Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar,
near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Jacob’s well was there.
Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well.
It was about noon.A woman of Samaria came to draw water.
Jesus said to her,
“Give me a drink.”
His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him,
“How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?”
—For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.—
Jesus answered and said to her,
“If you knew the gift of God
and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink, ‘
you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep;
where then can you get this living water?
Are you greater than our father Jacob,
who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself
with his children and his flocks?”
Jesus answered and said to her,
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again;
but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst;
the water I shall give will become in him
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty
or have to keep coming here to draw water.”Jesus said to her,
“Go call your husband and come back.”
The woman answered and said to him,
“I do not have a husband.”
Jesus answered her,
“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.
What you have said is true.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain;
but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus said to her,
“Believe me, woman, the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
You people worship what you do not understand;
we worship what we understand,
because salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour is coming, and is now here,
when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth;
and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.
God is Spirit, and those who worship him
must worship in Spirit and truth.”
The woman said to him,
“I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ;
when he comes, he will tell us everything.”
Jesus said to her,
“I am he, the one speaking with you.”At that moment his disciples returned,
and were amazed that he was talking with a woman,
but still no one said, “What are you looking for?”
or “Why are you talking with her?”
The woman left her water jar
and went into the town and said to the people,
“Come see a man who told me everything I have done.
Could he possibly be the Christ?”
They went out of the town and came to him.
Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat.”
But he said to them,
“I have food to eat of which you do not know.”
So the disciples said to one another,
“Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“My food is to do the will of the one who sent me
and to finish his work.
Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest will be here’?
I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest.
The reaper is already receiving payment
and gathering crops for eternal life,
so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together.
For here the saying is verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’
I sent you to reap what you have not worked for;
others have done the work,
and you are sharing the fruits of their work.”Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him
because of the word of the woman who testified,
“He told me everything I have done.”
When the Samaritans came to him,they invited him to stay with them;
and he stayed there two days.
Many more began to believe in him because of his word,
and they said to the woman,
“We no longer believe because of your word;
for we have heard for ourselves,
and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.”
Do You Trust Jesus?
In this week’s Gospel Reading, Jesus invites the woman at the well into a relationship of trust. He is a Jew—the sort of person she expects to look down on her because she is a Samaritan. What’s more, he knows about her past. She has been through marital struggles: five husbands and now living with a man who isn’t her husband. And again, she must be regarded very poorly by her townspeople: she, a woman, comes to draw water from the well alone, at midday! (In the ancient Near East, women usually went to the well in groups, in the cool of the morning or toward evening.)
This mysterious Jew, however, doesn’t make fun of her lonely midday errand, nor does he mock her for her tumultuous past: he invites her into a conversation that unfolds into him offering to give her living water so she will thirst no more.
Jesus does not come into our lives to condemn us (Jn 3:17), rather He comes to offer us a true friendship (Jn 15:15) and new life (Jn 10:10). He comes to enter into a relationship with us. This relationship must begin with trust. Often, we are like the woman at the well, carrying within our hearts a history of sins of which we are ashamed, a past of many disappointments and wrongs done to us, a bitterness of things that didn’t work out, and a fear of the uncertainty of what lies ahead of us. The result is that we build walls and defenses to protect our hearts from being broken again; we make our own plans, so we don’t get disappointed again.
To trust in Jesus means to break down these walls—to let go of our past, and to surrender our future.
Jesus, our God, is fully aware of what we have done in the past. He knows what sins we have committed. He knows what mistakes we have made. He knows, too, how those we might have expected to love us failed or at least did not love us as we expected to be loved. When He comes to us, He knows these things and responds to them with divine mercy.
It was with divine mercy that Jesus spoke to that woman at the well, that He called St Matthew from collecting taxes (Mt 9:9-13), that He forgave the prostitute at Simon’s house (Lk 7:36-50), that he called St Peter, who himself acknowledged that he was a very sinful man (Lk 5:8). With the same divine mercy, He calls you and me. We must, first and foremost, trust that if we have truly repented of our sins, then Jesus has forgiven them, and He loves us despite our past.
Trusting in Jesus also means surrendering to His will for our future. The problem is that we often want certainty and total control of what is to happen to us, and this leads us to the error of self-reliance and murmuring, like the Israelites in the desert: they had only recently been saved from slavery in Egypt when they began to murmur because they saw no water. In their human limitedness, they could think of no way out. Their murmuring is even more surprising considering they had so far witnessed not one, but three miracles: the parting of the Red Sea (Ex 14:1-31), the sweetening of the bitter waters at Marah (Ex 15:22-25) and the raining down of bread from heaven (Ex 16:1-36). And that’s not counting the series of wonders that had led to their leaving Egypt in the first place! These signs should have been enough to ground them in a deep trust in God, that he could provide water for them in the desert.
They, however, tended to struggle with trust. Don’t we all?
Don’t we, all-too-often, when confronted by our own deserts of misunderstandings, insufficient resources, family problems, illness, bad grades, embarrassments, and the like, lose our patience and trust, and begin to grumble and murmur?
The good news is, as we see in the First Reading, God gives the Israelites yet another reason to trust Him: He provides them with water from the rock! God does not tire of coming after us even when we tend to go away from him and to distrust him. Jesus could have used the usual route any other Jew would have taken to avoid Samaria, but he specifically and intentionally passed through Samaria so that he could meet the woman at the well, and tell her that He was the Messiah she was waiting for to set her heart at rest.
We can trust Jesus. We can surrender our past to his mercy, knowing that He has forgiven us, and will heal all our wounds. We can surrender our future, our plans, our dreams, and our worries to Him, because He knows what is best for us, cares for us (1 Pt 5:7) and can accomplish far more for us than we could ever dream or imagine (Eph 3:20). He can love us like we are meant to be loved. We can hope in Him, and we know that this “hope does not disappoint us” (Rom 5:5).
As a signature on the Image of the Divine Mercy, Jesus asked St Faustina to write “Jesus, I trust in You.” It is a curious statement, but one that bears absolute significance, knowing that Our Lord’s message to us through those apparitions was that his mercy infinitely overcomes all our sins, our misery, our troubles, and embraces us, providing all we need on our earthly pilgrimage.
Jesus invites us daily to give him a drink (see Jn 4:7) of our trust in Him. This Lent is a good time to trustingly go to Confession and allow Jesus to wash us of our past offences, and to deepen our prayer life so as to know Jesus better and entrust our lives to His will more fully.
