“Each individual layman must be a witness before the world to the resurrection and life of the Lord Jesus, and a sign of the living God. All together, and each one to the best of his ability, must nourish the world with spiritual fruits (Gal 5:22). They must diffuse in the world the spirit which animates those poor, meek, and peace-makers whom the Lord proclaimed blessed (Mt 5:3-9). In a word: ‘what the soul is to the body, let Christians be in the world.’” (Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 38)
Today and the next two Sundays, parishes with catechumens use Cycle A readings, rather than Cycle C, to work with the Scrutinies. Scrutinies are self-examinations and prayers before the congregation to help the elect have the courage and perseverance to move through the last half of Lent as they prepare for baptism.
Today I am breaking from my usual path of discussing all three readings. Today it is just the Gospel from Cycle A.
John 4:5-42
Jesus is tired and hungry. He has recently learned that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been put in jail. While one of the main Pharisees, Nicodemus, has come to talk with Jesus “by night,” generally, religious leaders are NOT seeing Jesus as the Messiah. They are increasingly giving him trouble. Jesus and his disciples decide to return to Galilee from Judea. They take the faster route through Samaria.
It is about noon—in the heat of the day. Jesus stays by Jacob’s well, while he sends his disciples off to get some food in the nearby town, Shecham. A woman comes to the well.
What happens is so exquisitely beautiful! Read it at home and let the scene unfold in your mind and heart.
Jesus begins with an act of friendliness, “Give me a drink.” He invites her into ordinary relationship.
The woman is more confused than impressed. She says, “Why are you asking me for a drink?”
Jesus responds by inviting her to relationship through him to God. “If only you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him instead, and he would have given you living water.”
The woman is intrigued. Her mind is engaged. “Sir, you do not have a bucket and this well is deep. Where do you expect to get this flowing water?”
Now that the woman is actively seeking, Jesus reveals himself to her, “Whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty; no, the water I give shall become a fountain within him, leaping up to provide eternal life.”
Then there is that essential moment: The woman says, “Give me this water…” The woman wants what God alone can give: “eternal life.” Her mind, heart, and will SEEK conversion.
Jesus moves her to conversion by telling her Truth. He tells her to go get her husband. She replies that she has no husband. Jesus lets her know she has only told him a partial truth: “You are right in saying you have no husband! The fact is, you have had five, and the man you are living with now is not your husband.”
Busted. But the woman doesn’t care; Jesus has her heart, as well as her mind. Without missing a beat, she says, “You are a prophet.” Jesus pushes Truth beyond his personal knowledge of her. “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and Truth.”
Now she believes enough that Jesus tells her, “I am the Messiah.”
With that, the disciples return with food, the woman goes to BOLDLY tell the whole town, “Come and see someone who told me everything I ever did. Could he be the Messiah?”
Jesus, fed by the living waters of Spirit within him, tells the disciples he isn’t tired or hungry any more. “Doing the will of him who sent me and bringing his work to completion is my food.”
The Model and the Woman and the Well
We have in this story Jesus’ model for evangelizing and changing the world:
- Start with human, friendly, humble relationship.
- Tie warm human relationship with something even better: warm relationship with God.
- Give the person time and space to seek God. Catch mind and heart and will.
- Speak Truth about who God is and who the person is. Let the person come to terms with it: metanoia (conversion)
- As the person rests in that truth, their created-in-the-image-of-God true self emerges, they change, they tell others, and change the world around them.
Questions remain for us: Did the woman repent of her many husbands habit? We don’t know. We assume so, but the Gospel is unclear about it. I’m not sure about Samarian custom, but Jewish women could not divorce their husbands. Divorce was a one-way process in which a man divested himself of a woman he no longer wanted as his wife. What was it about this woman that she could appeal to six men, yet five of them had either died or divorced her? All in a small town. Nobody had stoned her for adultery, but nobody kept her as wife.
What was it about her that she came to the well at noon? Plenty of commentators have noticed that, mostly assuming she was either looking for another man or so rejected by the other women that she chose to avoid them.
The woman’s history and character are suspect from many directions. Yet the Gospel is clear: she was changed and became an effective evangelist because she talked about what God did for her.
This well was at Shechem—which was where Abraham first settled on the land God gave him. It is where he came from Haran (Gen 12). The woman was a Samaritan—a descendant of the people who were such nobodies that the Babylonians left them in Canaan when they carried off the wealth and noble peoples 600 years before this conversation. This, too, is a rich symbolism: this woman and this work Jesus was doing with her was as much a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham (last week) as the birth of Isaac (or the birth of his progeny, Jesus).
Wow!
Model for Us, for Me
What does all this say for catechumens and those who guide them? What does it say for all of us who are to live by the Vatican II quote that began this reflection? “What the soul is to the body, let Christians be in the world”—what a powerful statement of who we are to be. The soul (mind-heart-will) animates the body. When our souls leave our body to go to God, our bodies die. The soul gives life.
We are imperfect witnesses, maybe with souls as clouded and suspect as the woman whose conversion was food for the tired Jesus. Yet we can ALL be friendly. If we have ever had even one metanoia, we have something to share beyond friendliness. We can tie changes in us with Truth and awareness of God. We can let someone see what God has done for us.
Maybe, today, think about those steps of conversion that Jesus used with the woman. Think of how those steps have happened in your life. Maybe once. Maybe multiple times. Be in the woman at the well story. Now, who and how do you tell?
If you can’t think of yourself in this story, then maybe Jesus needs to meet you at your well here and now. Beg him to come. See what God will do.
Prayer:
Lord, as You call us to Yourself, You call us to share the Fruits of Your Spirit in us (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, generosity, goodness, self-control) with everyone in our life. That makes each of us a tangible Jesus at the well of our own community. In my life, Lord, there are many who have been Jesus to me and had the conversations that led me to metanoias. Thank You for each and all of them! Lead me, guide me, now, to further conversion as I need it, and to be to the world around me what the soul is to the body.
