She
stands as one torn between flight and curiosity. One foot is on the step, rope
in hand, leaning towards pulling up the skin of water to fill her jar, the
other foot on the ground as if she might suddenly turn and flee.
Though
we see only partially the face of Christ His head is slightly tilted upward for
she is His focus, while her face betrays a type of skeptical hostility.
Here we
have, as it were, the opening scene of one of the powerful examples by St. John
the Evangelist of the public-missionary life of Christ.
We
humans, sadly and scandalously we Christians, are so quick to judgement, to
sneering and accusing without having the whole picture, without meeting,
listening to the human being or group we are rejecting because we fail to see
each other with the eyes of Christ, fail to listen with the ears of Christ,
fail to love with the heart of Christ.
Stop judging, that
you may not be judged. For as you judge,
so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured
out to you. Why do you
notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam
in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your
eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from
your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your
brother’s eye. [Mt.7:1-5]
V.7= A woman of Samaria……
In many countries, women, as
in the days of the Woman of Samaria, still have the daily heavy chore of
walking, often for miles, to the nearest well to get the day’s supply of water
for cooking, cleaning, drinking. It is a time for the women to chat about
everything, to receive wisdom, comfort, affirmation from each other.
St. John is telling us, a woman isolated from
other women, perceived as a danger to marriage and family life because she was
perhaps a prostitute, certainly an adulterous, was clearly not welcome amongst
those going to the well in the cool of the morning.
So alone, unwelcome, at high
noon in the broiling heat, she comes to the well, every step a burdensome
reminder of her isolation.
Approaching the well she
would have seen the man sitting there.
Given her history with men
likely she was suspicious, perhaps even apprehensive.
V.7-cont.=…..came to draw water.
Water is mentioned over 700
times in Sacred Scripture from: The
Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water. [Gn.1:2] to: …one of the
soldiers pierced His side and immediately blood and water came out. [Jn. 19:34]
and the last mention is: …Whoever desires, let him come take the water of life
freely. [Rv. 22:17].
Water covers the earth in
vast oceans, and the Arctic and Antarctic are lands of water frozen as snow or
ice. Fresh water, meaning drinkable water, is so essential to life we cannot go
more than 3 days without it, yet nowadays millions can only have drinkable
water if it is first filtered and chlorinated, or if we can afford to buy
bottled watered.
Millions of our brothers and
sisters around the world have no access to safe drinkable water and so drink
polluted water and are plagued by diseases, some of them fatal.
Insufficient water soaking
the earth as rain and crops fail, famine follows.
We all know this
intellectually, but I wonder when we let the tap run until the water is as cold
as we like before filling a glass, almost without thinking buy yet another
bottle of water, or obsessively water lawns, do we ever stop for a moment, give
thanks for the gift of water, pray for those who suffer lack of pure water?
Thirst is a terrible thing.
The water the woman had come
to draw was no luxury, rather fundamentally necessary.
V. 7 cont.= Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
Just reading the words of
Jesus on the page we might assume a certain curtness in “Give me a drink.”
Certainly, we can hear our mothers’ voice telling us about please and
thank-you!
However, Jesus speaks at a
time and in a culture far removed from ours, plus He was a Jewish man asking
for a drink of a Samaritan woman added into the mix.
So, unless we hear the
spoken word, see the facial expression, observe the body language, be we
reading words spoken in a newspaper article, a work of history or fiction,
unless the author adds a descriptive to indicate how the words were spoken:
gently, harshly, pleadingly, for example – there is no way to know.
There is another occasion,
reported by the Evangelist, when Jesus reveals He is thirsty: After this, aware that everything was now
finished, in order that the scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I
thirst”. [cf. Jn. 19:28]
Many Saints across the
millennia, St. Mother Teresa among them, have seen Christ’s “I thirst”, spoken
on the Cross as His thirst not just for souls in general, but for you, for me,
as individuals and the saints have sought to satiate this thirst of Christ
through serving the poor, through prayer and acceptance of suffering, through
all the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
So, we would not be amiss to
‘hear’ Jesus’ request for a drink spoken with the sound of tender love and
thirst for the soul of the Woman of Samaria.
V. 8= His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
As he often does St. John is
giving us a clue here to something very important which we will discover at the
end of the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. This is also St.
John making it clear why Jesus was alone.
V.9= The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a
Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with
Samaritans.)
Some translations indicate
not ‘use nothing’ but rather ‘have nothing in common.’
Despite their common
heritage various events over the centuries caused extreme bitterness, even
hatred between the Jews and the Samaritans, some were religious/cultic
differences, others were claims of right of territorial possession, none them,
justified the enmity, just as no cultic, theological, ethnic or other assertion
of one group of human beings against another can be justification for hatred
and violence in our own day.
