The Samaritan Woman at the Well – a homily by Alban McCoy OFM for the third Sunday in Lent 2021

Part of the genius of John’s gospel, for all its theological depth, is the way he sums up the whole of the Christian message in disarmingly simple stories. Though they differ in detail, each of these touchingly human stories carries the same message: people are saved by their encounter with Jesus from whatever weighs them down or holds them back. The woman taken in adultery, for instance, is saved not only from stoning but censure: instead, she finds forgiveness; the helpless cripple is able to walk again and, as a consequence, is able to care for himself not only materially but spiritually; the man born blind who is made able to see for the first time, recovers not just his sight but faith; and the wedding party at Cana is not only revived by Jesus’ intervention but reaches its cheering climax when water for purification is changed into wine for celebration.

But of all these stories, this exquisitely turned account of Jesus’ chance meeting at a well with a feisty Samaritan woman is one of the most vivid. At the heart of the story is the breaking down of barriers: the barrier of ignorance, the barrier of religious intolerance, the barrier of racism, the barrier of sexual prejudice and prudisness: but most important of all, the barrier of the past and, in particular, past mistakes.

The scene itself speaks volumes. Jesus meets the woman at Jacob’s well in the noonday sun. Now nobody drew water at that time of day; but given her marital status – or lack of it – the woman was doubtless avoiding the disapproval of the village gossips who, like all sensible people, came to the well in the cool of the morning and the early evening. The reference Jesus makes to her five husbands and his quip that the man she was living with now wasn’t one of them, is one of the best examples of our Lord’s quick, dry wit and gently ironic humour. (I knew a friar who would assure the congregation that his sermon was going to be brief, by saying: “As the woman at the well used to say to her husbands, I won’t keep you long.”)

Again, Jesus wasn’t helping his own reputation by being alone with her. Even if her domestic arrangements hadn’t been so colourful, it would have been considered unacceptable for an unmarried man to be alone with any woman, except his close relatives. But even more, no observant Jew would have dreamt of having a conversation, let alone share a drinking cup, with a Samaritan woman.

To Jews, Samaritans were heretics. In fact they were worse: they were despised as quislings. In the distant past, they’d collaborated, married and had children with their Assyrian conquerors. But by the time of Jesus, the attitude of Jews to Samaritans was blatantly racist. Samaritans, in Jewish eyes, could do no right: they had the wrong liturgy, the wrong theology and patently inferior morals. All that wrongness was summed up in their having built a Temple in the wrong place. (When it came to real estate, even then location meant everything, especially where Temples were concerned.)

This whole episode is a wonderful example of Jesus’ obvious attraction to and ease with the kind of persons supposedly ‘nice’ people look down on: it’s yet another example of how it was (and is) precisely people in trouble who understood him more easily than the untroubled. The complicated family arrangements of this five-times divorced, cohabiting, Samaritan woman, don’t provoke in Jesus censorious stricture, but humour, albeit gently challenging humour. Unlike the Pharisees then and all Pharisees, including Christian Pharisees, since, Jesus refuses to focus attention exclusively on the tribulations of the flesh or make them the scapegoat for all our other troubles.

The point of this remarkable story, then, is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of our salvation, except not knowing our need of it. That same assurance is given to all of us, whatever our past. This is a wonderfully encouraging story of hope and a reminder that the Christian gospel isn’t primarily a moral code. Moral integrity is, by definition, integral to our lives, of course, but the only measure of goodness is God Himself, who is, of course, Love Itself. And love, while it certainly creates laws, duties and obligations in our lives, was never itself created by obligation, law and duty.

The story also reminds us – and this is especially important to remember during Lent - that the Christian gospel isn’t primarily about discipline and detachment. Detachment doesn’t mean not owning anything, but not being owned by anything – no thing, that is. And discipline isn’t mere self-restraint, imposed from without, but the ordering of our lives in the direction of the good – Goodness Itself - that we desire above everything else. Virtue and discipline are not in themselves the same thing. To reduce Christianity to good behaviour is to miss the point: it is much more.

What the Christian life means, primarily, is living and being “in Christ”: and that’s not a matter of effort, merit or achievement, but sheer gift. Christian life means living with the life he shares with us, his life: seeing, speaking, loving, as he did and does. St Paul expresses it perfectly. “I live”, he says, “now not I, but Christ lives in me”. And what does that look like, in practice? An old friend’s prayer, found after his death in a battered missal he’d kept with him throughout the Second World War, answers that perfectly: “Lord, so act in me, that all I do is done also by Thee.”

“For me, to live is Christ”, says St Paul. That’s where we find ultimate meaning, where everything in our lives comes together: little things and great things, suffering and consolation, the altar and the kitchen, life and death. That truth is the heart of Christian existence.