Alliance for Catholic Education
Third Week of Lent - Sunday, March 8th
What would it be like to have a relationship with someone who only spoke 10-20 words a day to you? (Parents of teens need not answer publicly.) It’s hard to get to know someone who only gives you 10-20 words a day. Yet, this is how the Gospels ask us to get to know Jesus. We come to church, we listen to the Gospel, in order to come to know Jesus better; and most days, we only get 10-20 words out of him.
And that’s why I love this Sunday’s Gospel – Jesus and the Woman at the Well. She won’t let Jesus depart, until she really comes to know him, and he comes to know her.
Jesus and this woman are alone during most of their encounter. We know from our own lives, that when we have sustained time alone with someone, we often come to really know them. Nowhere in the Gospels is there a longer one-on-one encounter between Jesus and another person. The Gospels don’t record any long, intimate conversations between Jesus and Peter late at night. But real relationship takes time. It takes back-and-forth questions. It takes work. It takes intimacy.
All of which is precisely what we get in this Gospel. It’s the one story where we get to see someone really pester Jesus. To listen to what he has to say, and then to question him, to not be satisfied with his answers, to want more. An accurate adjective to describe this woman of five husbands and counting is “insatiable.” She’s restless, troubled, anxious, compulsive. She’s not all that different than most of us.
This Samaritan woman requires Jesus to slow down, and spend considerable time with her, helping her get her life right again. The Good News is: Jesus is willing to spend it.
This woman needs to discover that the places she has been looking to quench her thirst are not ultimately satisfying. And Jesus decides to slow her down, and teach her that there is a deeper well inside of her – her relationship with God – that alone will quench her thirst.
Our hearts are stone water jugs sometimes – we spend our lives trying to keep them full, only to find they keep feeling empty again. Perhaps in this long, slow encounter we hear this Sunday, Jesus is inviting us, especially in Lent, to slow down, spend time alone with Him, go deeper within, and come to know the One who will fill our hearts, so that we will never thirst again.