It amazes me how human
beings can get all gaga when seeing a rainbow, the multiplicity of colours in a
field of wild flowers, marvel at the plumage of varieties of birds but go
apoplectic when seeing human beings of different colours!
Racism, for example, if we
were truly thinking and reflective human beings, is counter intuitive.
Blood has only one colour.
We all bleed red.
Air, so vital to life that
it is the very breath of God within us, is colourless.
We all breathe.
Enmity between peoples, the
dark seedlings of hatred and violence can only grow in hearts frozen by enmity,
is always rooted in the bitter retelling-blaming stories which become ever more
divorced from objective truth with each retelling.
Jesus, who knows everything
about us, about all human history, thus about His own people and the
Samaritans, simply will not participate in the enmity and so His reply is a truth
way beyond bitterness, blaming, hatred, anger: v. 10= Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and
Who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him and He would
have given you living water.”
Jesus has also just turned
the whole encounter on its head.
From supplicant, He has
become gift-giver and the woman no longer the one from whom something is
expected: now she is offered gift.
Jesus Himself is the gift of
God.
Jesus as gift of God gifts
to us also the name of God: Abba/Father and with the Father gifts us the Holy
Spirit, who is Himself the living water:
As "by one Spirit we
were all baptized," so we are also "made to drink of one
Spirit." Thus the Spirit is also personally the living water welling up
from Christ crucified as its source and welling up in us to eternal life.
[Catechism of the Catholic Church # 694]
Pope Francis has taught
eloquently on this when commenting on this very encounter between Jesus and the
Samaritan Woman: Jesus promised the
Samaritan woman that he will give a superabundance of “living water” forever to
all those who recognize him as the Son sent by the Father to save us (cf. Jn.
4:5-26; 3:17). Jesus came to give us this “living water”, who is the Holy
Spirit, that our life might be guided by God, might be moved by God, nourished
by God……In the Letter to the Romans we find these words: “God’s love has been
poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (5:5).
The “living water”, the Holy Spirit, the Gift of the Risen One who dwells in
us, purifies us, illuminates us, renews us, transforms us because he makes us
participants in the very life of God that is Love…… The Holy Spirit teaches us to see with the eyes
of Christ, to live life as Christ lived, to understand life as Christ
understood it. That is why the living water, who is the Holy Spirit, quenches
our life, why he tells us that we are loved by God as children, that we can
love God as his children and that by his grace we can live as children of God,
like Jesus. And we, do we listen to the Holy Spirit? ….. Let us hear the Holy
Spirit, let us listen to the Holy Spirit and may we move forward on this path of love,
mercy and forgiveness. [Pope Francis, General Audience, May 8, 2013]
Vs. 11,12= The woman said to Him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the well is
deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father
Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and
his flocks?”
From the ‘you, a Jew’
hostility to now a respectful, less hostile, yet in a sense still uncertain
about who Jesus is and what this is all about, the woman uses the honourific,
“Sir” as she seeks clarity and, by referring to Jacob hints at the common
ancestry, shared by both Jews and Samaritans.
There is a softening here of
tone and attitude.
Vs. 13,14= Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone
who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I
shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a
spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
That drinking a cup of mere
‘created’ water can never satisfy our need for full daily hydration is an
obvious observation Jesus makes to counter point the truth He is revealing,
namely that within the water He is offering is the gift of the Holy Spirit, but
also therein all that Jesus teaches us, which is why the water of Baptism, or
rather the Sacrament of Baptism itself, when we first receive the Holy Spirit,
is called the gateway to sacramental life.
More, it wells within us
like a river upon which we are carried into eternal life!
There is this wonderful
vision in Revelation 22:1-5: Then the
angel showed me the river of life-giving water, sparkling like crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of its street. On either
side of the river grew the tree of life that produces fruit twelve times a
year, once each month; the leaves of the trees serve as medicine for the
nations. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore. The throne of God and of
the Lamb will be in it, and His servants will worship Him. They will look upon
His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. Night will be no more, nor
will they need light from lamp or sun, for the Lord God shall give them light,
and they shall reign forever and ever.
Vs 15-16=The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not
be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and
come back.”
The woman is still thinking,
or at least by her reply seems to be so, in terms of material, physical thirst
and that the water Jesus is offering would mean she would no longer have to
endure the daily grind and humiliation of her solitary trips to the well.
Jesus however is offering
faith, conversion, a restoration of her human dignity, membership in the
community.
Jean Vanier, in his book
BECOMING HUMAN, reminds us that: Those
who are weak have a great difficulty finding their place in our society.
Acceptance of our weakness, ultimately
our need of Jesus and the grace and gift He offers us as He is doing here with
the Samaritan woman, is the first step towards faith and conversion of heart:
metanoia.
