1. Conversion to the Gospel supposes a radical change: a step from thirst to the water of life. Catechumenal and liturgical tradition of the Church has seen in the passage of the Samaritan woman (Jn 4,1-45) a test that serves to review faith experience which bursts forth here in a concrete situation: that of a woman with an identity crisis.
2. The pharisees learnt that Jesus was making more disciples than John. The people follow him! As a measure of precaution he leaves Judea and returns to Galilee where he felt safe. To do that he has to pass through Samaria, the neighboring, separated, hostile region, colonized five times (2 Kgs 17,24). According the prophet Hosea, Samaria is the Lord’s wife, prostitute (1,2) and adulteress (3,1), with a religious past that combines with pagan customs. As in our country, with an old religious tradition, but in the end a missionary country.
3. Jesus arrives at a town of Samaria called Sychar. At around one thousand meters was Jacob’s well, one of the deepest of all Palestine. Arqueological excavations confirm that it was in use from the year 1000 B.C. until 500 A.D. Its origins go back to the time when the division between Jews and Samaritans had not yet occurred when the Lord’s wife had not yet gone after her lovers (Hos 2,7) . The Gospel of Jesus refers us also to the origins, when the big division between Christians had not yet been produced.
4. The disciples had gone to town to buy some food. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was around the sixth hour, about noon. A woman from Samaria came to draw water. The woman (it does not say her name) is a living sign of her land. Jesus tells the Samaritan: Give me a drink. The situation by the well recalls the encounter of Abraham’s servant with Rebekah, when he was looking for a Isaac’s wife (Gn 24,17); it reminds us also of the encounter of Jacob with Rachel (Gn 29,1-4). Jesus asks for a gesture of welcome and hospitality, something unusual among Jews and Samaritans; he puts himself above prejudices, divisions, discriminations. He addresses the person: I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart (Hos 2, 16).
5. Before the perplexity of the Samaritan, Jesus continues with the initiative of the dialogue. He asked the woman a question about knowledge of God, that is to say, experience of faith, in a land where they have said: There is no fidelity, no mercy, no knowledge of God…but false swearing, lying, murder, stealing, adultery and violence (Hos 4, 1-2). Jesus announces the experience of God as a gift. He is inside and outside, up and down, right and left (Ps 139). As St. Paul says: In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17,28). Besides, Jesus also asks the question of her own identity: If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, “Give a drink,” you would have asked him and he would have given you the water of life.
6. The woman takes literally the words of Jesus and thinks about just water: Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep; where then can you get this water of life? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself with his children and his folks? Jesus talks about the fountain of the Word, which is renewed endlessly by a profound current of water, bursts forth from the heart of the earth and leaps toward heaven: 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.
7. Jesus talks about another water and another thirst. He will cry it out on the Feast of The Tabernacle, the most solemn one, where they pray for rain and they celebrate commemorative rites of the miracle of the water which springs from the rock in the middle of the desert (Ex 17,1-7): Whoever is thirsty, come to me and drink whoever believes in me, as The Scriptures says: Rivers of the water of life will flow from within him (Jn 7,38). Jesus offers another water that could satisfy the most profound thirst of the human heart, the thirst of God. They said in psalm 63: O God, my God, I look for you, for you my soul thirsts.
8. The woman starts to understand and starts to change: Sir, give me this water. He said to her: Go call your husband and come back. The woman answered and said to him: I do not have a husband . Jesus answered her: You are right in saying, I do not have a husband. For you have had five husbands, and the one who have now is not your husband. What you have said is true. The Samaritan is a symbol of her land, deported, colonized five time, and in an identity crisis. Nevertheless, in the encounter with Jesus she accepts the word of God about marriage which brings her to her husband. So, neither repudiation, nor annulment, nor divorce. By the way, in the 1980 Synod about the role of the Christian family in the modern world, Cardinal Pericle Felici sounded the alarm: he said that declarations of annulment had increased 5,000 per cent in decade of the seventies.
9. The woman is impressed, she realized that she is before a prophet (4,19) and leads the conversation towards a religious subject: Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people said that the place of worship is Jerusalem. The Samaritans had built a temple on Mount Garizim. Nevertheless, the Jerusalem temple as well as that of Samaria offer forms of worship that belongs to the past. Jesus says: Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father, neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand: the worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, that is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth. The hour had come when the place is not important. So, neither Samaria nor Jerusalem. Neither Rome nor London, nor Moscow.
10. The woman can testify that Jesus has a deep knowledge about her own history, a knowledge that reveals him to her as a prophet. The woman is waiting the coming of the Messiah, the Christ: When he comes, he will tell us everything. She considers the Messiah as the one who will tell the whole truth about religious matters. Jesus said to her: I am he, the one who is speaking with you. Jesus inaugurates a new era: he continues speaking.
11. At that moment the disciples returned, and were amazed that he was talking with a woman, but still no one said anything. The woman left her water jar and went into the town and said to the people, “come and see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Messiah?” (to see Gn 24,28-32). The disciples are fixed on other things: Rabbi, eat. But Jesus says: My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work.
12. It is necessary raise your eyes. We are in harvest season. Harvest is a symbol of judgment, a judgment that is taking place now within history: Look up and see these fields ripe for the harvest. The reaper is already receiving his payment and gathering crops for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper can rejoice together… I send you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work. Samaritans invited him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And they said to the woman: We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know by ourselves that this is truly the savior of our world.
* For personal or community reflexion: How do I stand before Jesus?
- As Samaritan, with several questions
- Recognizing that the Lord knows my history
- Embracing the word of God about marriage
- Leaving the water jar, announcing the good news of the Gospel
- As a disciple who sows, as a disciple sent to reap