March 17, 2025
This Week’s Theme
Verse
Mark 8:34-35
“Whoever wants to be my disciple
must deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me.”
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John 4:4-42
So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot
of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus,
tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When
a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a
drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman
said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for
a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered 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.” “Sir,” the woman
said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get
this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well
and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
Jesus
answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever
drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them
will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman
said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to
keep coming here to draw water.”
He told her, “Go, call your husband and come
back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when
you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the
man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors
worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must
worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming
when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You
Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for
salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true
worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the
kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must
worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The woman said, “I know that Messiah”
(called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Just then his
disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no
one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” Then, leaving
her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come,
see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They
came out of the town and made their way toward him.
Meanwhile his disciples
urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat
that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could
someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of
him who sent me and to finish his work.
Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still
four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields!
They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests
a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.
Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what
you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped
the benefits of their labor.”
Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in
him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 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.”
Have you ever felt unseen or alone, like no one truly knows your struggles or cares about what you’re going through? It’s easy to feel disconnected, maybe even alienated, but what happens when someone meets you right where you are and offers you something better than you could ever have imagined of hoped for.
In John Chapter 4, Jesus meets a woman at the well who was used to being avoided and judged. As you noticed in our reading today, she was living a complicated, broken life, but Jesus didn’t reject her, he saw her in her loneliness. Jesus offered her “living water”—a new way of life that only He could provide. This beautiful Gospel moment reminds us that following Jesus means receiving and accepting His love. This women in our reading, I believe, recognized that even in her messy situation God's grace was being extended to her. While others perhaps treated her as unworthy of basic human interactions, avoided her, judged her. Jesus responds with conversation and actions that said "you are worthy" of God's love and grace, "you matter." After all, as we say so often, experiencing grace is not about what we’ve done, or what we can do, but God's grace is about what He has done and what he offers to all, a love that transforms us.
