We all have something in common with the Samaritan woman. What could it be that we all have in common with the Samaritan woman? It isn’t that we are all Samaritans, at least presumably not so, either in the ethnic sense or in the religious one. The Samaritans being, at least religiously, not connected with the mainstream of Judaism.
They only acknowledge there to be five books to the Bible, whereas most Jews acknowledged several more in what we would now call the Old Testament. We do not believe that worship must happen in that place that this woman of Samaria mentions, then neither do we also say that it must happen in Jerusalem. So we’re not Samaritans.
We are not all women. Probably about half the room is not. Maybe a little over half the room is actually.
So we are not all Samaritans or women, but we have something in common with the Samaritan woman. It is not that we have, most of us, I would imagine, been married five times, maybe once or twice. But if you come to me and say that you’ve been married five times, my mind goes to the canonical paperwork that I’m going to have to make the very difficult decision to delegate to Father Palma to deal with, with the words, this hurts you more than it hurts, or this hurts me more than it hurts you, which is just not true.
But we have something in common with the Samaritan woman in that we all thirst. But thirst, in some way, is the inescapable condition of being human. And I don’t just mean thirst for water.
Obviously, on that level, we need we need water or we will not live. The old maxim they teach you in Boy Scout wilderness survival that you need, you can last two weeks without food, two days without water and two minutes without air. We do need water to survive, but our thirsts go a bit broader than that.
There’s a lot of things we need to survive. But beyond simple survival, we are thirsty. To be human is to be needy and to not be able to fulfill our needs on our own.
Because nothing we have ultimately came from us. It all came from someone else and ultimately from the hand of Providence. And everything that we will receive will be handed to us from without.
Of ourselves, we cannot sustain ourselves. Of ourselves, we are insufficient. And so to be human is to be in a constant state of need and a constant state of desire to reach beyond ourselves to fulfill that need.
We are all thirsty and we’re all reaching out for something to drink. And perhaps it is that we reach to the table next to us to pick up our drink so that we will not be physically thirsty. All the way up to reaching across time and eternity to the everlasting God in whom alone is our fulfillment.
And everything in between. But ultimately, there is only one thing that can make us not thirsty. And that is that living water that is the presence of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promises to us.
He approaches this woman and he asks for something to drink. Here is the one through whom the Holy Spirit is sent and he is asking for a drink. Here is the one who promises living water and he is asking for a drink.
It says he is thirsty and in body he is thirsty because he allowed himself to suffer the things that we suffer. He took on our human nature. He isn’t just some hallucination.
He got tired. He got hungry. He got thirsty.
He bled. He experienced anxiety. He died.
And here he is thirsty. But he thirsts for something even deeper than that, which is why he asks this woman for something to drink. What he wants to drink of is her faith.
Something that she of herself would be powerless to give to herself, just as every one of us is powerless to create faith within ourselves. Faith isn’t just white knuckling it into believing in God. It begins in God himself.
It begins in God giving us the grace of faith to which we then have to respond. It begins in the faith we receive in baptism, that in their love for us, our parents or guardians, our godparents bring us to the font. In its love for us, our mother, the church pours out that gift of faith.
And while the answers are made for us in that moment, we then are taught to hear and respond to that call to faith that is established in us by God. And Jesus thirsts for our faith our whole life long. He thirsts for the faith of a Samaritan woman, someone who is here an outsider, that according to the etiquette of the time and of the religious and social circumstances, a Jewish man would not speak one-on-one to a Samaritan woman because the Jews viewed the Samaritans as enemies.
And it would be highly inappropriate for him to do this. And we could go down that rabbit hole that so many do where that’s the thing they focus on, that here is Jesus bucking the social norms of his time as though that was the most important thing, as though the God who ordered the heavens and the earth is going to care about what we find mannerly, but what he does care about is her faith. And so they enter into this dialogue about water.
This water will make you thirsty again if you drink it, or everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. This water will never fulfill you because it is not the living water that I come to give. And she asks for that water then because here that gift of faith is beginning to be manifested in her.
She asks for that water that will keep her from ever being thirsty again. And then there’s a shift in gears. Then Jesus says something that doesn’t seem to follow.
Go call your husband and come back. What does that have to do with anything? Because they’ve been talking at this point about water. The setup is Jesus is thirsty.
He stops at this well. Here comes someone from nearby to drink from the well. They talk about where real water comes from.
It’s the living water Jesus comes to give. And so the pause here, go call your husband and come back because she has had faith awakened in her. She doesn’t attempt to hide the reality of the situation.
She speaks up authentically. She speaks the truth. I do not have a husband.
Jesus answers her and says, you’re right in saying this for you’ve had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true. Jesus says this in all boldness because it is the truth because he is the truth.
And because this is all about awakening faith and responding in faith, he speaks the truth to her because he is truth itself. There’s no disputing that. And she may not yet realize that, but because here she is acting from a faith that he has awakened in her and she doesn’t become resistant.
She doesn’t argue with him. She doesn’t try to excuse what she’s done. She answers simply and humbly because once you have faith and are hearing the voice of God, there’s nothing else you can do.
She says, I can see that you are a prophet. She sees that there’s a reason that he’s able to speak to the truth of what she’s done. Jesus cries out to us in thirst as well.
Jesus thirsts for our faith. And when we listen to him thirsting for our faith, we come to him to ask for that living water. To hear him in faith means to hear the promise of that living water that we receive in the Holy Spirit and that gives us that clarity to see what he sees in us.
And it may sound a little funny than if we put ourselves into the shoes of the Samaritan woman. We put ourselves into the story and hear Jesus saying to us, you have five husbands. And as I said, that isn’t applicable to, I would imagine, most of us.
But think of what this woman has done in her thirst and her desire for fulfillment. She has given her heart away to five different people and yet she is still thirsty. And we don’t have to be talking about marriage or even entering into serial matrimony over and over again because we do the same thing.
In our thirst and our desire to be fulfilled, we give our hearts away to five or ten or a thousand different things, which does not accomplish our fulfillment. It accomplishes our anxious distraction from how deep our thirst is. But only in confronting the depth of our thirst can we find the one who can go deep enough to slake it.
The one who calls out to us in his thirst for our faith. The one who awakens that faith in us that causes us to see that only the living water he gives us can really provide for us and fulfill us. In giving our hearts away five or ten or a thousand times a day to thousands upon thousands of alien thoughts, of distractions, of any number of things to stir our passions, we find ourselves not only unfulfilled but unsettled because the chasm within us is infinitely deep.
And the more things we put in it that are not God, the more we realize how deep it is, the more deeply we realize the separation from goodness itself and its fullness. And so then the path back is simple. To put away the things that we have attached ourselves to, to put away the things that we have given our hearts to in our vain attempts to answer our thirst, to hear Jesus thirsting for our faith, to give him what will fulfill him in his thirst.
The response in faith that says, Lord, give me this water forever.
