Jesus Meets You and Me at Many Places

So, over 2,000 years ago, a thirsty Jewish man who was a preacher, encountered a Samaritan woman who couldn’t keep a husband and my job is to help us see how this ancient story has anything at all to do with our lives, yours and mine. Let’s take a look at how this woman (and let’s give her a name – we’ll call her Rachel) let’s see how Rachel responds to Jesus.

Jesus asks her for a drink of water and her first response is:

 “So, you want something from me?”

There are times in the lives of us all when we respond just that way when the Lord is asking something of you and me. We’re usually quicker to call on God to give us something and slower to return the favor when he comes knocking on our door.

What the Lord asks of us is usually pretty simple, even if not always easy. The Lord asks for our attention, he asks for some of our time, he asks for the truth, he asks for a place in our hearts where he might be at home; and he asks for the use of our arms and hands to reach out to those in need.

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Staying in the Conversation

The conversation between Jesus and the woman begins with a conversation about the basics of life, about water. Jesus and the woman have a different understanding of what water is but they are in agreement on the common thirst to drink. This common understanding moves their conversation forward. When we discuss with those who think differently from us, we should be looking for a common thirst, a common thread of our humanity that can unite us. Even if we do not agree, we can at least identify what we share.

The story also points to the importance of recognizing our failures. The woman is faced with and accepts her disastrous past, her multiple failed marriages. In this honesty of her failure, a step is taken towards the truth. In the same way, when we talk with others who have a different point of view, any honesty on either side cannot help but lead us forward. Admitting that we have weaknesses, that we are imperfect, opens our mind to listen for the possible truth in another’s position.

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The story of Christ's encounter with the Samaritan woman is a kind of template by which we can understand our own encounter with the Lord.

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We are made for God, and therefore our hearts are restless until they rest in him. This longing is symbolized in the thirst of the woman at the well. Directing her away from all earthly goods, Jesus draws her to himself: "I will give you water springing up to eternal life." We hear the same invitation to the font of grace.

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This Sunday we have the great privilege of hearing the story of the woman at the well. Take the time this week for a prayerful reading of this story and notice that as this woman seeks, she's already been found! If only we would surrender to our God who is already always pursuing us! Then, we might realize how the Everlasting Lord is the only one who can quench the otherwise unquenchable thirst of our hearts. Make the effort this Lent to clear a path and set down your old buckets so that the water of Christ's divine life can flow through you.

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Jesus Christ is the perfect model of human desire

He understands the human nature because as the son of God, he has been through the paths of human predicament. He is like us in all things but sin. (Heb. 4:15). The encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well reveals God’s understanding of human nature. The insatiable nature of human desire is revealed in the life of the Samaritan woman. The Samaritan woman at the well has been married five times and is currently living with a man that is not her husband. Once our choice is entangled with the wrong model, crisis sets in. To be married five times and not finding love, shows the pitiable human nature.

Thirsting for the Lord

She really was quite intelligent, this Samaritan Woman that Jesus met at the well. She engaged Jesus in discussion about Jews and Samaritans. She asked him, “Why do you bother talking to me? Jews don’t speak to Samaritans.” She even engaged the Lord in a bit of a theological argument, “We worship on the Mountain, you worship in Jerusalem, so who’s right?”

She was also a hard worker, not a lazy woman. She was at that well probably to get the water she needed to clean her home, or perhaps prepare the afternoon meal. Her life was difficult, but probably no more than any other woman of her time and place. But her life was different. She had gone through five husbands and now was living with a man she had not married. No one respected her. She didn’t respect herself. She had given up on herself and just gone with whatever the immediate situation presented. Another husband, another m an. Another child. Whose the father of this one? Of that one? She had learned to live with the emptiness that comes from accepting sin in her life.

We Need to Stop Doubting, Grumbling, and Quarreling with God

In the first reading we hear about the people of Israel grumbling, quarreling, and testing the Lord, saying: “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  This is a question many people are asking today as they witness the problems in the Church and in the world.  Just like the people of Israel wondered why God would lead them into the desert where they were dying of thirst, many people today wonder how, if God loves us, can these horrible things be happening? 

God was testing the people of Israel, having shown Himself all powerful and truly present in many ways.  Now the people were being tested to see whether or not they had faith and trust in God.  At the same time, we are told, the people were testing the Lord.  Rather than act in faith and trust that God would provide for them as He had done so many times previously on their journey, they doubted the Lord and tested Him.  When we look at what the Israelites did in the desert, we need to ask ourselves, how often do we test the Lord? How often do we grumble against the Lord and quarrel with Him? 

