March 10, Third Sunday in Lent, Jn. 4/5-42

1 Background

There is no reason to think that this story does not refer to an event that happened during the life of Jesus, especially since a conversation between him and a Samaritan woman would have been a bit shocking in the early Church. However, in its present form it is a theological reflection in dramatic form, indeed one written by a very skilled dramatist. It is not impossible that in fact this was a one act liturgical play acted out by the very early Christians as part of the baptismal ritual. The Sufi mystic Rumi once wrote apropos of God and humans, "thirst seeks water, but water seeks thirst." That would be a good summary of today's Gospel. Certainly Jesus defies all the politically correct conventions of his time by talking to such a person, thus denouncing implicitly all ethnic and gender prejudices. Certainly also it is a love story, harking back to the love stories at the well of Isaac and Jacob. But above all it is a story about thirst, about St. Agustine's "You have made us for yourself alone, O lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee."

2 Story

Once upon a time there was a man who was a prisoner of war. The camp in which he was held was a cruel, harsh place and the guards were brutal. Many men died. Our soldier was sick often and hungry always. Once he almost died of thirst. But his worst suffering was the separation from his home and family and his fear that he would never see them again. Every day he prayed that he might live long enough to go home and quench his thirst for his family. Finally after many years the war was over and he went home. He was deliriously happy to be reunited with his wife and children and they with him. But as time went on it seemed to him that they didn't understand all that he had suffered and the terrible thirst he had experienced for their love. You don't understand, he said often, you just don't understand what it was like. Finally his teenage daughter said to him, "Daddy, you don't understand what it was like for us."