IIIrd Sunday in Lent . Cycle A

EX 17: 3-7; ROM 5: 1-2, 5-8;Gospel: JN 4: 5-42

A thirst could be physical or spiritual. Often it is both, as in the case of the unnamed woman whose meeting with Jesus by Jacob's well gave us today's gospel story. Physically she is thirsty, thirsting for water, and that brings her to the well day after day. But spiritually also she is thirsty, an inner thirst which drives her from one man to another and for which she can find no satisfaction. By the time she meets Jesus she is in her sixth marriage, and yet she is able to tell Jesus "I have no husband," indicating that she is probably already looking for the seventh.
Numbers are often significant in biblical interpretation. According to the biblical symbolism of numbers, six is a number of imperfection, of lack, of deficiency. The woman in her sixth marriage is, therefore, in a situation of lack and deficiency. Seven, on the other hand, is a number of perfection, completion and sufficiency. Jesus comes to this woman as the seventh man in her life. She opens up to him and finally experiences the satisfaction of all of her soul's desiring, the full assuaging of her spiritual thirst.
God created us with a thirst for his friendship, for divine wisdom, and for everlasting truth and love not in order to torture us, but to lead us towards the real paradise. But when we let ourselves be seduced by plastic paradises instead, his treasures go undiscovered, and our desires go unsatisfied.
As the Catechism puts it: The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself .Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for. (#27).Isn't this the kind of experience we wish for ourselves and for all in this season of Lent?
This unnamed woman was coming to the town well in the middle of the day, the Gospel tells us, the hottest time of the day, when none of the other women in the town would be coming to the well. She wanted to avoid them or it could be that she was ostracized as a social leper by the community. Human society organizes itself by erecting boundaries - national, ethnic, religious, and gender. Jesus shows in today's gospel that in order to reach out to the other and create the necessary conditions for conversion, one must be prepared to challenge these man-made boundaries and break the dividing walls of prejudice.
According to the convention of the times, Jews were not supposed to interact with Samaritans. Walls of prejudice built on the foundations of ethnicity and religion kept them apart. Jesus broke these boundaries when he asked the woman for a drink, as her reaction shows:
"How is it that you, a Jewish man, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan woman?" Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans" (John 4:9).
That was not all. It was also against the moral norms of the day for a man to engage a woman in dialogue in a public place. And yet Jesus engages this woman in the longest dialogue we have in all the four Gospels, an act which even his own disciples saw as morally questionable:
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" (John 4:27)
If Jesus had kept within the bounds of the expected behaviour of his day, there was no way he could have gone beyond a superficial brush with the woman, which would invariably lead to superficial results. Why does Jesus make such a tremendous impact on the woman? Because for the first time in her life she meets a man who really understands her. In her excitement she forgets her water jar and physical thirst (and so also does Jesus); and she runs back to the village inviting the villagers to come and see "a man who told me everything I have ever done" - probably the first man to know her so well without rejecting her. Before you know it the convert has become a missionary bringing others to Jesus and to the joyful experience of conversion.
When Jesus reveals himself to her, her life turns around, one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. She runs back to the village announcing the good news to anyone she can find. And we know from the Gospel that Jesus and his disciples ended up spending three days there, and the whole town came to believe in him. They said to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world." (4:42)
We see that there are two stages in the believing or conversion process: a. believing because of what someone told us about Jesus, and b. believing because we have come personally to know Jesus ourselves. Lent is the period when the Church invites all her children who still believe on the strength of someone else's witnessing to come to Jesus personally and believe, not because someone told us, but because we have known him and experienced his love personally in our own lives.
Evangelization is as some one said - one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread. We should lead the hungry and the thirsty to the table of life. Let’s ask ourselves: Can I do what she did? Invite friends and neighbors to Jesus and salvation?
When Jesus became personal with this woman and started asking embarrassing questions about her five husbands, she cleverly tried to change the subject and talk about religion. She didn’t want Jesus to get personal. But Jesus wanted to free her, forgive her, shape her life in a new direction, and change her. He wanted to offer this woman living water. At the end of the long heart-to-heart conversation Jesus revealed himself to her as the Messiah, which in turn led her to faith in him.
We need to allow Jesus free entry into our personal lives. Jesus wants to get personal with us, especially during this Lenten season. Jesus wants to get into our “private” lives. We have a “private” personal life which is contrary to the will of God. Christ wishes to come into that “private” life, not to embarrass us, not to judge or condemn us, not to be unkind or malicious to us. Rather, Christ comes into our “private” personal life to free us, to change us and to offer us what we really need: living water. The living water is the Holy Spirit. The living water is the Spirit of Jesus and his love. We can find this living water in the sacraments, in prayer and in the holy Bible.

In the words of that Samaritan woman let’s pray: Lord give me that living water, so that I may never be thirsty again.