Justice Lessons at the Well

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Justice Lessons at the Well

Herb Montgomery | March 6, 2026

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of John:

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)  Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said 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 water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water . . . 

 . . . Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”  (John 4:5-42)

Our reading this week is a small story in the gospel of John, and it is charged with radical social meaning when we read it through the cultural norms of its time. Jesus Christ, a Jewish man, asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. She is someone who that society defined with overlapping boundaries of exclusion based on gender, ethnicity, religious tradition, and social reputation. First, Jews and Samaritans did not share vessels. Second, men did not publicly engage women in theological conversation. Jesus’ simple request crosses these lines and more before he ever speaks a word of teaching. Jesus’ transgression of these both of these boundaries and speaks to our justice work today.

Jesus also begins with his own vulnerability. Jesus does not approach the woman as a benefactor dispensing charity from heaven. He begins instead by asking for help. In doing so, he affirms the woman’s dignity, agency, and humanity. He positions himself as one who needs, and so disrupts those boundaries that had established hierarchies that privilege the powerful and silence the marginalized. This, too, speaks to our justice work today. Too often, charity and justice work do not risk mutuality or genuine solidarity but end up reproducing the very inequalities they seek to undo.

Our story then moves beyond a drink of water. Jesus offers the woman “living water,” a metaphor for life that restores, sustains, and liberates. Jesus offers this freely, without condemnation or dehumanization. He communicates that he knows and understands the woman’s social location. She has been rejected over and over in her patriarchal society and even now is not being valued. The man she is in a relationship with won’t even take her as her husband. These statements mean much more in a patriarchal context where women are not in control of their standing than they do in an egalitarian context. Jesus is offering the woman something more than her current situation can offer.

As our story unfolds, we encounter a society where women had little to no agency over their marriage, divorce, or social standing. Too many Christian interpretations frame this woman’s marital history of five husbands and living with a man “not her husband” as a moral failure on her part. It plausibly reflects more structural vulnerability than personal sin. In the ancient world, women were commonly married off for economic or political reasons, divorced at a husband’s discretion, and left dependent on male protection for survival. Repeated marriages could easily signal abandonment, widowhood, or exploitation.

Jesus’ interaction with this woman is therefore radical. Again, he speaks publicly with a woman, a Samaritan, and someone marked by social stigma. These were three intersecting forms of marginalization. Rather than shaming the woman at the well, though, Jesus names her reality honestly and entrusts her with revelation that honors her value. He offers her “living water,” not as a reward for moral reform, but as a gift that bypasses the patriarchal systems that have failed her. Access to the abundant life (justice) is no longer mediated through husbands, temples, or respectability, but offered directly to her in her full humanity and agency.

The woman’s response further subverts patriarchal norms. She questions Jesus’ theology, engages him as an equal conversational partner, and ultimately becomes the first herald of the gospel in John by bringing her community to encounter Jesus themselves. Her voice, which would have been dismissed or silenced too often in her society, becomes the vehicle for change in John’s gospel.

This story challenges readings that individualize blame while ignoring oppressive systems that create the harm in first place. Instead of asking “What did she do wrong?”, our story asks us to consider “What structures left her with so few choices?” Jesus models a justice that restores dignity to this woman, encourages listening before judging, and centers her as someone harmed by social arrangements she did not create. The Samaritan woman reminds us that liberation begins when marginalized people are seen not as problems to fix, but as partners in truth-telling and change.

Next, the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman turns on a deeply contested question: where is God properly worshiped? She names the conflict: Samaritans worship on Mount Gerizim, while Jews worship in Jerusalem. In the ancient world, sacred space was tied to ethnic identity, political power, and religious legitimacy. To worship in the “right” place was to belong; to worship elsewhere was to be excluded.

Jesus’ response unsettles that entire framework. “The hour is coming,” he says, “when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Rather than choosing sides in a religious geography war, Jesus reframes worship altogether. Jesus’ God in this Gospel is not confined to sanctioned locations, institutions, or power centers. Worship is no longer mediated by control of space but is grounded in alignment with spirit and truth.