As Jesus Himself teaches us,
the journey of faith, the Spirit’s gift of metanoia, is a life journey, indeed
a day by day journey: Then Jesus said to
his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his
cross, and follow Me. [cf. Mt.16:24]
St. John Paul in his first
Holy Thursday letter to Priests in 1979 stresses: We must be converted anew every day, we must rediscover every day the
gift obtained from Christ Himself…[cf. op. cit. para.10]
As with the woman here, so
with every human being, Christ’s ‘ask’ of us is always invitational, always
protective of our human freedom, itself God’s gift to us, to say yes or no: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If
anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will enter his house and dine
with him, and he with Me.” [Rev. 3:20]
This whole dialogue with the
Woman is, truly, Jesus knocking at the door of her heart and asking her to go
and get her husband is, as it were, handing her the key to unlock the door and
open to Him and the living water, the Holy Spirit.
IF she goes to get her
husband then she is making a gesture of freedom, she is freely choosing to open
the door of her being, in itself an act of faith and trust for:…….faith, in its deepest essence, is the
openness of the human heart to the gift of God: to God’s self-communication in
the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul writes: “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” [cf. Dominum Et Vivificantem,
para.51.2; encyclical of St. John Paul, May 18, 1986]
v.17= The woman answered and said to Him, “I do not have a husband.”
Speaking truth, indeed
making a confession, we can hear not only the woman’s words, but the sound of a
door being unlocked.
Ven. Fulton Sheen, in his
book, LIFE OF CHRIST, speaking of another adulterous woman’s approach to Christ
notes with great compassion: There was
love in her boldness, repentance in her tears……[op. cit. p.122]
In his book ORTHODOX
PSYCHOTHERAPY, Hierotheos, Bishop of Nafpaktos, quotes St. Gregory Nazianzen,
who stresses that “…it is necessary to be
truly at ease to know God.” [op. cit. p. 31]
Throughout this encounter
Jesus has been putting the woman at ease.
V. 17-18=Jesus
answered her, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five
husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is
true.”
Jesus
zeros in not on her promiscuity but on her truth speaking, for the now unlocked
door is beginning to open.
When
Pope Francis began stressing the mercy of God early in his pontificate, in his
book THE NAME OF GOD IS MERCY, he teaches us that: The Church does not exist to condemn people, but to bring about an
encounter with the visceral love of God’s mercy….I like to use the image of a
field hospital to describe this “Church that goes forth”; it exists where there
is combat. [op. cit. p. 52]
In this encounter of Jesus
at the well with the Samaritan Woman we have a template of what Pope Francis is
teaching, a template in the first instance for bishops and priests, but for all
the baptized on how we should encounter, witness to, love one another.
This encounter between Jesus
and the woman is also a template for patient, attentive, dialogue, for
apparently instant conversions, at least authentic ones, are rare – look at the
struggles of a St. Augustine or a St. Teresa of Avila.
Vs. 19-20= The woman said to him, “Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to
worship is in Jerusalem.”
Things have moved now from
‘you’ the Jew to ‘sir’ to ‘prophet’ indicating growing trust and respect, but
still some resistance.
It is as if having unlocked
the door of her being, opened it slightly, she is guarding the door still,
needing perhaps assurance Jesus is indeed whom she thinks He may be.
So, she reaches back to the
old enmity between Jews and Samaritans.
Vs. 21-24=Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when
you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You
people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand,
because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here,
when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed
the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who
worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth.”
In His reply, it is striking
that Jesus, who has just heard the woman speak of ‘worship’ as generalization
specifies that she, indeed everyone, will “worship
the Father.”
It is Jesus who, after the
millennials of human history, and specifically that of the Chosen People,
reveals that God is indeed our Father.
Further, Jesus lays out the
whole mystery of the Trinity while announcing that the fulfillment of the
prophecies, which point to Himself and the gift of redemption, is at hand.
V.25= The woman said to Him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, the one
called the Anointed; when He comes, He will tell us everything.”
Now she has opened to the
door to Jesus. Not yet has she invited Him in, but in her own way, minus any of
the previous attitude, she is conversing, person to person and, in her own way,
making a statement of faith and hopeful expectation.
What is this ‘everything’
that the Messiah, the Anointed One, will tell us, will tell her?
First and foremost, that
‘everything’ is what Jesus tells her, namely that the Expected One is now among
us: V. 26= Jesus said to her, “I am He,
the one who is speaking with you.”
How wonderful as He reveals
Himself Jesus stresses that He is speaking ‘with’ her.
Too often when we seek to
evangelize we speak ‘at’ or ‘to’ people, not with them.
Now she can allow Jesus to
cross the threshold of her being for she no longer is speaking with a mere man
but with the Messiah, the Redeemer, the sought-after Beloved Himself!