When the Well Runs Dry

Compared with the generation of our parents and grandparents, today we own twice as many cars per person, eat out twice as often and enjoy endless other commodities that weren’t around then–big-screen TVs, microwave ovens, tablets, smart phones, handheld wireless devices, to name a few. But are we any happier? Certainly, happiness is difficult to pin down, let alone measure. But I suspect that we’re no more contented than we were then–in fact, maybe less so. Compared with our grandparents, our most recent generation have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and much greater risk of depression and assorted social pathology, So many today suffer from that gnawing spiritual thirst for more and the next best thing, but the next best thing always seems elusive.

This spiritual thirst is indicative of an awareness that something is missing in one’s life – a feeling of ennui, of listlessness and dissatisfaction, mundane boredom, an inner longing, but one can’t quite put your finger on the reason for the emptiness within…

This emptiness often feels like a bottomless pit. We try to fill the emptiness with sex, drugs, work, fashion, cars, houses, jobs, and many other things, but the truth is, nothing but God Himself can quench our spiritual thirst.

This world is filled with wells that promise to provide love, acceptance, and self-worth but never fully satisfy. Many of us turn in desperation to the fountains of the world seeking a drink; where alcohol, food, outside relationships, addictions, entertainment, money or constant busyness fill our cup. And, yet, like the Samaritan woman, we still thirst. Only Christ can fill our empty souls for eternity and provide for our essential emotional needs now. Don’t wait till your soul is empty and the well runs dry. Look for Jesus now. Thirst only for him. He alone can quench the thirst of your soul. Saint Augustine was right when he said that our hearts will remain restless until we rest in Christ. 

Clergy E-Notes

Pro-life reflections and intercessions related to the Sunday readings

We are Samaritan woman

Water is a symbol of life or fullness of life which we can call happiness. To be thirsty is to be in a situation where life is threatened. And so the people in search of water in the readings are actually in search of life or happiness. So, what do these readings say about our thirsty?

Jesus, tired from the journey, sits at the well. And there a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. A simple request for a drink ignites a conversation that goes wide and deep. If this encounter is coincidental it’s nevertheless providential. So, if you think you are on this blog by chance, well, perhaps you would do well to fasten your seat belt. I can’t guarantee how you are going to land. You might as well end up abandoning your jar like the Samaritan woman. But who’s she?

We don’t know much about her. All we can do is link up bits and pieces from the text to make up something whole with which we can work.

From Water Bearers to Gospel Sharers

Water is a natural important gift and is very important to life. Drinking enough water is the best treatment for many ailments. Water is the most important liquid in the world. Without water, there is no life. Water is also a key concern for Christians. When we take water for granted, waste or spoil it, we suffer spiritually and physically. When we respect and cherish it as God’s gift, we not only find our rivers and reservoirs full, but we also draw with joy from the wells of salvation.

The Book of Genesis begins with a wonderful image: the spirit of God, brooding over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2). The last image in the Bible is also the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing from God’s throne in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 22:17).

Water flows through the pages of Scripture and depicts its great spiritual significance. Water also occupies an important place in today’s readings. There is, therefore, no better theme for this Sunday than that in the Claretians East Africa Bible Diary: A water bearer turned into a Gospel Sharer. Our readings today present three water bearers. In the First Reading, Moses is presented as the water bearer to the complaining Israelites. They were thirsty during their desert sojourning and asked for water. At Moses’ intervention, the people had water from the rock to drink. We know quite well Moses’ role not only as a water bearer but also as the bearer of the good news of the covenant between God and the Israelites.

The Scent of Water

Some of you have probably read Lonesome Dove. It is basically a story about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. At one point they have to cross a vast, arid plain; the lack of water causes the cattle to slow down and even die. The men on horseback do what they can to urge the cattle forward. All of a sudden things change. The animals’ nostrils expand and they begin snorting. Long before the men sense it, the cattle smell water in the distance and they start to stampede. Now the cowhands have to race to keep up with them.

Our lives are like that. Sometimes we begin to slow down, we know not why. We perhaps even feel a desire to stop entirely. We could keep going if we had a sense that somewhere, not too far away, is what we most want – cool, drinkable water. The sad thing is that although water is coming down in cascades very near to us, we cannot pick up the scent. We say that water is odorless, but the beasts know better. Our problem is that we have manufactured so many syrupy substitutes that we cannot recognize the real thing.* Water is at hand, but we remain thirsty.

