Jesus is tired & thirsty from a
long journey; he meets a Samaritan woman at a well and asks her for a drink of
water. This Gospel story may not be
shocking to us, but viewed through the social norms of ancient Israel, this was
a very bold act. The well was the source
of water and the source of life for the small communities of ancient Israel as
women gathered at the well a couple times a day to get water for their families. The mid-day sun was very hot, so this task
was usually performed in the early morning and evening hours as the women of
the village came together at the well at about the same time. In addition to being a time when the women
performed this important chore, gathering water from the well was a social
gathering when they took a break from the hard work of running a household.
In today’s Gospel, the
woman at the well was alone in the hot mid-day sun, suggesting that the other
women were shunning her. It isn’t shocking
that Jesus and the Samaritan woman were at the well at the same time, but it
was daring that he spoke to her in public, since men in ancient Israel didn’t
speak to women unknown to them in public places.
This Gospel story resonated with
me, since I had to go to a well to get water when I was Peace Corps volunteer
in Guinea, West Africa. The first time I went to the well, I saw all of the
women gathered around, waiting their turn to get water, chatting and
socializing. All of a sudden, several
of the women started laughing and screaming and pointing to the bucket that
they had just pulled out of the well. A
large turtle had come up in the bucket of water, all wiggling and squirming
trying to get out, quite a surprise to the women who weren’t expecting anything
out of the ordinary. As got my water and
started on the journey back, I realized that I was the only man present,
surrounded by about 25 women with huge buckets of water that they carried on
their heads back to their homes.
When I was in Africa, and when I
lived in the jungles of Ecuador as a missionary as well, getting water from the
well or from the river was a commonplace chore for me. It seems odd and out-of-place in modern
America, but we can takes things for granted in our lives, can’t we? It is all how we look at something, how we
perceive it. For my daily devotions, I
use a monthly publication called Give Us This Day, published by
Liturgical Press out of Collegeville, Minnesota. Each day, this publication chooses someone
who is a saint or an outstanding example of faith and it gives a brief
reflection about that person. One day
last week, they singled out the Samaritan woman from this Gospel passage,
naming her an Evangelist. Here she was,
separated and looked down upon by the villagers where she lived, and here we
are almost 2,000 years later naming her as an Evangelist and a great example of
faith. The law and Jewish tradition in ancient Israel tried to keep the Jews
from Judea from having contact with Samaritans, since the Samaritans had
intermarried with the local people and were seen as having corrupted their
Jewish heritage. Yet, Jesus asked the
Samaritan woman for something to drink, he engaged her in conversation, and she
responded and asked questions and dared to even ask him about religious matters
as well. She admits to Jesus: “I know
that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ; when he comes, he will
tell us everything.”
On an interpersonal level,
the Samaritan woman, who had been unable to turn away from the hurts and sins
that had held her back in her life of faith, now experiences a conversion
through her interaction with Jesus. She
became his disciples in her own way and out of the reality of her life. In turn, her conversion and testimony are instrumental
in converting her town into believers in Jesus.
What started out as Jesus reaching out to a woman in a way that was
condemned by traditional Jewish law turned into a significant interpersonal
interaction that brought about her conversion to Christ, leading to the
conversion of an entire town.
As I thought about
today’s Gospel, I couldn’t help but think about the new evangelization that
Benedict XVI called us to as part of the year of faith he declared in order to
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. And just as the Samaritan woman had to first
connect her own faith to Christ before she went out to evangelize to her
community, we are called to deepen our own faith during this Year of Faith, and
then to evangelize others, particularly those who have left the faith for
different reasons. In the Mississippi
Catholic newspaper last week, it was expressed as – “KNOW your faith, SHARE
your faith, LIVE your faith.”
We can share our Catholic
faith in so many different ways. The
pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain that we’ve been following on our
Lenten journey draws people from all over the world. This pilgrimage is dedicated to St James the
Greater, but when St James arrived in Spain right after Christ’s death and
resurrection he was not successful at all in his missionary efforts. Spain remained a pagan country, James won
over very few converts, and he returned to Jerusalem defeated and dejected,
where he would soon die as a martyr for the faith, the first apostle to do
so. However, now almost 2,000 years
after his death, the Apostle James is bringing amazing numbers of people closer
to Christ. In fact, last year about
195,000 pilgrims complete the journey to Santiago de Compostela either on foot
or on a bike. When can sometimes get
discouraged in our evangelization efforts, but James is a great example of how
our evangelization efforts can bear fruits even when everything seems so
discouraging.
We are now in the middle
of our Lenten journey. As we take in the
different stories of our faith, as we hear about the Samaritan woman at the
well and about St James, may we take heart, may we learn and grow in our
relationship with God, and may we see ourselves in that same tradition as
Evangelizers of the Good News of Jesus Christ.
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