Next there is an
interruption and here the words of William Barclay in his commentary on the
Gospel of St. John, volume 1, page 103 apply: We must always remember that beneath John’s simple stories is a deeper
meaning which is open only to those who have eyes to see. In all his gospel
John never wrote an unnecessary or an insignificant detail. Everything means
something and everything points beyond.
V. 27=At that moment His disciples returned, and were amazed that He was
talking with a woman, but still no one said, “What are you looking for?” or
“Why are you talking with her?”
Then an amazing thing
happens, reminiscent of all the running to and fro, Easter Sunday, as people
ran around proclaiming: HIS IS RISEN!
V.28/29/30= The woman left her water jar
and went into the town and said to the people, “Come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could He possibly be
the Messiah?” They went out of the town
and came to Him.
Metanoia,
conversion of heart, leads to a willingness to proclaim, and for the Samaritan
Woman this meant the courage to do so in the heart of the very community which
held her in disdain and rejected her.
Indeed,
given enmity between Jesus and the woman at the outset, for she noted He was a
Jew and she a Samaritan, that between her and the people of the town, not
merely her lifestyle but the state of her soul, then what transpires once she
allows Christ to enter her being and transform her heart, we see what St.
Gregory Nyssa illustrates when he teaches on Christian perfection: We have Christ, who is our peace and our
light. He is our peace, who has made both one. Since Christ is our peace, we
shall be living up to the name of Christian if we let Christ be seen in our
lives by letting peace reign in our hearts. He has brought hostility to an end,
as the apostle said. Therefore, we must not allow it to come back to life in us
in any way at all but must proclaim clearly that it is dead indeed. God has
destroyed it in a wonderful way for our salvation. We must not, then, allow
ourselves to give way to anger or bear grudges, for this would endanger our
souls. We must not stir up the very thing that is well and truly dead, calling
it back to life by our wickedness. But as we bear the name of Christ, who is
peace, we too must put an end to all hostility, so that we may profess in our lives
what we believe to be true of him.
Bl. Pope Paul VI: "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers,
and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses."
This is who the Samaritan
woman is, a witness first and then a teacher and as a result the people went to
meet Jesus, which means they too spoke with Him, and clearly, listened and took
what He said to heart.
Was St. John, presumably at
a respectful distance, present for the entire exchange between Jesus and the
Samaritan Woman, or did he seek her out after the event to fill in the details?
In any event he would have
been present when, the disciples have returned, the following took place: VS.31-38= Meanwhile, the disciples urged
Him, “Rabbi, eat.” But He said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not
know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought Him
something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of the one
who sent me and to finish His work. Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest
will be here’? I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest. The
reaper is already receiving his payment and gathering crops for eternal life,
so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is
verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap what you have
not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of
their work.”
Over and over Jesus draws
from the ordinary of life to illuminate the realities of who and why we are as
persons, what the gift of life is ultimately about: As the Baltimore Catechism
of my childhood stated, God creates us to: know
Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him
forever in the next. Thus, too the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in the
Prologue, # 1, re-affirms: God,
infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely
created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at
every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek
him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men,
scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To
accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as
Redeemer and Saviour. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in
the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.
St. John closes this
critical section of the Gospel with these verses: 39-42: Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in Him
because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me everything I have
done.” When the Samaritans came to Him, they invited Him to stay with them; and
He stayed there two days. Many more began to believe in Him because of His
word, and they said to the woman, “We no longer believe because of your word;
for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of
the world.”
All of us, in imitation of
Christ, as did the Apostles, as did the woman, as baptized Christians are
called to witness to Christ and to teach the Gospel.
When a heart is open to
Christ in the Gospel the person must then have a personal experience of Christ.
The greatest of these personal experiences with Him occur within the
Sacraments: Baptism, Reconciliation, Holy Eucharist, Confirmation, Holy
Marriage, Priesthood, Anointing of the Sick.
Strengthened by sacramental
grace we remain faithful, courageous even, especially in these days when
Christians are constantly derided, hated, persecuted, even martyred.
Many stories have been
handed down by oral tradition long before someone wrote anything down about the
lives of various people who do appear in the Gospels and the Acts of the
Apostles without accurate historical records of their later lives.
Purists may fret over the
lack of historical records, but there is a strong presence of the sensus fidelis: Thanks to the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the understanding of both
the realities and the words of the heritage of faith is able to grow in the
life of the Church……[Catechism of the Catholic Church #94].
Thus, since devotion to St.
Photini has been handed down over the generations, it is a beautiful tradition,
inspiring, that the Woman has been given a name and is celebrated as one
faithful to Christ to the very end, martyrdom.
St. Photini prayer for us.