Speaking at our place

The Roman Catholic Lectionary for the third Sunday in Lent contains the Gospel passage from John which tells of Jesus encounter at the well of Jacob with a Samaritan woman. The “Scrutinies” are a rite celebrated today as part of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults which uses this Gospel as instruction for those wishing to be baptized at Easter. Water, life, faith and trust are themes for today as we hear the psalmist implore us not to harden our hearts as Moses did at Meribah and Massah where his manner of bringing forth water for the complaining Israelites was sufficiently lacking in faith that, as Friar Jude Winkler notes, he was prohibited, according to rabbinic teaching, from entering the Promised Land. Paul proclaims to the Romans that our justification before God is in our faith and trust that the Love shown by Jesus and confirmed in us and Paul through our experience of the in dwelling Holy Spirit which Dick Hauser, S.J. of CreightonUniversity notes was poured into Paul’s heart,  totally  unexpected  and totally unmerited.  So dramatic was this experience for Paul that later he refers to it as a “new creation." The Gospel tells us that Jesus stopped at a well in Samaria as He journeyed from Judea to Galilee. Friar Jude comments that the well is the traditional place for Jewish men to find a wife. Our understanding of Church today is as the bride of Christ. Jesus encounters the thirst of the Samaritan woman for God and offers her life in intimate relationship with Love and Truth through the indwelling Spirit. Jesus is offering to become her seventh husband. The perfect number is seven and the dialogue between Jesus and the woman, a scandalous encounter to righteous Jews, opens hope within her that this might be the Messiah. Some scholars have noted how the “Samaritan Messiah”, The Taheb, is described as being like Moses. The similarity between Jesus, the new Moses, and the expectations for the Messiah is very high. In this Gospel, Jesus initiates an intimate encounter with a woman of an ethnic background rejected by the people of his culture and chooses her as His first missionary to gather  into Him those of the “white” harvest, Samaritans wearing their traditional white clothes, who were those despised by and outcast from the Jewish culture. Our contemplation of this episode in Jesus mission should soften our hearts to expand our family to the others we neglect or ignore.