Lent 3A: The Woman at the Well

For the 3rd Sunday of Lent, Lindsey and Adam do a dramatic reading of John 4:5 – 42. “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” What is this living water for which we all thirst?

A Samaritan woman goes to a well in the heat of the day. Jesus breaks all the rules of propriety to talk to her – a woman, a non-Jew, and an outcast. How do we know she’s an outcast? Anyone who goes for water alone, in the heat of the day, is avoiding, or being avoided, by her society? Why?

Well, Jesus reveals that this woman has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. In a patriarchal culture, where women had little power and depended on the care of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, this poor woman has become a pariah through no fault of her own. Men have left her – by death or divorce, we can’t know – and now she is ostracized.

How she must thirst for acceptance and love! How she must yearn for belonging!

The woman at the well is a scapegoat, a pariah against which her community measures their own worthiness. She is also a badass woman of scripture, and a messenger of love.