Sunday of the Samaritan Woman The Very Rev. Steven J. Belonick 2017 I. Today, we remember the encounter that took place between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob s Well. It is certainly one of the most beautiful stories in the Gospels. Above anything else, it is a story that reveals Jesus desire to share His life with us. We often do not consider this aspect of Jesus work, if we do, it is not emphasized. Rather, we think of Jesus handing out and dispensing certain spiritual gifts and graces, but keeping His distance. But that is not the Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus says the woman whoever drinks of the water that I give will never thirst. The water that I shall give shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life. Do you see how our Lord wishes to share His life with us; how He desires to be the source and the fountain of Life in us. We could even go so far as to say 1
that He thirsts to share His life with us. II. The same invitation is given by Him to partake of His Body and Blood. Take eat, this in my Body which is broken for you, for the remission of sins. We should not think of the Eucharist as some sort of spiritual aspirin that God gives to make us feel better, nor given to simply forgive us of our sins; or as an antidote for the evils of this fallen world. It is first and foremost a sharing of His life with ours. Even the word communion suggests the idea of sharing. Jesus said: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. In another instance, Jesus told us: I am the vine and you are the branches. We know what this means. The branches only thrive when they are fed by the vine. The Christian path, then, is the way of life that God desired it to be, a shared life with Him and with each other. Communion with Him and with each other is what makes us alive. Without it, we remain 2
isolated; only the darkness within oneself remains; loneliness and separation thrive in such isolation. So God gives us life as relationship, a shared thing, through communion with Him and through communion with others who share that same life. This is the first thing Jesus was offering to this lonely Samaritan Woman at the well all by herself; cut off from everyone. He was saying abide in Me; join Me; live in Me and allow Me to live in you. III. The vehicle for this shared life was what Jesus called living water which He alone could give. What is living water? Someone once explained the living water in this way. Whoever lives with Christ and in Christ, has in his heart a spring of water perennial and inexhaustible; a peace that passes understanding; a joy deeper and more real than any other joy; a life far more abundant that anyone else can know a perpetual fountain, clear and clean, cooling, and 3
refreshing. St Symeon the New Theologian described it as sweet peacefulness. St Gregory of Nyssa described it as sober intoxication. So, Living water is Christ s gift of His life flowing through the Holy Spirit in a person s life. The person who experiences this is transformed from within. They become different than what was before. They exude in their mannerisms, in their attitude, and in their disposition, the loveliness of Christ. They are, as St Paul described, aglow with the Spirit. Living Water is Christ s Life abiding in us. It is a shared Life. IV. Finally, the sadness in the Samaritan woman s life is that she tried to find joy and contentment in things that could not provide them. In her case, she thought that the men in her life would bring joy and they would be able to fill the deep empty well within her. She tried five times, with five men, and each time her hopes were dashed in futility. In the Book of the Jeremiah, there is warning about 4
choosing such things over God. Jeremiah writes: My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and have dug out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Through the prophet, God lamented the fact that His people kept searching to fill their souls with the things that could not provide them. And yet they rejected Him who could quench their thirst. You and I still make the same fatal choice. We continue to choose wells and waters that leave us still thirsty and unsatisfied. V. If you and I can identify with this, then we need to accept the fact that something is obstructing the flow of the living water that Jesus desires to give to us. We have to figure out what that obstruction is, dislodge it, and turn our whole hearts to Him. VI. In a beautiful reflection, Fr Lev Gillet, of blessed memory, wrote these words of Jesus 5
conversing with a human soul. I think they approximate the interior conversation of Jesus with the woman at the well. /// Under your sin and behind all your transgressions and all your failings, I see you. I see you and I love you. It is not the wrong you do that wrong which one must neither ignore, nor deny, nor extenuate. But underneath, I see something else, something that is still alive. The masks that you wear, the disguises with which you clothe yourself, may serve to conceal you from the eyes of others, and even from your own eyes. But they cannot hide you from Me. I pursue you to a greater depth than anyone has pursued you.of you I could say then; not of that you that the power of darkness has so often led astray, but of the you such as I desire it to be, of the you who lives in Me, of the you which could still visibly exist. Become visibly what you are in My thought. Allow the powers that I put in you to become active. There is no divine gift whatsoever to which you may 6
not aspire. For you shall receive them all if you love with Me and in Me. VIII. Today s Gospel reminds us that Jesus thirsts to share His life with us. He says so lovingly, Abide in Me and I in you. What He desires to share with us is His own Spirit, which can be compared to a fountain of Lifegiving Water. But the decision to desire or to extinguish the desire for this abundant life is ours to make. St Augustine once said: Without God we cannot; without us, God will not. VII. Let s learn the lessons from the Samaritan woman. She left Jacob s Well. And she left her water bucket at the well because she had found the Fountain of Life in Christ Jesus. Amen. 7