Third Sunday of Lent
“We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” Jn: 4, 42
I will never forget meeting Vin Scully, the famous Dodger announcer. It happened in a totally unexpected way while attending a baseball game in San Diego 40 years ago!
The Dodgers were playing the Padres. Just by chance I mentioned to one of the ballpark ushers what a thrill it would be to get to talk to perhaps the greatest announcer in baseball history. A few minutes later, the usher came back and told me Mr. Scully would be delighted to meet and gave me directions to his booth!
For some 40 minutes, I got to sit “at the feet” of a near-god in the sports world – who, incidentally, could not have been more gracious and welcoming.
The opportunity of a lifetime!
Completely unexpected. Totally out of the ordinary.
The woman in today’s gospel story also had a completely surprising, chance encounter – one far more significant than mine, to say the least. But both instances have something in common:
Good news, even transforming events, can happen in the most unexpected places and in the most unusual of circumstances.
The treasure for us today is that we are privileged to eavesdrop into the longest recorded conversation Jesus ever had with anyone in the gospels!
To top it off, it’s a dialog that has several unexpected and extraordinary twists to it – a Jew talking to a Samaritan, and a man talking to a serially married woman who is seeking water from a well.
Several social boundaries were violated in this discussion. But both Jesus and the woman decide that these long-held restrictions were insignificant considering the importance of this chance encounter.
Instead, the primary focus turns out to be something as ordinary as water.
Water is a life essential. But Jesus wants to help the woman to recognize water’s more profound meaning.
He has her full attention – and ours, as well.
Jesus even says that the water he is talking about is a different kind of water, a water with a deeper meaning, a water for which she will never thirst again.
Jesus calls it a “living water;” a water that will result in a “gushing up to eternal life.”
This dialogue strongly suggests the gift of baptism and its importance in the life of a follower of Jesus. It signifies plunging into a new kind of life with a new kind of purpose.
At first, the woman doesn’t get it – as often we don’t either. She doesn’t understand that Jesus is inviting her into a whole new way of seeing life and living life.
And yet, she’s hooked. She wants to hear more. There’s a hunger within her that keeps her in the conversation. She realizes that this is not just an everyday person. There’s something about this man who is talking to her that sets him apart.
Little by little, she begins to have an awakening. And a thirst develops within her. She even says: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Next Jesus reveals that he is fully aware of her history of failed marriages. She then graduates from calling him “Sir” to realizing that he is a “prophet.” Then Jesus takes her a step further and shares with her a much deeper insight into who God is, the “Father in Spirit and truth.”
The woman is becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the depth of revelation Jesus is offering to her. She now takes another step towards understanding, and refers to Jesus as not just another man, or even a prophet. She now comes to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the one who “will tell us everything.”
The woman is so transformed by the conversation that she is filled with excitement and cannot help but leave her water jar, run back to the town, and, bursting with excitement, announce to the people “Come see a man who told me everything I have done.”
This famous interaction between Jesus and a Samaritan woman – who is never named – concludes with the report that “Many more began to believe in him … and they said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.’”
The many-times married woman with no name becomes for us a model of what true conversion looks like.
She represents the growth that can take place for each of us: knowing Jesus first as a man, and then progressing to the recognition that he is a prophet, and then the Messiah, and finally the “savior of the world.”
It’s what we are called to in our own experience of water – the water of baptism, the water that symbolizes our immersion into a person whose life becomes like that of the Samaritan woman – someone who steadily grows into an understanding of who Jesus truly is and falls in love with that experience.
Out of a thoroughly unexpected event, the joy of getting to meet “the savior of the world” takes place.
Along with it also comes the joy of realizing that even a multiple married, unnamed woman of a religious sect that we hardly understand can meet the Lord and have her life transformed.
And then, we get it: the same unexpected encounter can happen for us too!
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
NOTE: Quotes from the book Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church, by Austen Ivereigh:
“Francis has called for a ‘poor Church, for the poor,’ to go out as sheep among wolves. Converted by mercy, a poor Church would seek every chance to offer what it had freely received, mercy, by ‘touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others.’ For what best communicates ‘the heard of the Gospel’ are ‘works of love directed to one’s neighbor.’ He emphasizes two signs of the Kingdom of God in today’s world: the inclusion of the poor and the need for dialogue in society. Together they represent the ‘change of era.’
“What matters is that we ‘go out.’ Cardinal John Henry Newman, canonized by Francis in October 2019, famously observed that ‘to live is to change’ and that ‘to be perfect is to have changed often.’ What matters most in our spiritual life is possessing this openness to be changed …. What blocks it is the fleeing from this openness: trusting rather, in ideology, structures, or an idealized sense of self. A saint is one who has moved out from those ‘false’ selves to become what God calls her to be.
“For Jesus, what matters above all is reaching out to save those far off, healing the wounds of the sick, restoring everyone to God’s family. Francis challenges the Church to be close and concrete, not distant and legalistic. People are hungry for God, hungry for dignity, yet too many stay away from the Church because of the attitudes of so many Catholics. The Church does not belong to us, but to God. He is the owner of the temple and the field, and everyone has a place, everyone is invited to find here, and among us, his or her nourishment – everyone!
The Lord is calling forth from His Church ‘missionary disciples who know how to see without inherited myopias, who examine reality through the eyes and heart of Jesus. And who take risks, act, and commit.’