What lessons might we derive from this story? First, Jesus’ words echo all the way down to us today and affirm us as we challenge systems that restrict access to God based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious gatekeeping today. If what Jesus said is true about access to God, it should also lead us to challenge systems that exclude access to justice. The Samaritan woman, who was marginalized by ethnicity, gender, and social stigma, is treated as a human being with value in John’s story. Her question matters. Her voice is honored. Justice work begins the same way: by centering those most excluded and trusting their questions as genuine sources of divine revelation.

Second, “spirit and truth” resists empty religiosity that divorces worship from lived reality. Truth is not mere doctrine; in John’s Gospel truth is embodied in Jesus’ life-giving, boundary-breaking love, just as the synoptic Gospels define that lived love as concrete justice for those being harmed by Herod’s and the temple’s complicity with Roman exploitation. Our story reminds us that worship that ignores oppression, poverty, racism, or patriarchy leads to worshipers who ignore these realities in our material lives as well, and that kind of worship and actions are incomplete. “God is spirit” in this context means that God is much larger than the institutions that try to trap the Divine and control access to it. God is Spirit and that Spirit is present wherever people struggle for for their humanity, liberation, justice, and wholeness.

Finally, Jesus’ response frees justice work from sacred-secular divides. Streets, shelters, protest lines, classrooms, and kitchens all become legitimate spaces of worship when animated by Spirit and truth. The question is no longer where we worship, but how we live, whether our practices align with the liberation, justice, and love we see Jesus modeled towards others in the gospel stories. 

The woman in our story this week becomes a witness, not a project. She leaves her water jar behind, and invites her community to experience what she has. In our justice work today, this story challenges us to cross boundaries, to listen first, to ask before we give, and to trust that those most marginalized are not merely recipients of justice but also its messengers. Jesus at the well shows that liberation flows first through shared humanity, and only then becomes living water for our world.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. What lessons related to justice work is that story of Jesus with the woman at the well reminding you of this week? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone? 

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate. 

My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.

As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. 

If you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

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New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice. 

This week:

Season 3 Episode 11:  Justice Lessons at the Well

John 4:5-42

Jesus’ words echo all the way down to us today and affirm us as we challenge systems that restrict access based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious gatekeeping today. If what Jesus said is true about access to God, it should also lead us to challenge systems that exclude access to justice. The Samaritan woman, who was marginalized by ethnicity, gender, and social stigma, is treated as a human being with value in John’s story. Her question matters. Her voice is honored. Justice work begins the same way: by centering those most excluded and trusting their questions as genuine sources of divine revelation. “Spirit and truth” resists empty religiosity that divorces worship from lived reality. Truth is not mere doctrine; in John’s Gospel truth is embodied in Jesus’ life-giving, boundary-breaking love, just as the synoptic Gospels define that lived love as concrete justice for those being harmed by Herod’s and the temple’s complicity with Roman exploitation. Worship that ignores oppression, poverty, racism, or patriarchy leads to worshipers who ignore these realities in our material lives as well, and that kind of worship and actions are incomplete. “God is spirit” in this context means that God is much larger than the institutions that try to trap the Divine and control access to it. God is Spirit and that Spirit is present wherever people struggle for for their humanity, liberation, justice, and wholeness. Streets, shelters, protest lines, classrooms, and kitchens all become legitimate spaces of worship when animated by Spirit and truth. The question is no longer where we worship, but how we live, whether our practices align with the liberation, justice, and love we see Jesus modeled towards others in the gospel stories. 

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/justice-lessons-at-the-well

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Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

 

by Herb Montgomery

Available now on Amazon!

In Finding Jesus, author Herb Montgomery delves into the profound and often overlooked political dimensions of the gospels. Through meticulous analysis of biblical texts, historical context, and social discourse, this thought-provoking book unveils the gospels’ socio-political, economic teachings as rooted in a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of the marginalized. The book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, presenting a compelling argument for a more socially engaged and transformative Christianity.

Finding Jesus is not just a scholarly exploration; it is a call to action. It challenges readers to reevaluate their understanding of Christianity’s role in public life and to consider how the radical teachings of the gospels can inspire a renewed commitment to justice, equality, and compassion. This book is a must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the social implications of Christian faith and a blueprint for building a more just and inclusive society.

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