St. Monica and the Mothers' Coffee in the 4th centuryAt John 4:1-30 is related what was perhaps one of the most extensive dialogues that remained written in the Gospel. It was not between Jesus and an apostle, a temple priest or a scholar of the word. Rather, it was with a sinful, alienated and marked woman, not a Jew, but a Samaritan. Jesus, who always thirsts for souls, as when on Calvary's cross he said "I thirst", at the foot of Jacob's well he said to this Samaritan woman: "... I thirst".Give me to drink. But if you knew the gift of God and recognized the one who asks you for water, you would ask me and I would give you living water. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever drinks of this water (of the well) he shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst".
Under the unforgivable glare of the burning sun of the deserts of the region of Samaria, with a panorama discolored by drought and aridity, a dazzling contrast is painted between human realities and divine promises. In this desert, rivers of living waters will flow into eternity. The drama of the life of a woman with deep and insatiable affective deficiencies was about to be transformed. To her usual and daily experience of exile and desolation due to error or sin, she will be promised the experience that liberated souls live in spiritual intimacy with God who intertwine after finding themselves at some decisive crossroads in life.
Thirsty hearts
Jesus was talking to a woman anonymous to the readers but well known in her town. Throughout her life she was trying to fill notable voids with failed experiences of failed love. It is these deficiencies in human beings that become urgent but fruitless searches. The Samaritan woman had lived through five love failures which could no longer be camouflaged or excused.
Those five love breakups came into her life laden with insecurity, contempt, abandonment, irrelevance, lack of appetite, sadness and desolation. But how does one water the desert of Samaria until it blooms, and how does one transform a life plundered of so much innocence, purpose, fulfillment and happiness? It is the question that is heard so much in the offices of psychologists, life counselors, and spiritual guides. The answer would be this: only by accepting an offer not to be refused: the Creator of the seas and rivers will divert one of them from its course to force it through a dry heart until it is soaked with new illusions and hopes.
Humanity with a woman's face
The Samaritan woman is not only a used or aged woman's face with the blows of life; she is also the one who represented at that time the sins of all the people of Samaria who had built a temple on Mount Gerizim in disobedience to God, alienating themselves from the Jewish religion and customs. The Samaritans at some times in their history worshiped 5 gods brought from 5 pagan regions. When Jesus speaks to this woman with 5 husbands, he speaks to the whole region.
Personal sins and social sins often resemble and intertwine. Sinful humanity has the face of a wounded woman, and the sin of a nation has its origin in the pain of a girl raped of her innocence or of a creature outraged of her dignity and destiny.
The confessional next to the well
Jacob's well is that improvised confessional where souls thirsty for love will continue to arrive, but overflowing with pain. The wounds of the past are contaminated and stagnant water that threaten to make us sick. The thirst in the heart of a wounded woman has many names and adjectives: thirst for relevance, beauty, youth, purpose, successful motherhood with fruits and legacies. The Lord Jesus, physician and healer of pierced hearts, points out and confirms that the needs of the soul are as real for survival as those of the body, and offers generous portions of love and forgiveness. "Take of the water that I offer you, for the time will come, and it is near at hand, when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth." What an announcement! What a prophecy for a world that yearns for what would most sustain it: the constant presence of its God! And what an offer so impossible to refuse!
It is time to stop begging for crumbs of love when the Bread of Life is speaking to you. And if you accept God's gift, come out of anonymity and let yourself be recognized as a free and healed woman.
A healed woman will be positioned and empowered to transform many, as when at the end of John 4, it was she, and not Jesus' disciples, who ended up evangelizing Samaria. She is the daughter, the wife, the motherThe teacher, the catechist, the courageous and assertive woman who allowed herself to be healed in order to become the bearer of healing for many. Sit down with Jesus in the "Jacob's well", or better yet, in the confessional and in front of the Blessed Sacrament, to begin or complete the most extensive and complete dialogue you have ever had with Him, and I assure you that you will never be thirsty again.
