Living Water
Original sermon given on Easter—The Third Sunday in Lent, Sunday, March 8, 2026 written and delivered by Pastor Jeff Leininger at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church.
Watch the sermon live.
“Living Water”
John 4.5-42
In the name of the Living God and his crucified Christ. Amen.
How’s your relationship with your GPS? Get a little irritated when it starts bossing you around, telling you what to do? It’s an almost daily occurrence for me on my commute to church. I’m convinced going down Division will be faster, but the “know it all” tells me North Avenue. It’s usually right. But then it provides additional confusing options like, “Fewer turns this way; normal daily route; avoid expressway; save 1 minute; accident ahead; speed camera ahead.” (Oops, watch that one!)
It all makes me long for the days of maps… (For those of you who don’t know, a “map” is something old people used to use for directions before GPS ruined our lives.)
Now I tell you all this by way of introduction, because on his journey from Judea in the south all the way back north to Galilee our Lord Jesus of course has no Global Positioning System. But he is most assuredly following a different GPS: God’s Provision of Salvation.
Let me explain. If you check a map, you’ll see that the most direct road between Judea in the south and Galilee in the north ran straight through Samaria. But this is not why the scriptures say Jesus “had” to go through Samaria — God’s Purpose of Salvation was taking him there. You see, the Jews of this day did not enjoy this journey through Samaria, which is why many chose instead to first head east, across the Jordan River, before heading back north to Galilee. One can imagine their GPS saying something like, “Avoid Ritual Defilement in Samaria” or “Religious Conflict Ahead”. So, they often took an alternative route, avoiding the region altogether.
Jews and Samaritans shared a bitter, historic animosity. Samaria was originally Jewish and part of the 12 Tribes of the Promised Land, but civil war divided the north from the south. Then in about 720 B.C. the Assyrians forcibly exiled the best and brightest out of Samaria, and repopulated it with foreign people, resulting in a considerable amount of intermarriage. What is more, the Samaritans also at one time betrayed and sold Jews into slavery. This is all to say that by Jesus’ day, the Jews regarded Samaritans as half-breeds, heretics, and traitors. It is no wonder that the purist Jews wouldn’t even touch objects which Samaritans had touched — they were considered ritually unclean.
How much more remarkable then that Jesus, this great Jewish rabbi and miracle worker, not only talks with this Samaritan woman at the well, but has contact with her and asks her for water. She is a half-breed, traitor-heretic; she is a woman; she is sinful woman, perhaps the harlot of the town; and yet here we find the Holy Son of God who by speaking created the entire universe, speaking again to the lowliest sinner in that society. In his speaking, he is recreating her, and I tell you that there was no less power at work near that Samaritan well than when the Word of God in the beginning forged heaven and earth, time and space, all that is seen and unseen.
There is so much to talk about in this passage — it is one of the most detailed conversations of Jesus recorded in the New Testament. We could note that the story starts with Jesus weary, labored, exhausted from his journey, but it’s really the Samaritan woman who is in need of refreshment. Or, how Jesus leads her beyond the pathetic divisions of her world into the healing and reconciliation that can only come through him. Or, how once she recognizes the power of this messiah, she leaves behind her water jug, so trivial a tool now that she’s encountered living water. Or, how the bold witness of one poor, uneducated, sinful woman changes her whole city.
But we could go no further than we already have to see God’s GPS (God’s Purposes of Salvation) for us. Jesus detours into the lives of the lowliest sinners; he speaks to them; he recreates them; he gives them abundantly more than they seek, desire, or deserve.
As he did so many times in his ministry, Jesus speaks of earthly things in order that our eyes of faith would be turned heavenward. The disciples would be “fishers of men;” Nicodemus last week was to be “re-wombed” or “born from above”; and this woman would be given a “water” so far beyond what she knows or expects that her life would seem but a stale, old, putrid well in comparison with the living, flowing, pure, spring-fed, abundance of the messiah who is called Christ.
But far more than a historic narrative of the Samaritan-Jewish conflict, or the “model of an effective evangelist,” or even a powerful story of one woman’s encounter with the Lord, this scripture this morning is God’s GPS for us. It is the very means by which Jesus detours into our lost, lonely, longing, lifeless lives and recreates them.
Can you hear him speaking? “Whatever sins you have committed, give them to me, and I will bear them to the cross. However lonely or ‘untouchable’ seems your life, I will sit and speak with you and restore you. Whatever your past has proven you to be, I make all things new. Whatever sad divisions you have created in your world, your home, or your heart, I will heal them. Whatever pile of rock and dirt at which you’ve been worshipping, I gather you to me in Spirit and in truth. Whatever rancid well you’ve been drinking from, I will pour on you — and in you — my living water welling over for eternal life.”
Another GPS will happen in a few moments for baby Skylar. God’s provision of salvation. There are many powerful images which the sacrament of Baptism evokes: washing and cleansing; dying and rising; being engrafted into the vine. But I’ve always had a personal favorite. Think of a fountain, an ever-flowing spring being implanted in us through Baptism. Skylar in a few moments will have flowing within her a fountain of grace welling up to eternal life. She’ll need this, for life will take her in all kinds of directions (who knows what kind of technology will exist when she’s as old as some of us). GPS might no longer exist, but God’s Provision of Salvation always will, and as certain as Jesus intervened into the life of that Samaritan woman at the well, so he does for Skylar today, and all of us.
Come soon, Lord Jesus. Amen.
