3rd Sunday of Lent 2020
Exodus 17:3-7; Romans 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42.
Living water, light and vision, resurrection; these are the themes of the next three Sundays. It isn’t easy for us in the Western world to grasp the literally vital significance of water. Indeed, at the moment, we are likely to be slightly cynical about water. We have seen too much of it in recent weeks. It has inundated the fields, made the roads impassable and, in some parts of the country, flooded people’s houses. Consequently, we may struggle to enter the mindset of people for whom, even today, water is a rare and precious commodity sometimes obtained only through a back-breaking trek to and from a well perhaps miles away.
The Israelites in the wilderness were, we are told, “tormented by thirst”. You and I will have been thirsty at times, but can we honestly claim to have been tormented by thirst? To such people as the tongue-cracked, gaspingly thirsty, the promise which Jesus makes, of springs of living water, must have seemed like paradise.
Notice to whom He makes this promise. It is to a woman, a Samaritan woman, a Samaritan woman of ill-repute. There are three grounds there for excluding Jesus from speaking to this person at all, let alone entrusting her with one of His most significant promises.
Firstly, she was a woman. In first century Palestine, as in the Muslim world today, men did not speak to unknown women. Secondly, she was a Samaritan, a heretic, someone who had broken away from the true faith, who actively repudiated aspects of it. It is as if the Lord was speaking to one of the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, who, you may recall, rejected many of the Church’s teachings embodied in the Second Vatican Council, and effectively set up a rival Church whilst claiming it to be the true Church.
Thirdly, the woman was a public sinner. It is conceivable, I suppose, that she was particularly unfortunate in her choice of husbands, and that all five of them died, leaving her free to marry again; in fact, though, she hasn’t married again, but is living with someone who is not her husband. Presumably that is why she is compelled to come to the well alone, at the hottest time of the day, the sixth hour being noon: the other women have ostracised her, probably suspicious of someone who may have designs on THEIR husbands.
So there is every reason, social, religious, and moral, why Jesus should steer clear of this woman, a sort of schismatic Christine Keeler or Mandy Rice-Davies, God rest both of them. Yet not only does He engage her in slightly racy conversation, He reveals to her His identity, with one of the “I am” sayings which express His self-identification with the God of the burning bush, as He declares Himself to be the Messiah; and He expounds to her one of the most important themes of His teaching, namely the presence of the Holy Spirit as a spring of living and life-giving water, welling up in the heart of the believer.
Why does Jesus do this? Is He expressing His frustration at the hard-heartedness or, at best, indifference of the chosen, Jewish people? Is He reminding us, in a very practical way, not only of His concern for outsiders and sinners, but of the startling truth that such people may be closer to the Kingdom of God than we are, though we are members of the new chosen people? There is much to ponder there, along with the richness of the promise of living water, the Holy Spirit who has come to dwell within us and who, if we are responsive, will quench our spiritual thirst as we make our own way through the desert of Lent and of life.
