This Sunday, Jesus Meets Us at the Well To Give Us What We Are Missing

Jesus meets the Woman at the Well in the Gospel this Sunday — in a Gospel passage which is meant to demonstrate that he wants to meet each of us in the same way.

Here are five takeaways for Third Sunday of Lent, Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Without Jesus, the Woman at the Well has had a disappointing life. So have we.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus masterfully takes a woman who is captive to sin from a simple conversation about water and thirst to a self-examination of her life and a recognition that he is the Messiah. He does it without ever voicing his clear objections to her sinful life.

It is both a model for how to talk to sinners, and a model for us sinners to recognize how Jesus approaches us.

He speaks in the woman’s language about the natural thirst she has in order to guide her toward her more fundamental thirst. The Samaritan woman’s heart has been restlessly searching for what could fulfill her. She looked for it in human love, with five different husbands. None of them stuck, and she gave up on marriage altogether to live with a man who wasn’t her husband.

She could not find fulfillment in companionship with the women of her village, either. She is getting water at noon, in the heat of the day, not at dawn when women typically got the day’s water. She is either shunning her community, or they are shunning her — probably both.

She has found no help in religion, either. She reveals in her conversation with Jesus that she knows the promises of religion — she expects a Christ — but, for her, religious practices are something her ancestors did, not something she does.

This is how our lives look without a real, living union with Christ: Human love and companionship disappoint, and even religion feels like empty promises.

Second: At first glance, the Woman at the Well is as unlike Jesus Christ as she can be.

The woman is nothing like what Jesus is. Yes, she is a woman and a Samaritan at a time when men and women and Jews and Samaritans do not mix. But more to the point, she is a notorious sinner and he is the holy one of God.

However, it turns out that God loves to visit unlikely people. In fact, it turns out he can only work with people who recognize their own powerlessness — people who have been brought to a place of honesty in their life where they realize that they are nothing like God, and that they are powerless in the face of an ugly fate without him.

That is what happened to the people of Israel in the First Reading. They could not embrace God when they were slaves in Egypt, because they were so beaten down they were grateful just to get fed by their captors — so God led them from captivity, with Moses, through the 10 plagues, Passover, the Red Sea. Even those miracles didn’t bond them to him, though.

They are addicted to slavery much the way we are addicted to sin, and in Sunday’s reading from Exodus, they are still complaining, such that Moses has to work yet another miracle to keep them close — the miracle of water from a rock to quench their thirst.

We need a miracle to quench our thirst too.

Third: Jesus’ approach to the woman of Samaria is much the same as his approach to the Hebrews, and to us.

They have been unfaithful; so has she. They have given up on love; so has she. They need to reject sin; so do we.

Whether the Samaritan woman knows it or not, her way of life has led her into a trap. Sin has her in its grips, and she feels like she can never escape. But like Moses, Jesus is willing to leave his lofty station and crawl into her trap with her, and draw her out in stages.

Jesus first shows that he is willing to be on her level by asking her for a favor for him: “Give me a drink.”

Next, he begins to describe a “promised land” to her. He can give her living water, spiritual thriving, that can lift her out of her circumstances. Then he helps her see the trap she is in by peering into her soul and touching her conscience. She begins to long for the healing water that can rescue her.

As C.S. Lewis put it:

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. … If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

St. Paul says the same thing in four words in our Second Reading:

“Hope does not disappoint.”

We ache for more. And that ache has an answer: Jesus Christ, true God and true man, capable of becoming in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

What does is look like when we find it? The Woman at the Well describes it perfectly: “The one called Christ; when he comes, he will tell us everything.” When Jesus tells her, “I am he, the one speaking with you,” she leaves her water jar and rushes back to her village to tell others that she has finally found what she was looking for — the one who truly knows her.

She started out unlike Christ; now she has become like him.

Fourth: This sounds like marriage. Because that’s what it is.

When the Old Testament shows a man and woman meeting at a well, marriage follows. John chose to put this incident in Chapter Four of his Gospel purposefully.

John’s Gospel opens in Chapter One with the declaration that “the Word became flesh … and made his dwelling among us.” If that image sounds vaguely like marriage, John makes it clearer in Chapter Two, with the Wedding Feast at Cana. In Chapter Three, John the Baptist calls God’s people the Bride and Jesus the Bridegroom. In Chapter Four, we get the woman at the well.

The New Testament will refer to the theme of marriage again and again. The Catechism explain:

“The Church is the spotless bride of the spotless Lamb. … He has joined her with himself in an everlasting covenant and never stops caring for her as for his own body.”

The fact is, what the Church says about baptism — that it “makes the baptized person a participant in the divine life of the Trinity” is not just symbolism to God.

When we enter the covenant of baptism with him, God’s relation to us becomes like his interior relation with himself. In us, that means marriage. God is love because Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one in love; they delight in each other, live for each other, act for each other. For us, true love is the same. True love is when the ego drops away and we are nothing but gift to each other. True love forgets its own prerogatives and exists to delight in the other in mutual service and enjoyment.

That is how God loves his people in the desert, and the Woman at the Well, and how he wants us to love him.

Fifth: The marriage is completed in the “living water” that flows from Christ.

Like the Samaritan woman, we all want perfect love but have been disappointed by the poor substitutes we get for it in empty relationships, fickle friendships, and unfulfilling religion. Nonetheless, at the front of every Catholic church, we see what perfect love looks like in Jesus Christ on the cross.

“Only with difficulty does one die for a just person,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading. “But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

That is where we got the living water he promised, when a lance was shoved into his side and his heart poured out blood and water — and his life becomes available to us, in baptism and the Eucharist. As St. Paul puts it, “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

The life of Christ is still pouring out all over the world — in the waters of baptism, which give us the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the Eucharist, which incorporates us into his body.

At communion today, we are like the Samaritan woman, finally finding the answer to our longings after a frustrating life of sin. We left our house and he came to meet us by the well of the baptismal font, and he wants to know us completely in the Eucharist.

Pray in the communion line today, “Lord you are my beloved, and I am yours. Fill me with your love, which is the only hope that does not disappoint.”

Image: Giuseppe Bartolomeo,
wiki-media commons.

By Tom Hoopes