3rd Sunday of Lent
John 4:5-42
Today, the Church offers us a particularly rich table of God’s Word. How can we understand today’s Gospel and make it fruitful for our spiritual life?
In the Catholic tradition, we assume that biblical texts have several levels of meaning, and none of these levels is unimportant. We speak of the ‘four senses of Scripture’:
The literal sense teaches history,
the allegorical sense, what you should believe,
the moral sense, what you should do,
the anagogical sense, where you are going.
What did actually happen in Samaria back then? We have heard the story, and I don’t need to recount all the details. The long conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman first led her and then the whole town to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and Saviour of the world. That is roughly the literal meaning, in a nutshell. We see here how Jesus extended his mission from the Jews to the Samaritans and how successful he was in doing so.
According to the literal sense of the text, the woman apparently lived after five marriages in a non-marital relationship with a man whom she admits is not actually her husband. Interestingly, Jesus does not say a word about any moral judgement of the situation. Instead, he just shows the woman that he knows her whole life. He does not condemn her. Therefore, she trusts him and begins to believe in him. At the end of the conversation, she forgets the water from the well, drops the water jar, runs back to the village and proclaims Christ as the Messiah. St Augustine interprets the water jar as ‘the fallen desire of man that draws pleasure from the dark wells of the world but is never satisfied for long.’ According to Augustine, the moral sense of the passage is that, like the Samaritan woman, we should convert to Christ and renounce the world, leaving behind the desires of our earthen vessels, and following a new way of life as Christians.
However, the text can be interpreted spiritually in an even deeper way. A key to understanding this is the fact that Jesus meets a woman at a well who wants to draw water. This motif appears several times in the Old Testament: Abraham’s servant, who is to find a bride for Abraham’s son Isaac, meets Rebekah at a well. Jacob meets his future wife Rachel at the well. Moses meets his future wife Zipporah at the well. Each time, it is about a bridegroom finding his bride.
And now Jesus sits at the well and meets the Samaritan woman…
Let us listen to the central passage once again:
“The woman answered him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.”
A very old allegorical interpretation sees the woman as a symbol of the entire people of Samaria and the five husbands as the Torah, the five books of Moses, which were given to them when they were still part of the people of Israel together with the Jews. The woman has separated herself from these five men. That means, the people of Samaria were no longer faithful to the Torah.
But who then is the man with whom the woman is now together, but who is not her husband? ‘You have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband,’ said Jesus. ‘The one you now have’ – that is the man standing before her. That is Jesus himself. He is not ‘her husband’ because the woman and her entire people have not yet come to believe in him. But Jesus wants to become her husband, in a spiritual sense. The conversation between the woman and Jesus finally ends with Jesus’ words: ‘I who speak to you am he.’
Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus explicitly refers to himself as the ‘bridegroom.’ And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul compares the love between husband and wife in marriage to Christ’s love for the Church. Christ is the bridegroom of the Church.
This leads us to another allegorical interpretation. St Augustine writes: The Samaritan woman “is a symbol of the Church not yet made righteous. Righteousness follows from the conversation. She came in ignorance, she found Christ, and he enters into conversation with her. […] The fact that she came from a foreign people is part of the symbolic meaning, for she is a symbol of the Church. The Church was to come from the Gentiles, of a different race from the Jews. […] We must then recognise ourselves in her words and in her person, and with her give our own thanks to God.“
Let us return to the beginning of the conversation, with this interpretation in mind. Jesus said to the woman, that is, to us, the Church: “Give me a drink!” St. Augustine comments: “the one who was asking for a drink of water was thirsting for her faith.” Christ thirsts for our faith.
But then Jesus adds something else: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
Christ thirsts for our faith, but at the same time he promises us living water, which he wants to give us to drink.
Here we encounter the anagogical meaning: that which awaits us in eternity. Jesus says: “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
All our longing, all our desire for life and salvation, will be fulfilled in Christ. When we receive him in the sacraments, he himself will become a wellspring within us, from which eternal life flows to us.
Let us summarise what today’s Gospel teaches us:
Jesus is truly the Christ, the Messiah, the Bridegroom of the Church, the Saviour of the world. He thirsts for our faith in him. When we convert to him, he will give us living water that will satisfy all our thirst for life and salvation. He himself is the source of this living water. Let us now drink from this source, in the Holy Eucharist!
