“I thirst.” Jesus said these words from the Cross, and He probably said them as He came out of His 40 days in the desert. And He also probably said them to Himself in the scene recorded in today’s Gospel text, as, tired from His long journey, He sat down by a well in the midday sun.
But, while Jesus’s thirst was genuine and physical in each of these cases, His was also a spiritual thirst that came from being surrounded by sin — from entering into sinful human life, the life of those who had been cast out of the lush Garden of Eden into the starkness of the barren desert wasteland of sin. It is not His thirst, since it is not His sin, but He accepts it as His own.
Thus spiritually parched He encounters someone who has contributed greatly to His thirst: A woman who comes out at the hottest time of the day because she wants to be alone — she is an adulteress, a notorious sinner both spurned by others and afraid of their animosity.
And yet this is exactly why Jesus is here — He’s come specifically to meet her, because she is a sinner. And Jesus deals with her the way He deals with all sinners. First, He goes someplace He knows sinners will be. Just as He would go to dinners with tax collectors, He goes to the Samaritan well in the middle of the day to meet this outcast adulteress. And as He does with all sinners, like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, He patiently waits for her to come to Him. And when she approaches, just as He directly challenges the hypocritical Pharisees, He almost immediately confronts her with her sins: “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.”
Still, as always, He treats each person uniquely and does whatever is necessary to help the particular sinner. So while the temple money-changers required a whip to recognize their sins, this broken, lonely woman needs a gentle but clear voice to help her to recognize hers.
It’s incredible; all Jesus does just to save sinners. He comes seeking us, suffers for our sins, waits patiently for us, tells us the truth and approaches each of in the way best suited for us personally.
Yet even all this isn’t enough to win sinners back. Because He also gives us and respects our free will, our freedom to choose. Since Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden so many have chosen to be satisfied temporarily with pleasures of the world, and die in sin, rather than accept the love and grace of God and live forever.
And so it is with the woman at the well. Unlike Eve before her, and rejecting her own former life, she now chooses well and repents. So that while before, she carried her empty jar as a sign of her dependence on the pleasures of the world, now Scripture tells us: “The woman left her water jar and went into the town.” Now leaving her sins behind, she’s not afraid to run to her neighbors and share the good news that she has found the Messiah.
The choice might seem simple and obvious to us. But if it’s so easy, why do you and I have such a hard time imitating her? Why don’t we admit our sins to Christ, and then leave them like an empty water jar and run out and tell the good news to our neighbors? This Lent we must choose: to thirst in sin, or to drink deeply of the life-giving waters of Jesus Christ.
Fr. De Celles is Parochial Vicar of St. Michael Parish in Annandale, Virginia.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