Today Jesus meets a woman who epitomizes our human condition. She sought desperately to find something which would quench her thirst. She tried everything – including five husbands! Then Jesus offers her “living water,” that is, flowing water. She had good reason to be cynical and at first it seems like she mocks Jesus: “Sir, you do not even have a bucket…”

Putting the Picture of Jesus Back Together Again During Lent

Jesus awoke faith in her heart. The Preface for today’s Mass says,

When he asked the woman of Samaria for water to drink
Christ had already prepared for her the gift of faith.
In his thirst to receive her faith
He awakened in her heart the fire of your [the Father’s] love.

(Preface Third Sunday of Lent)

Jesus thirsted for the woman’s faith and awoke the love of the Father in her heart. Jesus thirsts for your faith and wants to awaken the love of the Father ever more in your heart. Did you ever hear someone say, “There must be something more to life.” Having Jesus in the center of our lives makes our whole life better. Every day is better with Jesus in the center. When we have Jesus where he belongs, our whole life falls into place better. At the end of Lent we want to have the picture of Jesus put back together again properly in our lives, like the Samaritan woman, because Jesus is the “something more to life” that we are looking for.

Encountering Christ

The woman at the well did not know who she was talking to.  This is of specific importance in today’s gospel reading (Jn. 4:5-42).  To her this man was some strange Jew – particularly strange in the fact that he would talk to a Samaritan woman.  

A danger in the life of faith is that we turn faith and Jesus himself into an idea.  The problem with that is that in order to grasp an idea you have to have it all figured out.  Also, ideas are passive.  They wait for our acting upon them.  Jesus is not an idea, he is a person and faith is not an ideology, it is an encounter.  People can introduce themselves to us without our expectation.  It happens all the time.  Some person comes up to us on the street or in the store.  People are active.  They can necessitate an encounter.  This is what Jesus did at the well.  “Give me a drink,” he asks of the woman.   

My Soul Thirsts forYou

We are in the midst of Lent, focusing our attention on life as a desert journey in which we constantly experience thirst for love, for meaning, ultimately for communion with God, the ‘fountain of life’ (Psalm 36:9). This thirst is expressed simply in the opening words of Psalm 63:
‘O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my body pines for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water’. The prophet Isaiah assures us: ‘With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation’(Isaiah 12:3) – words which Pope Pius XII chose to open his
encyclical on the Sacred Heart (‘Haurietis Aquas’). Isaiah echoes God’s call to each of us: ‘Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for
that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant’(Isaiah 55:1-­‐3).

Water and Bread

Jesus is the stream of love between God and ourselves. We are invited to drink of the mystery, this outpouring of love, embodied in Jesus, the thirst of God in us. His “I thirst” from the cross is as much the voice of God as it is the stirring of a human heart. It is not Christ’s humanity alone that feels the parching. It is his divinity too. The story of the woman at the well, like our own rituals of baptism and the Eucharist, interprets for us the fundamental nature of our relationship to God. We are nothing without God. God is our drink. God is our sustenance.

There are days when we realize the deep meaning of our Eucharist, when we fully enter the actions we do and the words we say. It amounts to this: “I take you for my food and drink, my nutriment. You become my very being as food and drink become my own flesh.” So great is the expanse of our hunger and thirst that only God can fill us, fulfill us.

Life Giving Water

I believe we are all like the Hebrews traveling in the desert to the Promised Land. We are all traveling with Christ’s Church, over the sands of space and time, to the promised land of the Kingdom of Heaven. Like the Hebrews, there were generations before us and there very well may be generations ahead of us. We are a people on a journey of faith to the everlasting life God has promised us.

On this journey, we too get hungry. We too get thirsty. Like the Hebrews, God has given us bread from heaven in the Eucharist to nourish our souls for the next leg of the journey. Like the Hebrews, God has given us the life giving water to quench our spiritual thirst. We remember our baptism every time we enter the Church, dipping our finger in holy water and making the sign of the cross. We have physical hungers and thirsts that need attending to every day. We also have spiritual hungers and thirsts that must be attended to lest we fall on our face in exhaustion in the spirit life. Jesus Christ meets such a soul at the well in Samaria

‘With Enduring Love I Take Pity on You’

In the beginning, God created humans, like a potter making pots or a child forming play-dough. He impressed upon them the image of himself. He even planned to divinize them: to make them gods, like himself, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says.

By nature, they were merely his artifacts, things he had made, but he endowed them with the knowledge and freedom they needed to relate to him in inter-personal love—or, unavoidably, in scorn and rejection.

Adam and Eve did reject him. The pot rejected the potter who had made it; the play-dough turned on the child who had formed it, “as though what is made should say of its maker, ‘He made me not!’ or the vessel should say of the potter, ‘He does not understand.’”