Lent 3A 2026: The Thirst of Women

Human beings have always gathered around water. Long before cities and borders, people gathered around wells, rivers, and springs — because water means life. Entire civilizations rose beside rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates. Villages formed around wells. Paths worn through dust led to the places where water could be drawn.

But water has never only been about survival. Wherever water is scarce, questions arise: Who controls the well? Who draws first? Who has access, and who does not?

And very often in the ancient world, the ones who carried the water were women. Day after day they walked the worn paths to the well, carrying the thirst of households, families, and communities on their shoulders.

Throughout history these questions have driven empires and justice movements alike, and the thirst for water, land, and security continues to shape human conflict today. It is into that ancient human story of thirst — and the often unseen thirst carried by women — that today’s Scriptures speak.

In the wilderness in Exodus, the people of Israel are afraid. The desert stretches around them, the water is gone, and panic spreads through the community. They cry out to Moses: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

Notice how quickly fear becomes accusation. The community turns on the leader who brought them out of slavery and violence is not far away. Moses even fears they might stone him.

But this is what fear does. When people believe survival is at stake, suspicion grows and communities fracture.

Centuries later, in John’s Gospel, another story unfolds around water.

A Samaritan woman comes to draw water from a well. In the Scriptures, wells are often places where God quietly alters the course of history. Rebekah is met at a well. Rachel is met at a well. Zipporah is met at a well. Wells are places where new futures begin.

Wells in the ancient world were not just practical places — they were social and political spaces. Wells determined survival. Access was shaped by custom, status, and community boundaries: who drew first, who waited, who belonged, and sometimes who was quietly kept at a distance.

And most often it was women who navigated these boundaries daily — drawing water not only for themselves but for entire households. And sitting between two communities that mistrusted one another for centuries, this well carries another layer of tension. Jews and Samaritans had long histories of hostility, religious disagreement, and cultural suspicion.

But then Jesus sits down. Tired and thirsty, he asks the woman for a drink. To us it sounds a small ask. But for a Jewish man of the first century to ask a Samaritan woman for water crossed ethnic, religious, and social boundaries all at once. What follows is an extraordinary conversation — about thirst and truth, about worship and identity, about the hidden wounds of a human life.

Jesus speaks honestly about the fractures in her story, without judgement or condemnation. Somewhere in that encounter, a simple request becomes an opening — one that begins to flow with dignity, mutual respect, and a path that can be trusted.

“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” he says.

Rather than a life governed by fear or scarcity, Jesus speaks of life that flows — like rain falling on dry ground, gathering into streams, running through rivers to the sea, rising again into clouds, and returning once more to the land. Water that is active, nurturing — perhaps that is why Jesus uses water as an image for the life of God.

In contrast to human systems that operate like dams — storing, controlling, restricting — living water suggests a different ecology. It moves freely across landscapes, nourishing what it touches and quietly filling the breaches between land and sea, sky and soil, life and life. And this is exactly what happens in the story.

The Samaritan woman encounters Jesus in the breach of her own life — a life marked by broken relationships and social suspicion. John hints that she comes to the well alone at an unusual hour, perhaps avoiding watchful eyes. She is a woman who knows something about exclusion. She knows what thirst feels like — not only for water, but for dignity, belonging, and the possibility of being seen truthfully.

In Scripture the thirst of women often reveals the deeper thirst of the world. Hagar thirsts in the wilderness. Hannah thirsts for a child. Mary thirsts for justice. And here, at a well in Samaria, a woman thirsts for truth — and Jesus meets her there, filling the gap between them not with judgement but with dignity.

In John’s Gospel this is not simply kindness. It is revelation. The way Jesus meets her is the way God meets the world. She returns to her town and shares what has happened — becoming herself a bearer of the living water she has received — and the living water begins to fill the breach between herself, the woman the village whispered about, and the community she had kept her distance from.

Fear has shaped so much of human history. The renewed war in the Middle East is just today’s example of conflict between nations and communities where land, security, identity, or future feel under threat. Where fear has convinced leaders that survival, or resources, or national pride depends on acting on their suspicions rather than discerning the facts and the longer work of bridging the divides.

In this space the Gospel invites us to consider whether life is sustained not by what we impose, but by what we allow to flow.

Throughout Scripture God shows a particular concern for those whose dignity is ignored or denied. The prophets speak again and again of those whose voices are dismissed or whose suffering is overlooked. Today the world marks International Women’s Day, remembering the courage and resilience of women whose bodies and voices have carried hope through times of upheaval and injustice.

Across history women have often filled the breach when systems fail — women who carried faith through the underground churches of Eastern Europe when religious practice was suppressed, mothers holding families together making homes in refugee camps when war scatters everything familiar, women leading movements for civil rights, equity, and peace, and the countless quiet acts of courage that never make the history books.

Women who know what thirst feels like — thirst for safety, dignity, justice, and the possibility of a different future.

It is fitting, then, that in John’s Gospel the first person to bring others to the breach-defying love of Christ is a woman at a well — a woman who goes on to gather not the powerful, but the thirsty.

And again and again we see that in places where women are able to lead, communities often become more collaborative, more attentive to the vulnerable, and more invested in long-term wellbeing rather than short-term domination. Leadership rooted in listening, relationship, and care often creates systems that are more just, more sustainable, and more compassionate.

The movement of living water rarely begins in centres of power. More often it begins with the vulnerable — with those who know what thirst feels like.

We see that thirst today in women who long simply to live in safety and dignity. Breaches open in every generation — this morning I read research indicating that 40% of adolescent boys do not believe women who report abuse and 17% believe violence is a legitimate tool for controlling women.

Organisations like the Allison Baden-Clay Foundation continue to fill those breaches — led by those who know what it is to thirst for the safety of loved ones, educating young people about respect, consent, and healthy relationships so that the next generation might live differently.

That work — slow, patient, courageous — is another kind of living water. It fills the gap between fear and dignity, between violence and hope, between the world as it is and the world God longs for.

All of us know places of genuine fear and scarcity: not enough time, not enough security, not enough belonging, not enough love. It is not hard to see how those pressures can make us reactive — and how the same dynamics that fuel division in the world can take root within us.

Yet again and again God brings life from barren places: Springs from stone. Hope from strangers. And a borderland well in Samaria, where a tired traveller asked a fearful stranger for a drink — and in the humanness of that moment, living water began to flow between separated people.

Lent asks us to examine the forces we allow to flow through us.

Do our fears deepen the breaches? Or will we allow the living water of Christ to flow through us…

until the thirst of women,
and the thirst of all creation,
is met with the living water of God —
the water that becomes in us a spring of life for the life of the world.

Amen.