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

Lent is a season of thirst.

In these forty days the Church leads us into the wilderness with Christ. We strip things back. We become more aware of the deeper hunger and longing within us. Lent exposes the truth that beneath all the activity and noise of life, there is a deep spiritual thirst in every human heart.

And today’s Gospel meets us precisely at that place — at a well.

Jesus is tired from his journey and sits down beside Jacob’s well. It is noon, the heat of the day, when a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.”

What follows is not just a conversation but a moment of revelation — about who Jesus is, and about the deep thirst within the human soul.

At one point Jesus says to her:

“Go, call your husband, and come back.”

She replies honestly, “I have no husband.”

And Jesus answers:
“You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

In other words, there have been six men in her life.

John’s Gospel is full of symbolic numbers, and that detail may not be accidental. In the Bible, six often represents incompleteness — something unfinished, something that has not yet reached its fullness.

And if we listen carefully to John’s Gospel, we have heard that number before.

At the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, at the wedding at Cana, John tells us something that at first seems like an unnecessary detail. He says there were six stone water jars, used for the Jewish rites of purification.

Six jars.

Six containers filled with ordinary water.

They represent the old system — good, faithful, but incomplete. The purification rituals that could wash the outside but could not transform the human heart.

And what does Jesus do?

He fills those six jars with water and then transforms that water into wine — the wine of the new kingdom, the overflowing joy of God’s grace.

Now here in John chapter 4 we meet another quiet echo of that number.

Six men in the woman’s life. Six attempts perhaps to find belonging, security, love, identity — six attempts to quench the thirst of the heart.

And yet she still finds herself returning to the well alone, in the heat of the day.

Six jars.
Six relationships.
Six signs of something still incomplete.

And then comes the seventh.

In the Bible, seven is the number of completion. Creation itself reaches its fullness on the seventh day, when God rests and everything is brought to wholeness.

Here at the well, Jesus becomes the seventh man in the woman’s story — not simply another relationship, not just the next attempt, but the one who finally addresses the deepest thirst within her.

That is why Jesus says to her:

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

The woman is thinking about ordinary water — water that temporarily relieves physical thirst. But Jesus is speaking about something deeper.

He says:

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

This is the heart of the Gospel. Christ does not simply give us rules or religious practices. He gives us new life within — a living spring in the heart.

And that is exactly what Lent is preparing us for.

Lent helps us recognise that many of the things we rely on to satisfy us cannot ultimately quench the soul’s thirst. We return to the same wells again and again — success, approval, relationships, comfort, distraction — hoping they will finally fill the emptiness within us.

But like the water in Jacob’s well, they leave us thirsty again.

Jesus meets the woman at precisely that place — not to shame her, not to condemn her, but to reveal a deeper truth about her life.

And then something extraordinary happens.

When she begins to speak about the coming Messiah, Jesus says to her:

“I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

This is one of the clearest declarations of his identity in the Gospel — and it is spoken not to a religious leader, but to a Samaritan woman with a complicated past.

And her life changes.

John tells us something small but very powerful:

“Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.”

She leaves the jar behind.

The very thing she came for — the old routine, the old way of dealing with her thirst — is forgotten. Something new has begun within her.

The well is no longer the centre of her life.

Christ is.

And she runs back to the town saying:

“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”

The woman who came to the well alone becomes the first missionary to the Samaritans.

Lent asks each of us a quiet but searching question:

Where are the wells we keep returning to?

Where are the places we keep hoping will finally satisfy the deeper longings of our hearts?

The good news of the Gospel is that Christ meets us there — at the wells of our ordinary lives, in the unfinished and incomplete parts of our story.

And like the six jars at Cana, like the six relationships in the woman’s life, he comes not to condemn our incompleteness but to bring it to fulfilment.

For Christ himself is the seventh — the one who completes what is unfinished, the one who transforms water into wine, thirst into living water, and searching hearts into springs of eternal life.

And if we allow him to, he will turn even the dry places of our lives into a well “gushing up to eternal life.”

Amen.