Thirst certainly drove her to the well that day. . She must have been desperate for water to go to the well at high noon at the height of the piercing sun. Why didn’t she go earlier in the day? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she had married five times and was living with a sixth man who was not her husband. Perhaps she avoided going to the well at the cooler times of the early morning or late afternoon, when the rest of the village was there because she sought to avoid the criticism of her the other women because of her complicated past and present.
We can detect already a thirst for more than water—we don't know what happened to her first 5 husbands, or why she was living with a man who was not her husband, but she no doubt displayed a thirst for authentic lasting companionship. That she ventured to the well alone, displayed a thirst for community from which she had become alienated either due to her own poor choices or factors beyond her control.
But, then she encountered Jesus who fulfilled all these thirsts and more. At the most brutal hour of the day, perhaps the most brutal moment in her life, she encountered the Lord.. And breaking with the social conventions—two social conventions, in fact, Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans and men didn’t speak to women alone in public places — the Lord began to speak to her about the spiritual life: of God’s grace, symbolized by the “living water” he describes, and our desire or “thirst” for that water.
This encounter with the Lord Jesus was life changing. Like the fishermen-apostles who leave their fishing nets behind to follow the Lord, their life changed by Jesus’ invitation, St. John tells us that the Samaritan women left her water jar behind and went into the town to tell people about Jesus. Following Jesus more closely always means leaving something behind. The Season of Lent—the quiet of the season of Lent, the prayerful reflectiveness of this holy season helps us to identify the things we need to leave behind in order to follow Jesus more closely.
Perhaps we need to leave behind a habit of quick cutting remarks, or wasting hours on social media or video games or perverted internet content; perhaps we need to leave behind the habit of looking for reasons to criticize or dismiss the people you don’t like. But there are things all of us are invited to leave behind in order to drink more deeply of the living water of Jesus Christ.
And in leaving those artificial substitutes—those inhumane behaviors, we discover that which is truly life giving in Christ—we rediscover our humanity in Christ.
At his Angelus audience a few years ago, Pope Francis pondered what it meant that the Samaritan woman left her water jug there at the well, “The result of that encounter at the well was that the woman was transformed. She left her water jug with which he had come to get water and ran into the city to tell others of her extraordinary experience. … She had gone to take water from the well but had found another water, the living water of mercy that flows to eternal life. She found the water for which she had always been searching. She ran to the village that was judging, condemning and rejecting her and announced that she had found the Messiah who had changed her life. … In this Gospel, we, too, find the stimulus to ‘leave our own jug,’ a symbol of everything that seems important to us but that loses its value before the ‘love of God.’ All of us have one or more than one of these water jugs. I ask you and ask myself, ‘What is my interior jug, which weighs you down, which distances you from God?’ Let us leave it and listen with our heart to the voice of Jesus that offers us another water, one that brings us closer to the Lord.”
This Gospel also challenges us to consider who we have ostracized like the Samaritan women was ostracized by her fellow villagers. Who have we turned off the water faucet of charity, patience, kindness, and courtesy towards? Who have we written off as irredeemable? That is the judgmentalism that is not our way—when we write people off and withhold charity towards them because they don’t conform to either our preconceptions or even to the Gospel. The people who don’t conform with the Gospel are precisely the people to whom the Lord sends us. We are to approach those lonely souls sitting at the well alone with kindness.
The great Father Faber says “Kindness has converted more sinners than either zeal, eloquence, or learning; and these three have never converted anyone, unless they were accompanied by kindness.” As you become kinder yourself by practicing kindness, so the people you are kind to, if they were kind before, learn to be kinder, or if they were not kind before, learn how to be kind. To engage in kindness is to take a drink of the living water which produces a wonderful effect in us. The wonderful effect of a kind deed makes you wonder why you do not do more kind things.
Lent helps us to identify those ways in which we withhold kindness, and then impels us into the world to perform acts of kindness and love. Love is patient, love is kind, it is not rude, it is not pompous.
In the last book of the Bible, in which Jesus speaks to us from within the heavenly Jerusalem, he reiterates what he said to the Samaritan woman. He states: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life” He is the Alpha offering each of us a new beginning. And He is the Omega towards which we are to direct all of our actions, our whole lives.
There are so many people in this world dying of spiritual thirst. They go from one fad to the next, one novelty to the next, one addiction to the next, one sin to the next, but the world offers nothing but sand. The world cannot quench the thirst for God. And these people—the thirsty--are in this neighborhood, they are sitting at those empty wells alone, thinking all they need is to find the right thing and then they’ll be happy. But happiness and fullness of life are found not in some thing, but in somebody, and the somebody is Jesus Christ.
“Come” the Lord says in the book of Revelation, “Come and drink.” “The Spirit and the bride (the Church) say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift”
He invites us to drink of the life giving water, then sends us out to make that invitation to others—in words of preaching, in acts of kindness, in prayers and penances, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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