Today’s Gospel gives us  Jesus’ revelation of himself as the Source of Living Water. Hence, the passage chosen from Exodus tells of the Jews’ complaining about their thirst, a figure of human longing for God and spiritual satisfaction. The rock which Moses strikes represents God who gives the water (God’s own life), essential for our spiritual life.  This reading shows us a time when God’s people literally thirsted, and God satisfied them.  The Israelites had been slaves for several generations in Egypt, and for the most part, they had forgotten their ancestral religion and their God’s Covenant with their patriarch Abraham.  Now their new leader, Moses, was telling them that their ancient Lord had at last heard their cries and was now leading their escape from Egypt back to their homeland.  In spite of the mighty deeds God had done for their liberation from Egypt, the former slaves complained that in Egypt, at least they were not thirsty. It is astounding to see their lack of Faith.

In the second reading, Saint Paul asserts that, as the Savior of mankind, Jesus poured the living water, or the gift of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts.  We need the Holy Spirit to sustain us spiritually, just as we need water to sustain us physically.  Through Jesus, God gave us the Spirit when we were dying of thirst.  Paul realized that he and all the Jews who kept the Law of Moses were trying to become justified on their own.  But keeping the Law is not an adequate means of justification because we are unable to make ourselves worthy of God’s favor, whether by good works, by keeping the Commandments, by rituals, or by prayers.  The word grace, in this context, means the gratuitous, unearned, undeserved love and favor of God for us.  By living water in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to this grace as a relationship with God and an active participation in His life.  According to Paul, redemption or justification is the gratuitous gift of God manifested in Jesus’ saving death on the cross.  By virtue of his death, Jesus has made just, or put in right relationship with God, every sinner who will appropriate His saving gifts by Faith.  Faith, then, is the admission that one cannot justify oneself, and that it is God who will grant us justification by His grace.

The background history: The mutual hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans had begun centuries earlier when the Assyrians carried the northern tribes of Israel into captivity.  The Jewish slaves betrayed their heritage by intermarrying with the Assyrians, thus diluting their bloodline and creating a “mongrel race” called the Samaritans.  The Assyrian men who were relocated to Israel married Jewish women, thus producing a mixed race in Israel as well. Hence, southern Jews considered all Samaritan bloodlines and their heritage impure.  By the time the Samaritan Jews returned to their homeland, their views of God had been greatly contaminated.  By contrast, when the southern Hebrew tribes were carried off into captivity, they stubbornly resisted the Babylonian culture.  They returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, proud that they had compromised neither their religious convictions nor their culture.  So, when the Samaritans offered to help to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, the southern Jews who had returned from exile vehemently rejected Samaritan assistance.  Consequently, the rejected and ostracized Samaritans built their own temple on Mount Gerizim.  But in 129 B.C. a Jewish General destroyed it, a slap in the face for Samaritan dignity that continued to sting for centuries, deepening the mutual scorn and hostility between Samaritans and Jews.

The Divine touch and conversion: So, the water-seeking Samaritan woman who faced Jesus that day belonged to a heritage rejected by the Jews.  In addition, she expected scorn simply because she was a woman, for in the ancient Middle East, men systematically degraded women.  Finally, this Samaritan woman seemed unwanted by her own people.  Since she had had five “husbands,” and was living with a sixth “lover,” she seems to have been considered by fellow villagers a social leper, and she seems to have been driven from the common well of the town by the decent women.  Perhaps she had not stopped wishing that somewhere, sometime, some way, God would touch His people — that He would touch her!  Jesus’ meeting the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well illustrates the principal role of Jesus as the Messiah: to reconcile all men and women to the Father.  Hence, Jesus deliberately placed himself face-to-face with this person whom, apparently, no one else wanted.  Jesus saw, in this social outcast and moral wreck, a person who mattered to God.  The Samaritan woman must have unburdened her soul to this stranger because she had found one Jew with kindness in his eyes instead of an air of critical superiority.  She was thirsting for love that would last, love that would fill her full and give purpose to her life. Just as Jesus confronted the woman at the well with the reality of her own sinfulness and brokenness, so we must, with God’s grace, confront our own sinfulness and, in doing so, realize our need for God.

The conversion leading to witnessing: Jesus not only talked with the woman, but, in a carefully orchestrated, seven-part dialogue, he guided her progressively from ignorance to enlightenment, and from misunderstanding to clearer understanding, thus making her the most carefully and intensely catechized person in this entire Gospel.  Jesus always has a way of coming into our personal lives.  When Jesus became personal with this woman and started asking embarrassing questions about her five husbands, she cleverly tried to change the subject and talk about religion.  She didn’t want Jesus to get personal.  But Jesus wanted to free her, forgive her, shape her life in a new direction, and change her.  He wanted to offer this woman Living Water. [Scholars have debated as to precisely what Jesus meant when he referred to living water. As Raymond E. Brown has explained, there are two possibilities: living water means the revelation or teaching which Jesus came to give, and it also means the Spirit which Jesus bestows (The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible, Vol. 29, Doubleday, New York: 1966).] The living water may refer to Baptism and the gift of the Spirit, the source of life.  It may also refer to Jesus as the source of life.  At the end of their long, heart-to-heart conversation, Jesus revealed himself to the woman as the Messiah, which in turn led her to Faith in him.  This growth in understanding on the part of the woman moved through several stages: first, she called him a Jew, then Sir or Lord, then Prophet, and finally Messiah.  When the Samaritans came to hear Jesus because of her testimony, their affirmation of Faith reached its climax as they declared that Jesus was the Savior of the world, and that they believed in him not just because of what she had said “for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”   Step-by-step Jesus had led the  marginalized woman in her Faith journey, and her enthusiastic response, powerful personal testimony and brave witnessing with its dramatic results in her town, stand in vivid contrast to Nicodemus’ hesitance (3:9), the crowd’s demand for proof (6:25-34) and the Pharisees’ refusal to acknowledge the hand of God in the healing of a blind man (9:24-34).