He Stays

Lent III

Jesus is tired.
That’s where it starts.

No miracles. No parables. Just the Word made flesh, worn out from walking, sitting at a well in the heat of the day.

And then a woman comes. At noon. Alone.

She has learned not to expect people to stay.

He asks her for a drink. It shouldn’t happen. She names it. Jew, Samaritan, man, woman. All the lines that keep people where they belong. And still he stays.

“If you knew who was speaking to you,” he says, “you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

She hears water. He is talking about life. He is not offering advice. He is offering himself.

She doesn’t understand. But she doesn’t leave.

And then he says it. Five husbands. The man you are with now. No explanation from her. No defense. Just her life, spoken out loud by someone who was not there for any of it.

Will he stay now?

You know what it is to be seen and then left.

She has no answer for it. Neither do we. We only know what usually happens. Distance. Silence. A conversation that ends a few sentences too soon. But she doesn’t leave. And he doesn’t send her away.

He stays. As if nothing he has said has changed his desire to be there. As if being known is not the end of the story.

He keeps talking. About water. About life. About a God who is not waiting to be found in the right place, but who came and sat down at this one.

And then he says it.

“I am he.”

Not in the temple. Not to the qualified. Here. To her. The one who came at noon. The one who has nothing left to explain.

The one whose life can be said in a sentence.

She leaves her jar. The reason she came. As if it is no longer what she needs.

And she goes back. To the people she came at noon to avoid. Not with answers. Just this:

“Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did.”

Everything. And he did not leave.

That is enough. Enough to send her back. Enough to draw others out. Enough to begin something she cannot yet name.

This is what he offers: to be known, fully, without having to explain yourself first.

Here, in the middle of the day. With nothing hidden.

He stays.

There is nothing in her life that made him leave. There is nothing in yours.

“The Woman of Samaria at the Well,” James Tissot, 1886-94.”

These midweek devotionals aren’t sermons. They’re meant to complement the Sunday homily. I’ll share the sermon below after it’s preached: