The woman who converses with Our Lord at the well was no ordinary woman. She was a Samaritan and Jews would have nothing to do with Samaritans. Centuries before Christ, the Samaritans had intermarried with Assyrians and adopted many of their pagan practices. They built their own temple and rejected much of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jesus considered them half-breeds and heretics. In fact, the most offensive term that Jews could apply to anyone was to call them a Samaritan.
And yet she and Jesus converse even though no Jewish man would permit himself to speak to a woman alone, much less a Samaritan. This woman goes to the well alone and at noon. Drawing well water was always a morning task and no woman would ever go alone.
But this woman does because she wanted to avoid the gaze and the gossip of others, because she was divorced five times and was living with a man who was not her husband. For this she was spurned and ridiculed by others. And yet, she and Jesus converse.
It is a conversation about thirst and water. At first the focus is physical thirst. But Jesus takes the conversation to another level. There is another thirst in life and water that satisfies.
Our Lord excludes no one and his desire, his thirst, is in fact, the salvation of the woman who is before him. He knows the state of her soul. She had come to draw water but he knew that her desire, her thirst was for more than a bucket of H2O. Her song about life might be that of Peggy Lee....”Is That All There Is?” She had made so many wrong choices. She had been hurt time and time again. She was searching for meaning, for happiness in all the wrong places.
At the well of Sychar, Jesus gets personal. He gets into her conscience, touches upon the most painful aspect of her life--her irregular living circumstances. She reacts as so many do when someone points out a disturbing reality—she changes the subject. “Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about the temple and the true place to worship God.”
Jesus is not put off! He is patient and leads her to understand her situation and nurtures a long dormant faith. He satisfies her true thirst. One of the many Lenten lessons we might derive from this rich passage is this:
We who strive to live the faith must continually renew ourselves by getting into our consciences, removing any obstacles that prevent God’s living water of grace to flow within us. How easy it is to “change the subject.” Lent is about getting personal, allowing God to meddle in our life. We must have the courage to seek the path of change. When we look at the crucifix as we should in Lent, we should be able to say, “This is truly the Savior of the world who thirsts for me, who desires to give me the water that will truly satisfy my thirst.”
