Living Water
Thirst: Part 3
March 8, 2026
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks from the water that I will give will never be thirsty again. The water that I give will become in those who drink it a spring of water that bubbles up into eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will never be thirsty and will never need to come here to draw water!”
~ John 4:13-15
_______________
We all get thirsty. We all need water. But in our consumerist culture, we have developed a thirst for many forms of “water” to quench our desires and satisfy our souls.
The woman at the well still sees only what is in front of her, a bucket, a deep well, and a weary traveler with nothing to draw with. “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” she asks. She cannot yet imagine water that does not come from Jacob’s well, water that becomes “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” So she asks for it, not because she understands it, but because she is tired of coming back day after day. “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
The woman may not have known who Jesus was or what he could give, but we know all too well, or at least we think we do. And we are more than willing to ask for “water” from the master.
We are quick to pray for health, for security, for comfort, and for more of just about anything we can imagine for ourselves or our loved ones. “Ask anything in my name,” Jesus promises, and so we ask. But his name can become little more than a set of magic words to make our every wish come true, much like the whiny “please” of a child that comes only as an afterthought when their initial demand does not produce the result they wanted.
Like the woman who is just beginning to realize the power of Jesus’ offer, we want a quick fix for all of our problems. We do not want to have to keep coming back to the well every time we get thirsty. We would rather bypass the deeper work and simply eliminate the inconvenience. But the prophet Jeremiah names our condition plainly. “My people have committed two evils,” God says. “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). We trade the spring for storage tanks. We settle for what we can control, even when it leaks.
Jesus is not so quick to grant the woman’s desire, even though he is the one who offered the living water in the first place. For him, it is not just about helping her avoid the daily toils of life, such as coming to the well. Jesus wants so much more for her than she could possibly ask or imagine. He wants not simply to quench her thirst for a moment, but to become in her a source that never runs dry.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
~ C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory