Do You Know the Gift of God?

 Jesu Juva

St. John 4:5-26                                                  

March 8, 2026

Lent 3A              

 Dear saints of our Savior~

        Jesus never does get His drink of water.  Did you notice that?  In all the twists and turns of His conversation with the woman at the well, it’s easy to lose sight of what started it all:  Jesus was weary and hot and parched.  Give me a drink, He asked.  It wasn’t a lot to ask.  But even at the story’s end, the Savior’s whistle is still not wet.  But that’s okay, because Jesus is always more interested in giving than receiving.

        This is just one of many surprises in this conversation at Jacob’s well.  All we have here is a one-on-one conversation.  Just words.  No miracles.  No soaring sermons to the multitudes.  It’s not unlike Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, which we heard last Sunday, one chapter earlier in John.  The key difference being that Nicodemus was a member of the religious elite; and this Samaritan woman . . . well, she was on the far-flung fringes of religion and polite society.

        Surprises abound here:  Jesus, a Jewish male, initiates a conversation with a Samaritan female—in public.  A whole host of unwritten rules are being broken here.  Jews and Samaritans were religious enemies.  And, in general, men didn’t talk to women in public.  But here’s Jesus just chatting up a woman at a well at about the sixth hour.

        The “sixth hour” was noon.  Why does St. John put a time stamp on this conversation?  Well, perhaps he’s dropping a big clue—like when he told us that Nicodemus came to Jesus “at night.”  Nobody goes to the well at noon.  Who wants to haul heavy water containers beneath the blazing heat of the midday sun?  Perhaps someone who knows she needs to keep her distance from other, respectable women—women who haven’t had five husbands—women who aren’t cohabitating with a man who isn’t husband material—women who have the dignity and security of marriage.  That noonday trip to the well was probably by design.  Bumping into a strange Jewish man at the well was probably an annoyance—certainly a cause for suspicion.

        But Jesus knows exactly what He’s doing:  If you knew the gift of God . . . you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.  It would seem that “knowing the gift of God” changes everything—for the Samaritan woman, for you, for me.  To talk about “knowing the gift of God” is a strange way of speaking—kind of like saying that “you must be born again.”  So, what is this gift of God?  It’s Jesus—God’s gift to the whole world.  For God so loved the world, that He gave the world a gift—His one and only Son.  If we truly knew that Gift in its fullest dimensions, it would change everything, every day.  But this “gift of God,” this gift of love, this gift of Jesus is so big, so all-encompassing and deep and wide, that we can only take it in little by little.

        Do you . . . know . . . the gift of God?  The verb “to know” implies much more than mere intellectual assent.  To “know” the gift of God is much more than just being able to recite John 3:16 or the Apostles’ Creed.  To “know” the gift of God is to believe and trust with confident expectation and lively hope everything that Jesus is giving you.  If you really “knew” that, little else would matter.

        If you knew the gift of God, then you could face hell and high water brimming with the glad confidence that in Jesus you have everything you need.  If you knew the gift of God, then you could look at that stinking pile which you call your success—your degrees, your career, your salary, your grades—you’d look at it all and laugh, because it matters not compared to the gift of God in Jesus.  If you knew the gift of God, then you’d let the world mock you for your five ex-husbands (as well as the five hundred other skeletons you’ve got crammed in your closet), because Jesus is your Bridegroom; and in this holy husband you have acceptance and love and forgiveness for every skeleton.  If you knew the gift of God, you’d never waste your time grumbling about what you don’t have, because you’d know that everything you do have is a gift from God, and that through faith in Jesus you have everything. If you knew the gift of God you’d reject every poison potion served up by the bartender from hell, and you’d slake your thirst exclusively with living water from the living Lord who will never let you go.

        The woman at the well did not know the gift of God; and Jesus just won’t let that stand.  Go, call your husband, and come here.  Oops.  What’s Jesus doing?  He steers the conversation in a very awkward direction—right at what’s most painful and shameful in her life.  We try hard not to do that in polite conversation.  We avoid topics that are unpleasant and embarrassing.  But Jesus isn’t concerned about being polite.  He wants this woman to know the gift of God—the love and the acceptance and the forgiveness that reaches down to our deepest sin and pain.  Because Jesus was unafraid to address the woman’s wound—her sorry string of ex-husbands—He can now apply the healing that His holy wounds would win.

        What Jesus did for this woman, He can also do for you.  He knows your every sin—and your every sad attempt to hide it—and every skeleton in your closet.  Knowing that, Jesus comes to you.  He comes with living water to wash those wounds and to cleanse you from your sin.  In the cleansing splash of your baptism, He has created in you a clean heart.  He knows what you’re going through.  He’s been tempted like you.  He’s been rejected like you.  He’s wept at the graveside of a loved one like you.  Jesus is the gift of God for you—the gift who changes everything—who died for us even while we were still sinners.

        Do you know the incredible gift of God?  Is it the center of your life and conversation?  Jesus revealed the gift of God to the woman at the well not by telling her what to do—not by listing out the six steps for holy living—not by telling her to clean up her act, or whether she should worship in Samaria or in Jerusalem.  Jesus doesn’t tell her what to do; Jesus tells her who He is: 

She said: I know the Messiah is coming . . . 

He said: I who speak to you am He.

Jesus rarely revealed His identity so openly.  But He wanted her to know the gift of God—that forgiveness and salvation and everlasting life come from Him—Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of saints and sinners, and Samaritans too.

        Jesus never did get His drink of water.  But that’s how it goes for the Savior of sinners.  Jesus knows what it is to thirst.  Hanging from His holy cross for the life of the world, Jesus would say it for all to hear:  I thirst.  On that dark afternoon the giver of living water was dehydrating on Calvary’s cross for you.  He was pleading for moisture for His lacerated, bleeding body.  By those wounds we are healed.  He suffered thirst so that you might never be thirsty—so that you might always be hydrated with His healing, cleansed from all your impurities and sins.  Jesus is the gift of God; and knowing that gift changes everything.

        In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.