(page 36-37)
. . . None of this extraordinary encounter could have happened if Jesus had not been the most radical liberator who breaks taboos and crosses boundaries. He asks the Samaritan woman for a drink, crossing gender, national, religious, and moral boundaries. He is free to be fully human, humbly admitting his exhaustion, and asking a despised woman for a drink. For people in barren lands, the well is a source of life-giving water; in the biblical world it was also the place of covenant making and betrothal. For example, Isaac and Rebekah (Gen 24:45-48), Jacob and Rachel (Gen 29:1-13), Moses and Zipporah (Exod 2:16-21) all meet and pledge themselves to one another at wells. When John wrote his gospel he was well aware that Samaria had been the first region beyond Jerusalem to receive the good news (Acts 8:2-9; 9:31), and so it had moved from being a despised people with “no husband” to being “betrothed” to Christ. So in his chapter 4, John combines the characteristic attitudes and actions of the Johannine Christ with the symbolism of encounters at the well and the strong belief of the evangelist’s community in the validity of the acceptance of Jesus. John is writing after the fact of the historical acceptance of the Gospel, but sees it as what it truly is: an encounter with Jesus through the preaching of the early church. An intelligent, daring woman is at the center of the shocking inclusiveness for which our contemporary church is still striving.
Then, as now, Jesus makes those who respond to him into sharers in his freedom. The despised woman, who comes to the well at high noon to avoid the judgmental eyes and tongues of the other women at the usual drawing time of morning and evening, hurries back to her own town. She is no longer ashamed of the story of her life because she has a more urgent story to tell about the man who lowered a bucket into the well of her soul and drew up the deep living water within her. Now she can leave behind her usual water jar. She has been helped to see what she was looking for, what her own inner reality and truth are, and that she must worship the God in this spirit and truth. John presents us with a “litany” of names for Jesus. First the woman speaks to him as “Jew,” then “prophet”; as she hesitates to call him “Messiah,” or “Christ,” Jesus reveals himself as the one anointed with the Holy Name, the “I AM,” “YHWH,” in his human presence; and after Jesus has stayed in the woman’s Samaritan city, its inhabitants name him as “Savior of the world.”
When the disciples return with food, they are shocked, not so much because Jesus has been talking with a Samaritan, but because he has been relating to a woman! What Jesus tells them is that he has food that they know nothing about: the woman’s questions, her insights, her energy and acceptance have nourished Jesus, for in such an encounter he is doing the will of the One who sent him and sowing in Samaria the grain that will be harvested for eternal life.
The woman announces to her Samaritan village what she experienced with Jesus, but until they have experienced him personally they cannot truly believe. Only then can he be named “Savior of the world.” This is the faith that calls us, with the elect of our parish communities, to a scrutiny of what quenches our deepest “thirsts,” what nourishes our spirits as well as our bodies. Do pleasure, power, exclusiveness satisfy us? With what “enemy” are we unwilling to sit and talk, to eat and drink? How tolerant are we of those who belong to other religious or cultural traditions? Do we believe in the value of creative conversation, even when exhausted, even with our own young people who may have questions—sometimes abrasive, often welling up from deep longings within them? Can we move out of our comfort zones, leave our old “water jars” behind and welcome the gifts of God that are being offered to us, especially in this privileged season of Lent? . . .