Third Sunday of Lent
February 27, 2005
John 4:5-42

In its particular style, John’s gospel provides a play rather than a narrative. Moreover, most of the play is a dialogue so that the reader can easily become a participant by taking over the role of the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well. With the customary feature of “Johannine irony” – a term modern scholarship uses for describing the ongoing presence of a second meaning or subtext or “double entendre” – Jesus and the woman speak of water and of thirst in both a physical and a spiritual sense.

It is most fascinating is to observe how in the process of this conversation the identities of the two interlocutors become revealed. Most commentators focus on the step-by-step revelation of Jesus as Redeemer, Messiah, source of heavenly life, transmitter of wisdom and grace. But parallel to this revelatory process is another development, equally gradual and sincere: the woman goes through a process by which she exposes her dissolute life, thirst for forgiveness, guidance and instruction.

What fits so well into our Lenten journey is the spontaneity by which self-knowledge and repentance come about in the Samaritan woman by the mere fact that she encounters Jesus and, through Jesus, God’s mercy. That turn of the conversation is, in fact, unexpected and surprising. “Go and call your husband. . . I have no husband. . . You are right. . . You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband. . .” At this point we, the readers – or spectators of the play – realize that Jesus’ words speak to the Samaritan woman both from without and from within. The man to whom she speaks is not a stranger, not an interrogator spying on her privacy, but a voice speaking with more authority than her own conscience. You cannot reach out to the “living water” that God offers to you unless you make order in your life of broken commitments, disorderly liaisons and cravings. We learn how reflection upon our desire for “living waters” can lead to a new birth to life. We recall the theme of the first dialogue of John’s gospel in the previous chapter: “Unless a man is born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).

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