On God as Living Water
March 8, 2026
Rev. Traceymay Kalvaitis
John 4:5-42
Jesus 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.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
*** Today’s sermon is titled On God as Living Water.
I don’t know if it is actually true or not, but I like to think that all the water of the earth is connected in one gigantic moving, changing network of liquid, life-giving water. We know that all of the oceans are connected and that they cover over 70% of the planet. There is a name for this body of water; it is called the Global Ocean. The Global Ocean holds 97% of the earth’s water. The rest is, I like to think, connected through underground aquifers, springs, rivulets, streams and rivers of all sizes that, eventually, lead back to the Global Ocean.
In Jewish culture, water that flows without the aid of human hands has a special name, khayim mayim.* There are seven different places in the scriptures, both in the first and second testaments, where references to “living water” or “fountain of living water” can be found. Consider the words of the prophet Jeremiah (2: 12-13), “‘Be stunned by this, O heavens; be shocked and utterly appalled,’ declares the Lord. ‘For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns— broken cisterns that cannot hold water.’”
Jeremiah speaks of God as the “fountain of living water” and Jesus uses the same familiar language with the Samaritan woman he meets at the well. Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the (living) water will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
Water sustains us, nourishes us, and becomes part of us, filling every cell of our being and enables us to function to the very best of our abilities. Could there be a more perfect metaphor for the love-that-is-God?…God as a force that sustains us, nourishes us, becomes part of us, filling us, and enabling us to then be a source ourselves? And who could be more intimately aware of this than our teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnation of the Divine, the one who knows of the interconnectedness of all life, the one who takes his disciples into a foreign land, among people they have been taught to hate, to prove this point, that the nature of God is just like water…available to all, nourishing, sustaining, filling to overflowing.
Jesus has come to a place that most in his community avoided at all cost. Jesus has come to Samaria. Verse 4 was not included in our reading for today but it gives us a critical piece of information. John 4:4 reads, “Jesus had to go through Samaria.” Geographically, Jesus did not need to go through Samaria. There was a well-travelled route around Samaria. Somehow, for the unfolding of Jesus’s ministry, it was important for the unfolding of Jesus’s ministry. My colleague and dear Friend, Bill Watson, Pastor in Grafton, Vermont, shared with me a brief and enlightening history about how the animosity between Jews and Samaritans evolved, as follows:
“— First, the Israel empire of David and Solomon was divided by a civil war after Solomon’s death. Judea was in the south. Israel, in the north, had a capital city named Samaria.
— Then, Assyria conquered the territory; the elite Jewish society was exiled and people from other parts of the Assyrian Empire replaced them
— The Jewish remnant and the immigrants from other parts of the Assyrian Empire intermarried.
— The Samaritans could not easily travel the distance to Jerusalem to celebrate holy days at the temple, so, they built their own temple on a nearby mountain. This became a point of passionate contention.
— They practiced what might have been an even more observant form of Judaism, based on the
Torah, (the first five books in our First Testament, Genesis through Deuteronomy).
After eight centuries, distrust and resentment ran deep between the Jews of the south and the
Samaritans of the north.”
Our teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, the great crosser of boundaries, the illustrious illuminator of prejudices, goes into the enemy territory of Samaria and in one interaction he bridges cultural and social divides that would have left first century readers of this Gospel gasping with astonishment. Jesus speaks to a Samaritan, a Samaritan woman, a Samaritan woman alone. This Samaritan woman is there alone, in the heat of the day, likely because she is unwelcomed among the other women who come in the cool of the morning or the cool of the evening to draw water. She is a woman who has been misrepresented as someone of questionable morals when in fact she, herself, is a victim of a system that valued women primarily for breeding and manual labor.
A woman, once married (often without her consent to begin with), could be divorced for many reasons. If a woman did not conceive, she alone was held responsible and could be cast aside. If a woman did conceive but the child was not a male, she could be cast aside. If a woman’s husband died, she would be cared for by his brother. A woman could be passed down the lineage like an unwanted heirloom, from brother to brother. This is the most likely scenario for this woman Jesus meets at the well, this woman to whom he offers the most precious gift of the knowledge of God, the source of living water, this woman who challenges him to explain and explain again, this woman who is not ashamed to admit the truth about her situation because she knows she is not at fault; she is a victim of the same system of oppression that Jesus rails against at every turn. True to form, it is this woman Jesus identifies as ready to receive the truth that in the proverbial eyes of God she is worthy, she is blameless, she is deserving, she is trusted. Jesus confirms his identity as the Messiah for the first time to the woman at the well and she wastes no time in going to tell everyone who will listen. Later in the same chapter it is revealed that Jesus and his disciples were warmly received by the community in Samaria. This is how the passage concludes: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony… So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.’”
The Savior of the world did not aim to start a new religion. The religion in his name that has evolved has been used as propaganda to promote racism, sexism, colonialism, oppression, and even execution for failure to confess. The religion in his name is still being used to judge, to exclude, and to harm. This has all arisen through the minds and hands of humanity in our quest for power, control, and material security. Let us not confuse the teachings and the living example of Christ with the trappings and transgressions of Christianity.
In closing, let us remember this metaphor that Jesus offers the woman at the well, the metaphor of God as the source of living water, khayim mayim. May the love that is God flow through us, sustain us, nourish us, and fill us to overflowing so that we, in turn, become sources of life-giving energy for others. May we be sources of encouragement, sources of true and authentic Friendship, sources of abiding love, as we follow the example of our teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Lastly, I celebrate that we are all connected, like the living waters of the earth. The healing, health and wholeness we generate here affects all.
So be it. Amen.
*https://hebrewwordlessons.com/2022/01/30/mqohr-khayim-mayim-fountain-of-living-water/
Pastoral Prayer
Beloved God, we can not exactly know Your ways, but we can feel Your grace in the sensations that most capture our attention. In both delight and despair, we become focused in ways that bring us closer to whatever You really are. Save us, most Holy One, from the unfeeling; save us from autonomy; save us from ourselves. Help us to be in this world without losing our hope and faith in humanity and inspire us to find our role in being solutions to the problems we find most troubling. For those who are in pain, Lord, I pray for comfort. For those who are in their final hours, I pray for assurance and peace. In the ways we are anxious and stressed, Lord, I pray we remember to breathe and remember to be kind and remember the power of prayer in bringing a sense of calm. Guide us, I pray, in expanding the ways we worship out and into every aspect of our lives. Remind us, Beloved, to let thankfulness for our many blessings be ever-present in our hearts
Benediction
I leave you with these words from the prophet Jeremiah (6:16):
“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”