This Sunday’s gospel is one of my favourites. I love to hear Jesus having a real theological discussion with someone. And that someone is not only a lay person – not a Pharisee or a scribe – but a woman, and a Samaritan with a colourful life story.
In this episode, Jesus gives us a great example of how to meet someone exactly where they are. This is something that many Catholics are terrible at. In fact, I’d say most of us.
Jesus wants to come into the world through me – my example, my words, my actions. This Lent, I’m trying to remove some of the things in his way. A big one for me is always being right. The thing is, I usually am right. It’s a heavy cross, but I struggle along. And I meet a lot of other Catholics who are always right. This is usually in the comments box on various news or opinion stories about the church that displease them.
Most of us are not at our best when we meet in these settings. We get our backs up and simply hammer each other. We don’t listen. We don’t try to work out where that person is in life or in their faith.
We just lecture them with our half-baked, ill-formed opinions based on something we might have read once somewhere else online and have mostly forgotten now. So Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well is a master class in how not to do that. It’s a great Lenten gospel for dialling back your expertise a bit.
Jesus is always trying to make a connection with every person he meets. He is always listening, always trying to hear what makes the person tick. But he’s not doing that as some kind of debating society trick to find a weak spot in the person’s argument so that he can then wallop them.
He’s trying to find common ground with a view to bringing them closer to the God who absolutely loves them. Just look at the quality of that conversation Jesus has with the woman. He treats her like a human being, and like someone who has something to contribute.
We know he’s successfully connected with the woman when she refers to “our father Jacob,” acknowledging that both Jews and Samaritans have a common ancestry.
He doesn’t make fun of her for being stupid or uneducated or not understanding him straight away. He also doesn’t lead with her irregular lifestyle. He gives her a chance to explain her living arrangements – which, given the times, may not have been her first choice, or indeed her choice at all.
When she shies away from the full story, Jesus gallantly corrects her gently and affirms her for being honest (when really, she hasn’t been completely honest at all). This is the mercy of God in living action – always giving people the benefit of the doubt; always looking for the grain of truth in the excuses and obfuscation.
But even when it turns out that she’s had rather a lot of husbands, Jesus doesn’t cut her out of the theological conversation. He stays engaged with her and keeps going.
In return, Jesus receives her profession of faith in the messiah who is coming, and he can reveal himself to her as that messiah. And she believes him enough to run back into town and tell everyone that there’s someone at the well who can read minds and might be the messiah.
The results of this little encounter – a simple request for a drink of water – are wonderful. Jesus can reach a lot of people who would have ignored him otherwise. But if Jesus had been snooty with that woman – if he had stood on ceremony and ignored her – would his visit to that town have borne any fruit at all?
If he’d cut her off when it turned out she didn’t understand him straight away, or when it turned out she’d been married a few times, would it have borne any fruit?
What obstacles do you put in the way of Jesus coming into the world through you when you treat people badly in the name of being right? How many times do you kill his mission stone-dead because you try to flatten people who disagree with you?
Have you brought these vanquished souls closer to Jesus, or driven them further away by being such an awful example of a Christian?
So there is plenty to think about this week in Lent, for me especially. Let’s continue to prepare the way of the Lord.
