Last Sunday, we encountered Our Lord glorified on the Mountain.  He allowed his apostles and us a glimpse of His divine nature and His full glory.  This Sunday, Jesus comes down the mountain into our ordinary lives, and he encounters us in our most vulnerable; he encounters us in our weakness and in our sin.  

The story of the Woman at the Well gives us a very important insight into how Christ reaches out to us, specifically as our Redeemer.  When Jesus meets this woman at the well, she needs Redemption; she needs to be saved.  The woman has been isolated from the community as a Samaritan and as a sinner.  But Jesus enters the scene and meets her face-to-face.  Notice: Christ is not disgusted by her.  But he also doesn’t pretend that everything in her life is hunky-dory.  Our Lord draws near and offers her something new; something besides condemnation on the one hand, or permissiveness on the other.  He offers her salvation.  This is what makes Christ’s message unique.  Plenty of religions are morally permissive; and plenty of religions condemn.  But the authentic message of Christ is something different: it’s a message which is neither of those things: it’s much more subtle and much more worthwhile.  God calls us to honesty about the things in our life that are not as they should be; and he shows us mercy. 

We see that in the life of this woman.  Up to this point, she’s drifted:  she’s gone from husband to husband.  She’s tried to satisfy her thirst: her thirst for love, for fulfillment, for meaning: but her search has just been a series of distractions, and has left her even more thirsty than before.  We also thirst: thirst for fulfillment and for meaning in our lives, but we too are distracted constantly by the things of the world.  These could be things inside us—envy, pride, lust—or things outside of us, things the world claims will make us happy: things like self-indulgence, power, love of money: these things appear to quench our thirst, but they’re salt-water: they actually dehydrate us and rob us of our joy and even our very life.  And Christ won’t let us stay there.  To give us a way out, he offers living water.  He gives living water to this woman, and he offers living water to us.  And this is the great mystery of our salvation, of our dynamic relationship with God: friendship with God, and living life virtuously and purposefully, is the living water that will actually quench our deepest thirst.  Will we choose to drink from that living water, or will we continue to drink instead from the stagnant, bitter water of sin.  If we can summon the courage to choose God, everything will start to change.  When the Woman at the Well finally makes her confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah, when she accepts what he offers, she immediately drops her jug of water.  She drops everything she had brought to that moment, she leaves the stagnant water of her futile attempts to quench her thirst behind.  She moves forward in freedom, to tell others that she had indeed encountered the Lord, that her life was changed.  When we truly believe that Jesus is Lord, when we pray and worship and work on living life well, we desire less and less to drink from false streams of lesser things, and wish more and more to be nourished by God Himself.  

At the end of the story, we see how this sinful woman, the least likely candidate, is transformed into a witness of Faith for others.  She loudly exclaims to the people what the Lord had done for her.  When we are set free from sin and given Eternal Life, we are able to be a light of God’s love for the world.  On this journey, we need God’s help constantly.  The temptation to turn back to our distractions can be strong.  We still feel pulled toward the saltiness of that water, even though we know it does our thirst no good.  So God offers us his help constantly, but especially during this season of Lent.  The Lord invites each of us to be set free from our sins: by trusting him, by humbly confessing our sins and weaknesses to him, and by having the courage to drink deeply from the well of living water, the fountain of mercy.  Let us approach Him with steadfast trust and Faith knowing that He has already come to us, already decided to stop a moment with us, to reach out his hand and offer us the living water of Eternal Life.