I Thirst
Lent 3A (Sunday, 8 March 2026)
John 4.5–42
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
St Bene’t’s, Cambridge
Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time.
Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
—Mary Oliver, Thirst
I have been to the Samaritan woman’s well, some thirty years ago; the well that Jacob bequeathed to Joseph. It lies within an Christian Orthodox monastery, in Nablus — and across the street from Balata Refugee Camp, built in 1950 for five thousand Palestinian refugees, and now serving ten times that number.
The well where the Samaritan woman came alone in the heat of the noonday sun to draw water is a place where the children of Abraham, the children of Jacob – Christians, Jews, Muslims, and indeed most of the last Samaritans — struggle to live alongside one another in a thirsty land.
As it is now, so it was then under Roman Occupation, neighbours sometimes living in peace but too often in conflict and war, driven by suspicion and fear, manipulated by zealotry, sectarianism, and the quenchless thirst for revenge.
Then, as now, most would have come to draw water from the well in the cool of the morning, those gentle hours between dawn and sunrise, when the water was cold and carrying a heavy water-jar less of a hardship.
The woman at the well had no such luxury. (She has a name, by the way — at least in the Orthodox church, where she is St. Photini, the Enlightened one, the and given the honorific ‘Equal to the Apostles.’)
At noon, the only people coming the well were those who didn’t want to be seen by others, people who struggled through the blinding heat because it was better than the whispers, the hurled insults, and sometimes stones, of neighbours.
Photini was a woman cut off — by choice or by social violence — from her community.
.I do not know what loses she had in her life — resist being cavalier about Photini’s marital history, an error scholars can make with so many women in the Gospels.
But we read in her history and in the bitterness of her words, a journey loss and grief, whether from death, betrayal, inconstancy, abandonment, abuse, fear of connection, fear of loss, Photini was parched with thirst for a goodness she did not know, trapped at the well at noontime.
As then, so now in our own lives, in our faith, we can be cut off — by grief, by loss, by abuse, by shame -told we cannot draw from the well.
Sometimes it is done to us, sometimes we do it to ourselves: we decide that we are unworthy of the living water — by our own failings, by the way others have failed us, by internalising the prejudices that surround us — the prejudices that were meant to prevent a Jewish man and a Samaritan women from talking, from sharing a cup of water; the prejudices that remain not only in that land, but also here in this nation as well.
Such prejudices can divide and damage us. When we internalise them, we do for our ourselves the work of the oppressor. We decide that we are unworthy of the living water — and so we will not drink of it.
But we know that the Grace which comes from Jesus Christ is in defiance of all that seems impossible. ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep,’ we cry out, shaking our heads.
And then the Living Water comes to meet us in our thirst — not by flooding us and drowning us, but by coming to us as one who is thirsty.
Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. Jew to Samaritan, violating every social norm.
A truth which I know Anna Matthews, whom we especially remember on this, her year’s mind, preached so eloquently on, as Mark Oakley reminded us three years ago: preaching again and again from this pulpit that there are no outcasts with God, our God who came to us in Jesus as an outcast.
Jew to Samaritan, Jesus made a simple request but one which changed everything in Photini’s life:
‘Give me a drink.’
The living water, coming to the thirsty as one who thirsts. A conversation that gently held Photini’s cynicism, irony and doubts. And for once the disciples kept their mouths shut!
Witnesses to the living water drawn deep for the outcast, where, as John feels compelled to point out in his Gospel, no one said, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you speaking with her?’
A thirsty man who drew up a cascade living water from her thirsty heart, so much so that Photini leaves her own water jar at the well, hear heart now brimming over with the living water; she rushes into town crying out: “Come and see!”
Photini is one the first evangelists of John’s Gospel, becoming herself a spring of Living Water, bearing the cup of life eternal to the very ones who had driven her from the well:
“Come and see a man who saw me as I am and still asked to share a cup with me. Come and see the Saviour of the World, come and see a man who knows our thirst.”
You have a thirst as well. You were born with it; it lies deep in your heart, a universal human condition but a thirst deeply and uniquely your own, individual to you.
It will not be quenched by war nor violence, it will not be slaked by shame nor oppression.
It is a thirst that has known grief and sorrow, trauma and loss, yet knows we are not made to drink bitter tears. That thirst is holy, for Christ meets us there at noon, tired and thirsty from his journey, asking for a drink, giving to us “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
I hope your thirst is something you can share with others, with family or friends who feel they have to hide themselves, or pretend to a dust-dry piety.
To be able to say, here we find the living water; here we bring our thirst to Christ who knows and loves us as we are, scoured by grief, yet spilling over with love.
To say to one another, come, pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, we are slowly learning.
Come and share this cup with us.
