at a well, in the heat of the day

This also speaks to what Pastor Emllie referred to in last week's sermon, as her altar care repetitions (or as she put it, those "just in case"affirmations). We don't need to be thirsty, to have our "just in cases" anymore when we believe in Jesus as the Messiah.  

The woman leaves her water jar behind. Another detail matters too. The object she came for is no longer what she needs. She runs, not away, but toward her community. The woman who came alone, at noon not to be seen, returns as a witness. The one who avoided the crowd becomes the bearer of good news. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done,” she says, not as an accusation, but as wonder. Her testimony is imperfect, provisional, deeply human. And it is enough.

Many Samaritans believe because of her word. 

Jesus still sits by wells. He still asks for water. He still waits for those who come at noon, convinced they must remain unseen. And he still offers a life that does not deny our wounds but transforms them into springs of living water. He sits for us, and for the world.

Pastor Emillie' Feb 1 sermon

St. Brigid's Day

Chat about St. Brigid's Day  

Bible Project's Video Clip Water of Life Why Water Matters in the Bible

End of Epiphany Season Candlemas (observed) Through us, Jesus is the Light of the World

A Prayer for Alex Pretti Faith ripples outward.  

 Be sure to check out Sarah's comments on this blog entry.