Last Sunday, we encountered Our Lord glorified on the Mountain before Peter, James, and John.  He allowed 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 in our weakness and in our sin.  

The story of the Woman at the Well gives us a very important look into how Christ reaches out to us as our Redeemer.  When Jesus meets this woman at the well, she has been isolated from the community as a Samaritan and as a sinner.  But Jesus enters the scene and meets her face-to-face.  He asks her to “give Him a drink.”  He initiates this encounter.  The woman is stunned first that He would be speaking to her at all, being a public sinner as she was; she’s stunned again when he offers her something, offers her “living water.”  Living water is fresh.  It moves.  It gives life and it cleanses.  And in this case, it represents even something far deeper: it is a sign of the Eternal Life which the woman so desperately needs, living water to wash away the tepid standing water that had built up in this woman’s soul from her sins and her lack of attention to God.  Christ is not disgusted by her.  But he also doesn’t pretend that everything in her life is hunky-dory.  Jesus draws near and offers her something new; something besides condemnation on the one hand, or permissiveness on the other.  He offers her salvation.  

Up to this point, the woman has drifted:  she has 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, 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.  Each and every person struggles with this: we are all affected by sin and brokenness which threaten to make our souls stagnant like standing water.  But it is at this moment that Our Lord wants to draw close to us, to reveal Himself, and to give us a choice.  He offers us the gift of Faith and He offers us the gift of freedom and forgiveness, giving us the living water of the Holy Spirit so that our lives might be turned to God and freed from sin.  And this is the great mystery of our salvation, of our dynamic relationship with God.  

Even at this moment, we find ourselves at the fountain of mercy.  Christ is asking us if we would make the choice to drink from the water that will quench our thirst, or whether we will choose to continue drinking instead from the still, bitter water of sin.  If we can summon the courage to choose God, to choose life: 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 has indeed encountered the Lord.  When we truly believe that Jesus is Lord, when we pray and worship and work on our relationship with Christ, we desire less and less to drink from false streams of lesser things, and wish more and more to be nourished by Goodness 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.  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.  And so God offers 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 to him in the Sacrament of Confession, and in 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 Eternal Life.