Scripture: Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42; Matthew 10:42 Series: Lent
A 3rd-Sunday-in-Lent sermon pairing the water from the rock at Meribah/Massah (Exodus 17) with Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4). The same staff that split the Red Sea splits the rock, signifying God’s power to give water for body and soul. Jesus asks to be served before he gives, modeling the more radical act of receiving from a socially impure stranger. We all carry thirst triggers in our souls and long for living (spiritual) water; the entryway to receiving it is giving water to the thirsty and outcast. Lenten call: discern your thirst, and start by satisfying the needs of Jesus and the thirsty before your own, offering a cup of cold water (Matthew 10), for it is in giving that we receive the living water.
Illustrations: appalachian-trail-water-hiking, dead-moose-by-spring, indoor-plumbing-appreciation, red-sea-in-movies, men-forget-to-drink-water, augustine-gift-of-god
March 8, 2026
3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 17:1-7 John 4:5-42
Give Me Water
Exodus 17:1-7
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
John 4:5-42
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
After college, I went hiking for a few months. I took a bus north to Maine and started walking south. Most of the hiking I had done before then was in Texas, where there’s not much water. You never expect water on a trail in Texas, and any water you do find should be regarded with a high degree of suspicion.
On the East Coast, up in the Appalachians, there are water sources all over — lots of springs, mountain springs. I was getting used to a new reality. I came from a situation of extreme suspicion around water to one of just appreciation for its abundance. When I hiked, I didn’t have to carry a lot of water with me because I knew I could fill up soon. I also stopped filtering it pretty quickly, both because I gained a lot of knowledge about good and bad water sources and for the sake of expediency — those two things combined.
Of course, there was always a small chance that the water sources I found would have parasites or Giardia or bacteria. But instead of taking a maximal risk view, I tried to just minimize my risk by applying a few criteria. Before I would drink the water, the first question was: Does the water come directly out of the earth? Do I see where it emerges from the mountain? Usually these were piped springs — water would trickle through rock, with a source inside the rock that came out through a pipe and dripped or flowed down. That was step one.
Step two was: Do I see what is above the water source, and is there any active animal activity? That is, is this water source near the summit of whatever place I’m on, so that I know what’s above it and what might drip down into it?
And this leads into a third criterion: Do I see any heavy animal activity around the source? One time, when I was in Maine, I decided to pass on a water source because there was a dead moose next to it. That’s a pretty clear violation of my criteria.
If those three criteria were met, I would just fill up my water and move on. If I was thirsty and needed water and there wasn’t a mountain spring nearby, I would filter the water — unless there were animal signs. If there were animal signs, I was not going to filter my water; I would boil it.
My hiking experience — that consistency of staying outside, day after day — also helped me appreciate indoor plumbing in a whole new way. Not just for gray water uses, but for the fresh water uses of simply turning a faucet and drinking water. How beautiful that is.
After their time as slaves in Egypt, when the Hebrew people came out and crossed the Red Sea, they had a hard time finding water. They were going through a wilderness area — a lot of people, thousands of people who needed to drink water. That’s thousands upon thousands of gallons of water they needed every day to survive in the desert. An incredible logistical challenge.
In Exodus 17, we see a glimpse of this challenge: the waters of Meribah and Massah, the rock that was split open to let water come out. It’s interesting that this story isn’t as famous in church circles as the Red Sea — that evocative, powerful image made famous in movies like The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt.
But this is intentional. The same staff used to split the Red Sea is used to split the rock and bring forth water. The same staff that is used to separate water is used to bring water out.
The staff of Moses signifies the power of God — the power of God to separate the waters, to split the rock and let the waters come out. The power of God to give us water for our body. The power of God to give us water for our soul.
Jesus is traveling through Samaria, a set of regions under Roman occupation. The Samaritans are relatives of the Jews, cousins of the Jews, but those who live far from Jerusalem — and so they practice their faith not at the temple but on the mountaintops. They still follow, in their mind, the words of Moses, of Abraham, of Jacob, but in a different way.
