3rd WEEK OF LENT 

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John 4: 5-42
 

This story is one of the most meaning-packed in the whole gospel. It demands time and attention but richly rewards our investment.

It has two parts. The first describes a ‘kairos’ moment: one of those flashes where the eternal intersects with ordinary time – a personal encounter, a word overheard, a revelation of beauty or love. Jesus arrives at a well at noon wearied by his travel. His crucifixion would take place at noon. It is the hour of debilitating heat that the desert monks called the noonday devil, when we are most vulnerable to exhaustion or discouragement. His disciples leave him to buy food while he meets a woman who has come to collect water. She is apparently a socially excluded person because village women came in the cool of day to get water and talk. She preferred to be alone.

 
She is an intriguing personality. What kind of woman do you think she is? She does not treat Jesus deferentially; nevertheless the conversation dives deeper than personality when he shows that he knows and understands her. As with Mary of Magdala, we see that it is when we realise we are known and recognised that we become capable of a more subtle kind of knowing and our perception is suddenly enlightened. He then leaps from the mundane to the mystical by speaking of another kind of water that alone can satisfy the endlessly raging human thirst: an inner spring of consciousness that wells up to boundless life. 

Their exchange and deepening intimacy leads him to do what he does nowhere else in the gospels: to declare explicitly who he is. ‘I who speak to you am he’, the messiah that Jew and Samaritan both believed would come. In the same moment he enacts a transformation of the entire human experience of religion. While she still conceives religion as denominational and separated, he unveils the universal truth that the worshippers the father wants are those who worship not here or there or in that mosque or temple or church but ‘in spirit and in truth’. It is like realising that the game is greater than the team, the whole human family than its races and creeds. 

He has shown what the ‘future of religion’ will be.

She runs back to the village (he never gets his cup of water) and his disciples arrive. We flip back into ordinary chronos time. His companions, however faithful, are less spiritually intelligent than the woman but he helps them to see themselves as the agents of the great change that is coming over the world. The villagers arrive and feel for themselves what the woman had reported. He stays with them an extra two days.

Perhaps it those who are marginalised – or the marginalised aspects of ourselves if we can own and accept them – who arrive recognise the Truth when they see and hear it.

 

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Laurence Freeman
Lenten Reflections 2026

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