My Dear People,

Today’s Gospel deals with Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.  Whenever there are well-mentioned meetings of a man and a woman in Scripture, it generally indicates a nuptial image. In Genesis, it was at the well that Jacob met Rachel and they eventually married. In Exodus, Moses met the seven daughters of the priest of Midian, who watered their flock at the well. Moses helped them by driving the shepherd away, enabling them to continue watering the flock. Later, he married Zipporah, one of the seven daughters.  

Jesus meets the woman of Samaria! She represents the future church; she has a checkered life, indicating that all who became Christians would have a checkered life without Christ; and Jesus is the bridegroom of the future church that will be transformed. 

Next Jesus asks the woman of Samaria for a drink. Note: the request for a drink was the sign Abraham’s servant used to determine if Rebekah was the divinely intended bride of Isaac (Gen 24:14). (Interesting also is that the only other place in the Gospel of John where Jesus will request a drink is from the Cross.)

Jesus and the woman begin to discuss wells of water, and at one point Jesus says, “the water I shall give will become in Him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  This is a subtle allusion to the song of Solomon 4:14, where the bridegroom calls his bride a spring of living water. When we receive the water of Jesus, we enter into a nuptial relationship with Him!

Finally, the subject of nuptiality and marriage is explicitly broached by Jesus when He asks the woman to call her husband and return. “I do not have a husband,” she replies. And Jesus responds: “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

This is a woman with a checkered personal history, which is no doubt why she is coming to the well at noon, to avoid the other women in the town who come at the usual times of dawn and dusk. But the woman’s personal history is an icon of the history of her people. She is a woman of Samaria, after all. The Samaritans were mixed descendants of the poor people of northern Israel (left behind by the Assyrians in 722 BC) and five foreign nations brought in by their conquerors, with whom the Israelites intermarried and worshiped their gods (see 2 Kings 17: 24-34). Keep in mind that the author of 2 Kings downplays the role of the Israelites left stranded in the land, whose presence we know about from other sources. 

Then, after the Judaeans returned to Jerusalem in the late 500s BC, the northern Samaritans bit by bit gave up the worship of other deities and returned to worshipping the God of Israel. But they did not worship according to the covenant with David (whereby Jerusalem was the place of worship). They built their own temple (mentioned in John 4) in Gerizim and tried to be in relationship with God without following the proper form of the covenant. What do we call it today when people live together but are not in a proper covenant relationship? (See the connection with John 4:18).

The woman’s experience mirrors that of her people. The people of northern Israel, her ancestors, left their husband-God all the way back in Kings 12 (see Hosea 1-3 all oracles directed to northern Israel). Now YHWH, (God) the Bridegroom of Israel (Hos. 2:14-23), has returned to woo the people of Samaria. 

He is successful. Not only the woman at the well but also the townspeople themselves come to believe that He is the Messiah: “We know that this is truly the savior of the world.” 

Throughout this whole process runs the theme of the living water of God:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give, will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. 

This is the water of Baptism, the water of the Holy Spirit. Jesus will say later, on the last day of the feast of tabernacles when water was being poured out on the altar of the temple: 

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, “Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:37-37)

If sin has dried up the living water, it is a good week to schedule an appointed time for Confession. 

[Parts taken from Reflections on the Sunday mass Readings by Dr. John Bergssma]

Yours in Christ, 

Fr. Vincent Clemente