Third Sunday of Lent

 Lectionary: 28

A woman of Samaria came to draw water....
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."

Today’s first reading from the Book of Exodus calls our attention to the water which miraculously flowed from the rock which Moses struck with his staff. We regard this liquifying rock  as a wonderful sign of God’s patient mercy and superabundant generosity. Despite the sins of his children, the Father provides for them.  

We’re also familiar with Jesus as the “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.” He is the same rock who goes with his people, as Saint Paul told the Christians in  Corinth: 

“All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ.”

Finally, Jesus is that rock who astonished his disciples by speaking alone to a Samaritan woman. She had come to Jacob’s well ostensibly to draw water, although we must suspect an ulterior motive. Namely, to get a better look at the stranger who loitered there. She’d had five husbands already, and was not content with her latest loser; so there could be no harm to her career or her reputation if she dallied with a Jewish stranger who happened to be passing through the neighborhood. 

Saint John tells us, “A woman of Samaria came to draw water..... But, a few minutes later, “she left her water jar there.” Saint John never wrote a story that wasn’t deep with meaning, and this one is especially important. 

In the Bible wells and cisterns seem to be good places for something to happen. They might have been the laundromats of the ancient east; you never know who you might meet there. Rebeccah was fetching water from a well when she met the stranger who introduced her to Abraham’s son, Isaac.  Moses also met his future wife at a well. This story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is not about Frank Sinatra’s strangers in the night. It will have enormous consequences for them and for the Church.  

First, we should notice, in traditional societies, single men and solitary women should not be seen together in public places, much less speaking to one another. But neither the Samaritan nor the Lord seems to worry about social norms. As we see when she returns to her village to tell everyone, ““Come see a man who told me everything I have done;” she is not much concerned about what her neighbors think of her. A changed woman, she has a mission and a responsibility to tell her gossipy neighbors and amused family about the one who might be the Messiah.

Jesus also upsets norms and people wherever he goes, and whatever he does. He talks with anyone, regardless of their high or low status, their righteousness or reputation. 

As their conversation leads from one thing to another, something amazing happens between them. She had gone to check out a good looking fellow; and was quite prepared to take charge of him as she had done to several other men. He might be her lucky number seven. And Jesus, for his part, had stopped at the well while his disciples went into the village to procure food and drink; he felt no particular responsibility to preach to Samaritans as he journeyed toward Jerusalem. 

Their encounter changed everything. She discovered that he was a prophet who knew her past. And he, hearing her speak of the Samaritans’ longing for the Messiah, realized his mission to her and her people. He could not hide his identity from them. 

In that moment, when he said, “I am he, the one speaking with you;” she became his missionary sent to her own people; and he became her Lord and Savior — the man who would finally satisfy her craving for love, meaning, and purpose. An endless series of marriage and divorce leads inevitably to an abyss of despair. Meeting the man who knew everything she’d ever done but regarded her with affection nonetheless, this Samaritan discovered her place in God’s kingdom. 

This Third Sunday of Lent is about water, as we hear the Lord’s words, 

“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.”

Water, by its nature, floods into empty places and hidden crevices. Like water, grace replenishes and satisfies men and women when they are looking for love in all the wrong places. Jesus offers himself in the baptismal water and Eucharistic blood that flow from his cross. They flood our hearts and souls, our minds and bodies. Jesus is the Samaritan’s seventh and final lover; the One who answers the question that everyone must ask and only one man can answer.