For Jews, Samaritans were dirty. They were impure because they did not follow the ritual purifications at the temple. Ironic now, after the destruction of the Second Temple, that all Jews function like Samaritans because they don’t go to the temple for the sacrifice. So that criticism doesn’t work anymore. But in Jesus’s day it did, and there was a fine distinction. Jesus could be rendered ritually unclean by making contact with a Samaritan — a woman, not his wife, who is also not a Jew.
Now, this passage goes on for a while, as most of the Gospel of John does. John doesn’t have short moments in the ministry of Jesus. If it’s worth telling, it’s worth telling at length in the Gospel of John. So we just cut down to this first portion of John chapter four.
This woman is shocked that Jesus asked her for a drink of water. It’s interesting — this is another moment when, instead of serving, Jesus asks to be served. Like with the baptism, with John the Baptist: Jesus comes and asks to be served at the well.
And in that, it is a much more radical act. Because it’s one thing to do something for another person — to do something for a stranger and just think, “You know what, I did that. I’m a doer. I’m a giver.” It’s quite the opposite to receive from someone. To receive from a stranger. To receive from someone who is socially impure, who is socially tainted, who could tarnish your reputation.
Sometimes God calls us to give. Sometimes God calls us to receive.
But then we quickly get into this distinction Jesus makes between the water of the well and the living water, which he is able to give. In Greek, “living water” could also be translated as “water that is alive.” And I think there are some biologists who could talk about all the living organisms within water that is alive — but this is not what Jesus is talking about. The life present in his water is a spiritual life. And we should think “spirit” here in contrast to material, physical life. This is the life that Jesus offers, if we ask it from him.
This is what we are thirsty for.
Now, there are a lot of people who aren’t thirsty for water that often. I think there’s a generation of folk older than me — especially males — who find it difficult to remember to drink water. The thirst triggers in their body don’t go off.
But what Jesus is pointing out here is that we have thirst triggers in our soul. And that thirst is not divided between the pure and the impure, between the just and the unjust, between the righteous and the unrighteous. We all long for living water that satisfies, that purifies, that justifies, that makes us straight — that makes us right.
The people of Israel were wandering in the desert. They were thirsty, and God opened the rock and gave them something to drink. They knew they were thirsty. The woman at the well didn’t quite know she was thirsty until she spoke to Jesus. And the throughway to get to the living water is to serve physical water to Jesus.
How interesting is that? This act of service, of mission, of giving drink to the thirsty — this is our entryway into receiving the living water of Jesus Christ. If we’re not willing to give water to the thirsty, if we’re not willing to receive water from the socially outcast, we’re not ready to receive the living water from Jesus.
Now, what does this water look like? What does it taste like? We don’t see what the water looks like physically, because it’s not physical water. But we see what happens from it. We see the reaction to it. We see what it does to us. The living water changes us.
As St Augustine says,
He asks for a drink, and he promises a drink. He is in need, as one hoping to receive, yet he is rich, as one about to satisfy the thirst of others. He says: If you knew the gift of God. The gift of God is the Holy Spirit. But he is still using veiled language as he speaks to the woman and gradually enters into her heart.
God moves gradually in our lives and sometimes God moves rapidly. We know when we’ve been given living water. Let us follow up that knowledge with action. We are thirsty, Lord. We are thirsty what quenches our thirst. And it doesn’t end with us. We will never be satisfied if we don’t respond.
The woman at the well kept missing the point. She wanted to to receive but she wasn’t ready to give.
In this season of Lent, as we go through the wilderness on the journey towards Holy Week, may we work to discern what we are thirsty for. And may we start not with satisfying our own needs, but satisfying the needs of Jesus, of the thirsty, the hungry, the tired, the lost.
May we look around us to see who is thirsty and offer a cup of cold water, as Jesus commends in Matthew 10 when he says, “And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.”
For it is in giving that we are able to receive the living water, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.