3/8/2026_Lent 3_Come & See
“Is God among us or not?”
This question at the heart of this reading in Exodus, feels close to home.
To understand the weight of that moment, we need to remember where the people are in the story. They have just been delivered from slavery in Egypt. They have crossed the sea. They have sung songs of liberation. Only to find themselves, in the wilderness—-in the dry, desolate, dangerous wilderness with all its uncertainty.
They camp at Rephidim, a place with no water. Obviously, water in the desert is everything—it is survival. Without it, the community will die.
So the people in their disappointment, quarrel with Moses. The word used here suggests a kind of legal dispute—almost like putting God on trial. They demand water, but underneath that demand is a deeper question: Can we trust the God who brought us here?
The place is eventually named Massah, which means testing, and Meribah, which means quarreling or contention. These names become a spiritual memory for Israel—a reminder of the moment when fear led them to doubt God’s presence.
In Scripture, remembrance keeps the community rooted in who they are and who God has been for them. By recalling God’s saving acts—people remember that they belong to a story of liberation, love, and covenant, which shapes how they live with faith and justice in the present.
And something remarkable happens.
God does not abandon them.
Instead, God tells Moses to strike the rock at Horeb, and water flows. Life flows out of what seemed impossible.
Even in their doubt, God remains present.
Our gospel also calls us to a place where people gather around water.
The setting itself is significant. Jesus stops at Jacob’s well, a place deeply rooted in Israel’s ancestral story. Wells in the Hebrew scriptures are often places where important encounters happen—meetings that change the course of people’s lives.
It’s curious that Jesus is speaking with a Samaritan woman. Jews and Samaritans had centuries of religious and ethnic hostility between them. And she is a woman alone, and people of different genders who were strangers didn’t typically have public conversations, more specifically, deeply personal and theological ones.
This whole moment of connection begins simply. Jesus asks for water.
But then he shifts the conversation: “If you knew the gift of God… you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
The phrase “living water” in Greek—hydōr zōn—literally means running water, like a spring or stream. But in John’s Gospel it also carries symbolic meaning: the life of God flowing through the Spirit.
As Jesus speaks of water that becomes a spring within, welling up to eternal life—the discussion moves from physical thirst to spiritual longing.
Then something else happens.
Jesus reveals that he knows her story—her complicated life, her relationships, the pieces of her past she likely carries with pain or shame.
And instead of rejecting her, he continues the conversation.
She begins to see something extraordinary. Their connection to each other shifts from stranger to something else. At first she calls him “sir,” then “prophet,” and then she begins to see the Messiah.
Her understanding unfolds step by step. Her questions lead her deeper into encounter.
This movement is important.
In the wilderness, the people ask, “Is God among us or not?” But their fear closes the conversation. The question becomes accusation.
At the well, the Samaritan woman also asks questions—but her questions remain open. They become a pathway to discovery.
That feels really important: Questions themselves are not the problem. Questions often transform our faith. Make it stronger. Help us see things we didn’t notice before.
These texts are gifts that remind us faith is not about eliminating doubt but about continuing to seek God even when clarity is incomplete. Faith grows not by pretending certainty but by remaining open to encounter.
I think one of the most significant moments in this gospel is the woman leaving the water jar behind.
This detail may seem small, but it is deeply symbolic. The jar represents the reason she came to the well—the daily task that shaped her routine.
But after encountering Christ, something shifts. The purpose of this trip is transformed. She runs back to the city to tell others: “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.”
She becomes, remarkably, the first evangelist.
A woman who arrived alone and marginalized becomes the one who leads her community toward the good news.
In the wilderness that is our own country, there is a deep thirst in our common life—a thirst for truth we can trust, for compassion across difference, for a sense that we still belong to one another. We quarrel, like the people in the wilderness, and I know I keep catching myself asking: Is God among us or not? And yet I am reminded by the story at the well that God often meets us precisely in moments like this—moments of thirst, confusion, and division. Jesus does not wait for the world to become peaceful or certain before offering living water. He meets a stranger at a well, in the middle of long-standing conflict between peoples, and begins a conversation that leads toward healing and new life.
So when the question rises in our hearts—Is God among us or not?—perhaps the invitation is not to run from the question.
It is to go to the well. To stay in the conversation. To listen for the voice of Christ who is already there.
He sits beside us at the wells of our lives—places of thirst, places of longing, places where we come simply trying to get through another day.
It’s there, in conversation and encounter, living water begins to flow.
Water that renews us. Water that restores us. Water that becomes a spring within us.
And when we encounter that living water, we may find ourselves doing what the woman did—leaving our jars behind and running toward the world saying:
Come and see.
