The Need Within
The Need Within
It’s good to have a bishop who, in the words of our Baptismal Covenant, exercises the “apostles’ teaching” in such a way that the priests under her authority, and all the people of our diocese, can benefit from her teaching. In her Thursday email, Bishop Mariann articulated the question that many in the time of the American Revolution and perhaps our own time have asked. “Across time and place, people caught in violence ask the same question: Where is God in all of this?
“In church this Sunday, prior to a gospel passage about Jesus as living water, you’ll likely hear the story of the people of ancient Israel struggling to make their way through the wilderness. Having escaped slavery in Egypt, the Israelites are a long way from the promise of freedom. Food and water are scarce, and where we meet them in the text, the people rightfully wonder if Moses had led them into the wilderness to die.
“God then provides water for them, and they keep going, by stages, through the wilderness. Before they continue on, however, they mark the place where they had given up hope, where they had asked one another Is the LORD among us or not? Like Jesus on the cross, where he felt God had forsaken him, I wonder if the places where we lose hope are the most holy of all. There are no easy answers in places of intense suffering; no spiritual platitudes that can take away the pain…When people are asked what enabled them to keep going, sometimes the answer is an experience of God, rescuing them or providing what was needed to carry on. More often, however, the answer is the kindness of another person who stayed with them in the darkest hour. Choosing not to look away is itself an act of faith.”
If I a lowly priest dare to add anything, it might be an insight about the reading from Exodus from the late Jonathan Sacks, who only died in 2020, and while alive, was a Chief rabbi in Great Britain. He pointed out that the Hebrew word normally translated as Is the LORD among us? could also be translated as Is the LORD within us?
Our Old Testament and Gospel readings have in common, need, and water. When it comes to the human body, those two go hand in hand. Depending on age and gender, we are 50-70 percent water. If we fast from food, the body can subsist on the stored fat and muscle for a while. But we don’t fast from water. Jesus of Nazareth was fully human; he wasn’t projecting a human hologram, nor was he wearing his humanity like clothing that he could take off whenever he felt like it. Left at Jacob’s well by his disciples in the Noonday middle eastern heat, he really was tired and thirsty and physically needed water. So when the Samaritan Woman shows up with her water jar, Jesus is asking her for help to satisfy the most basic physical human need, hydration.
The Samaritan Woman has her own physical and emotional needs. It’s hot and she still has to carry a full water jar back to her village. It would have made more sense for her to come in the morning, say nine. But then she with five previous husbands and currently “living in sin” would have only felt more isolated by the women of Sychar’s gossip and ridicule. Who needs that?
But she is proud of her legacy as a Samaritan and true descendant of Jacob in a way that the people of Judea were not. And being as fully God as he was human, Jesus senses her spiritual need, apart from her emotional and physical needs. Thus begins a conversation between two needy human beings in which Jesus strips away every misunderstanding on her part; first her singular focus on her physical need for water, then her defensive arguing over religious doctrine, and in the middle her fear of exposure to ridicule and condemnation.
What had been done to her in those five marriages; what had she done? The truth is that it didn’t matter, because what had been done to her or what she had done, Jesus didn’t mention. But what he did say to her revealed so much more than her marital past — Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! — She knows that Jesus sees every hurt inflicted on her, every hurt inflicted by her, every grief, every fear, every accomplishment, every hope, all of her Jesus sees and loves.
And in that seeing and loving, Jesus has unearthed a spring within her. “Is the Lord among us or not,” the people of Israel angrily asked Moses, when they should have asked, “Is the Lord within us or not?” We can’t change the world or people around us with a snap of our fingers. And having made us free to choose, God has given up the power to snap their fingers. But within each of us is a spring “gushing up to eternal life,” which transcends all our confused needs: power confused as security, violence confused as safety, pleasure confused as intimacy.
This Samaritan woman is not named in the Gospel, and in the West there has been no tradition about her. But according to the Eastern Orthodox, she was baptized in on Pentecost, given the name Photini, “the enlightened one,” in Russian, Svetlana.” And eventually she was martyred in Rome at Nero’s command. But as she died, she lived, because she knew that her greatest need was not purely physical or purely emotional but spiritual. Her need, our need, was and is to be known by the Word who was with God at the beginning and is God and whose light shoots like a beam though our darkness and whom the darkness cannot extinguish. That alone is our eternal need, and its satisfaction is already within us.
March 8th, 2026
The Third Sunday in Lent Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick