This Sunday our Lenten Journey begins a series of three Sunday Gospel readings from St.  John. These readings focus our attention on the Scrutines which will be observed at one Mass each weekend. The Lenten Scrutines are an important part of our RCIA process that provide an opportunity for our RCIA candidates as well as our entire Community to reflect on our own journey from sin to grace.

Today’s Johannine reading is the beautiful account of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. Her encounter with Jesus is a journey that took her from sin to grace. The account is rich in dialogue between Jesus and this woman. It shows us a patient and inviting but a challenging Jesus who leads this woman to see her own sinfulness and ultimately is able to bring her into a life of grace and to become an evangelizer herself. The episode centers on the image of water at Jacob’s well and it reveals for us and the Samaritan Woman that Jesus is the source of life-giving water.

St. John tells us that Jesus, tired from his journey, came to sit at Jacob’s well just as the Samaritan woman approached with her water jug. Both were violating social convention by engaging in conversation with each other. The first words of Jesus to the woman are “give me a drink.”  Little did she know that Jesus was thirsting for her conversion from sin to grace. In a developing way, she refers to him as Sir, then as a Prophet as he confronts her moral life, and finally she realizes that he is the promised Messiah and asked can he possibly be the Christ. Now she understands that Jesus is thirsting for her just as she is thirsting for the one who is the source of life-giving water. Her conversion calls her to invite others to come and meet him.  As St. John writes, "Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him because of the word of the woman who testified, 'He told me everything I have done.'"

Lent began with a Jesus in the desert, a place of no water, dryness and death.  Lent moves this weekend to Jesus, as a person of life-giving waters. It is a time for us to confront our own sinfulness and dryness; to realize that Jesus continues to thirst for us each day. Can we pray with the psalmist, “My soul is thirsting for the living God, when shall I see him face to face?" (Ps 42:2) When we thirst for the living God, we will come to see him face to face in the stranger, the refugee, the undocumented, the elderly, the sick,  the homeless, and in those sitting around us in the STM Chapel. Once we have drunk of this living water, we will want to spread the good news of Jesus by our invitation to others to meet this person Jesus and to worship him in Spirit and Truth.   As Jesus invites the Samaritan woman to reject sin and live a life of grace, we must ask ourselves if we have made that journey, particularly through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, a primary means of preparing ourselves to celebrate the Great Paschal Feast with our RCIA brothers and sisters.

For a visual meditation on this passage see Sculptor Ivan Mestrovic’s bronze and marble sculpture on the Campus of Notre Dame University at the following link.

Notice the relaxed inviting image of Jesus; notice the humble, sincere posture of the Samaritan woman.