A reading from the book of Exodus (17:3-7)
In their thirst for water the people complained to Moses, saying, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, only to make us, our children and our livestock, die of thirst?’ Moses cried out to the Lord, saying, ‘What am I to do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me!’
Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, taking some of the elders of Israel with you; in your hand take the staff with which you struck the river, and go. I shall be waiting for you there on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out for the people to drink.’ Moses did so, with the elders of Israel watching. He gave the place the names Massah and Meribah because the Israelites had quarrelled and put the Lord to the test by saying, ‘Is the Lord among us, or not?’
At this point in the book of Exodus the people have crossed the sea and are travelling through the desert towards Sinai (Horeb). The privations of desert life lead them to regret coming out of Egypt. God has provided food for them in the form of the manna and the quails (Exodus 16). Moses is now blamed for the lack of water, and he fears for his life. The place where water sprang from the rock is given the names Massah and Meribah, Hebrew terms which mean ‘trial’ and ‘contention’. This theme will occur again later in the story of the wandering in the desert after the stay at Sinai (Numbers 20). Life-giving water is the theme in each of the readings today.
Psalm 95 (94) also refers to the incident of Massah and Meribah, and proclaims God as the ‘rock of salvation’.
A reading from the letter of St Paul to the Romans (5:1-2, 5-8)
So, now that we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; it is through him, by faith, that we have received access to the favour of God in which we are living, and we exult in the hope of the glory of God. Hope does not disappoint, since the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us. When we were still helpless, at the due time, Christ died for the godless. Scarcely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person perhaps someone might undertake to die. So God proves his love for us, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
St Paul restates the situation of the faithful Christian, justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and at peace with God. Furthermore, ‘the hope of the glory of God’ is bestowed on the Christian, since the love of God ‘has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit’. It is no surprise that this love is said to have been ‘poured’ like water: water is essentially life-giving, and baptism is being recalled. The gifts of God in Christ came to us despite human sinfulness. Christians are the recipients of God’s gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism, and throughout their lives.
A reading from the holy gospel according to John (4:5-42)
So Jesus came to the Samaritan town called Sychar, near the land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there and Jesus, tired by the journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon, when a Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?’ – for Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus replied to her:
‘If you knew what God is offering
and who it is saying to you, “Give me a drink”,
you would have asked him,
and he would have given you living water.’
She answered, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get this living water? Are you a greater man than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it, himself and his sons and his cattle?’ Jesus replied:
‘Whoever drinks of this water
will be thirsty again;
but anyone who drinks of the water that I shall give
will never be thirsty again:
the water that I shall give
will become an inner spring of water, welling up to eternal life.’
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or go on coming here to draw water.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Go and call your husband and come back here.’ The woman answered him saying, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right to say, “I have no husband”; for you have had five men, and the one you now have is not your husband. You spoke the truth there.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, though you say that the place where people should worship is in Jerusalem.’ Jesus said:
‘Believe me, woman, the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
You worship what you do not know;
we worship what we do know;
for salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour is coming – and is now here –
when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth,
for such are the worshippers
whom the Father seeks.
God is spirit,
and those who worship him
must worship in spirit and truth.’
The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah, the one called Christ, is coming; and when he comes he will declare everything.’ Jesus said, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.’
At this point his disciples returned and were surprised to find him speaking to a woman, but none of them asked, ‘What do you want?’ or, ‘Why are you talking to her?’
The woman left her water jar and went off to the town and said to the people, ‘Come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done. Could this be the Messiah?’ They came out of the town and they made their way towards him.
Meanwhile, the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, have something to eat’; but he said, ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’ So the disciples said to one another, ‘Has someone brought him food?’ But Jesus said:
‘My food is to do the will of the one who sent me,
and to complete his work.
Do you not say,
“Four months and then the harvest”?
Well, I tell you,
look around you, look at the fields;
they are white for the harvest!
Already the reaper is being paid his wages,
already he is bringing in the grain for eternal life,
so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.
For here the proverb holds true:
one sows, another reaps;
I sent you to reap
a harvest for which you did not labour.
Others have laboured;
and you have come into the rewards of their labour.’
Many Samaritans of that town believed in him on the strength of the words of the woman’s witness, ‘He told me everything I have done.’ So, when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them. He stayed there for two days, and many more came to believe on the strength of the words he spoke to them; and they said to the woman, ‘We believe no longer because of what you told us; we have heard for ourselves and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.’
Three great Johannine gospels punctuate the road to Easter. They feature: the woman of Samaria (John 4); the man born blind (John 9); and the raising of Lazarus (John 11). The theme today is ‘living water’, the topic of conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria. Jesus arrives, tired and thirsty in the middle of the day, and sits by the well, the well of Jacob. The woman is unnamed, she has a chequered history, but she is ready to learn. After a discussion about ‘living water’, the question of the identity of Jesus arises. He is surely a prophet, or perhaps even the Messiah. Jesus declares: ‘I am he.’ This concludes the dialogue, for the woman, having discovered one who can give ‘living water’, leaves her empty water jar, and rushes off to call the villagers. This missionary disciple, the despised woman befriended by Jesus, brings them to faith, and that faith is confirmed by hearing the message from the lips of Jesus himself. They know that ‘this is truly the Saviour of the world’.
How is the journey of faith of the Samaritan woman like your own?
Pray that on our journey we may be open to the surprises of God.