The Sunday of the Samaritan Woman
Year A – Lent – 3rd Sunday
John 4:5–42: “Give me a drink.”
After the first two Sundays of our Lenten journey, which presented to us the victory over temptation and the transfiguration of our life, the next three Sundays invite us to meditate on three themes that are profoundly baptismal and paschal: water, light, and life.
The Gospel of John will guide us, and on this third Sunday it offers us the long dialogue between Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman, centred on thirst and water. It is a dialogue interwoven with symbolism, biblical allusions, and human feelings, which becomes a true courtship of God towards His unfaithful bride.
The meeting at the well
Today Jesus also arranges to meet us at the well, together with the Samaritan woman. The well was a meeting place, as still happens in some parts of the world. The Samaritan woman, however, seems to avoid encounters, since she comes to the well around midday. It also happens to us that we avoid people and even God, especially when we do not feel at peace with ourselves.
This well was “a well of Jacob”, near Sychar (Shechem), therefore an ancient place filled with symbols and traditions (see Book of Genesis 33:18–19). This well still exists today, more than thirty metres deep. There is a continuity, in time and space, of needs, desires, and places where human beings seek to satisfy their thirst.
The well is a metaphor for our life, a constant search for a water capable of quenching our deepest thirst. The tragedy is believing that any water can satisfy us, that every good, every affection, and every pleasure can fulfil our desire for life. Yet, sadly, everything proves fleeting and sends us further on, beyond. And the One who was “beyond” has come “closer”, to wait for us at the well of our desires.
This Samaritan woman, symbol of humanity thirsting for love, with five husbands behind her and with a sixth man who was not her husband, could not imagine that the seventh bridegroom, the Messiah, was waiting for her that day at the well to court her with a love she did not know.
The thirst of God is the deepest thirst that exists. Yet God too thirsts for our love, a desire that makes Him a beggar. He wants to make us know the living water: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that says to you, ‘Give me a drink’, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
Give him a drink, Samaritan woman!
The Gospel of John is the Gospel of dialogues. Jesus loves to spend time with people and to converse with them. Our life of faith, in fact, is nothing other than an uninterrupted dialogue with Him. It is a dialogue that continues throughout life, with beautiful moments of harmony, but also with periods of confusion and distance. Long periods of cooling in our relationship with the Lord risk turning into real separation. Lent is the favourable time to deepen this dialogue or to begin meeting again.
The dialogue of Jesus with the Samaritan woman is quite unusual. Not so much because it happens in private, but because it takes place between a rabbi and a woman of doubtful reputation, between a man and a woman, between a Jew and a Samaritan. Jesus, as usual, breaks down the walls of separation, overcoming prohibitions and taboos. He presents himself without pretence, as someone in need, tired and begging: “Give me a drink.”
In his humanity, he acknowledges that he is in need. There will be another hour, “about midday”, when Jesus expresses this same need for the last time and as his final poverty, on the cross:
“I am thirsty” (John 19:28–30).
Let us not pass too quickly over this physical necessity, the most fundamental for human survival. We are accustomed to seeing Jesus as the answer to our needs, without thinking of his. And this is one of the needs he chose to consider as his own until the end of time: “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (Matthew 25).
Let us think about the needs of Jesus in those who are thirsty, in whom his thirst becomes present today. Often our relationships become dialogues of the deaf because we start from our differences and interests instead of from the fundamental needs that unite us.
Hearts, wells to be cleaned!
The dialogue of Jesus revolves around water, but also around the well. The well symbolises the Torah, that is, the Pentateuch, the only part of the Scriptures recognised by the Samaritans as the Word of God. Jesus is saying that the water of Moses cannot quench thirst forever. Only those who drink the living water that Jesus gives will never thirst again: “Indeed, the water that I shall give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
It is therefore a water that becomes a spring, flowing without measure and without end. This is what Jesus will proclaim later: “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” (John 7:37–38).
The heart of the believer becomes a well of living water thanks to the Spirit that has been given to us (see Romans 5:5). Through this same Spirit we also become the new temple in which God is worshipped “in spirit and in truth” (see 1Corinthians 3:16–17).
However, our hearts, when neglected, sometimes dry up or become cracked cisterns of stagnant water: “My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
Thus we go to draw water from other wells, often polluted ones, and neglect the water of our own well. It is time to do as the patriarch Isaac did: to clean and reopen the wells that the enemies, our “Philistines”, have blocked (see Genesis 26:15ff).
We must dig into the depths of the soul to free that “spring of water welling up to eternal life”. Perhaps it lies hidden beneath the rock. The staff of Moses—that is, the cross of Jesus—can strike the rock and cause the water to flow (see Exodus 17, first reading).
The Samaritan woman became the first “apostle” of her fellow citizens. She forgot her jar, the symbol of her needs, and ran to the town to invite everyone to come to the Well of living water!
It is striking how the Samaritan woman presents her testimony, arousing curiosity and encouraging everyone’s search: “Come and see… Could this be the Christ?”
And so knowledge, experience, and testimony multiply: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and we know that this truly is the Saviour of the world.”
In short, an experienced missionary!
A fine example for each one of us!
Fr Manuel João Pereira Correia, mccj
Fr. Manuel João, comboni missionary
Sunday Reflection
from the womb of my whale, ALS
Our cross is the pulpit of the Word
