Give me a drink. Jesus meets the woman of Samaria doing an ordinary chore of the day. He is tired and thirsty, so He wants a drink. The woman seems to resist at first. She puts up the barrier: you’re a Jew, I’m a Samaritan. Jesus gently ignores that and draws her inwards to a deeper level. He’s preparing her to understand that His “give me a drink” is actually a thirst for something much more than common water. He doesn’t want a drink from Jacob’s well, but from the well of her heart. He wants a drink of her faith, her love.

Even more profoundly, He leads her to recognize that she, too, is thirsty, not just for the water in the well but for the living water flowing from His Heart. It’s as if He is placing her mystically before His pierced side on the Cross. There is a mild melancholy in how He addresses her, “if you knew the gift of God, you would have asked me.” He longs for her to perceive, to intuit, the gift of God, and also to intuit who He Himself is. He is longing for her to thirst for God, for Himself, for the living water of God’s life, the Holy Spirit. But she’s not there yet. When He mentions living water, she still thinks He’s talking about water in Jacob’s well. And when He hints to her that there is something about who He is that she is not quite getting yet, she responds only by asking if He is greater than Jacob.

But Jesus is gradually and carefully winning her over. He raises the stakes higher when he entices her with a water which will quench her thirst for ever because it will turn into a well, a spring, a fountain within her. But the woman remains on the practical, earthly plane. She does want this water, but she still thinks it’s in the well and her reason for wanting it is just of convenience: she wants to avoid the bother of coming back to the well. Even so, Jesus has hooked her. And it is at this point He turns her attention back to herself, not to the labours of her daily chores, but to the labours of her soul, to the thirst of her soul for healing, for faithful love and for peace. “Go, call your husband, and come here”, He says. He knows that her moral life is going through a desert, that her heart is broken, divided, confused. And her answer to Him is honest: “I have no husband.” With exquisite kindness, Jesus then confesses her sin for her, as regards the five husbands, and accepts her words about having no husband as true. The warmth and sincerity of His approach to her from the beginning has given her the confidence to unburden her sin without fearing rejection. Now she is ready to receive the living water.

Seeing that Jesus could read her soul, she begins to perceive in Him something more, a prophet. This leads her to talk about worship. The prophet always challenges us to live a moral life which enables us to worship God properly. She returns to the difference between Jews and Samaritans at this point. In strands of Old Testament thinking, God or the gods were bound by their own territory. That’s why the woman is talking about which mountain God is to be worshipped on. But Jesus moves the argument from the externals of where you worship to the interior of how you worship. It’s not primarily about bricks and mortar, but about spirit and truth. That living water about which He spoke to her cleanses hearts of sin and strengthens them with the power, the grace, to worship God in the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Truth, that is, in Christ Himself. Jesus underlines this strongly to the woman: “those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”

Suddenly, the woman herself talks about the Messiah. It’s as if His words have drawn her heart to sense in Him something or someone truly special. When she says to him, “I know that Messiah is coming”, it’s almost as if she is asking Jesus to open up more about who He is. It is Jesus who has, of course, led her interiorly to this point because He has wanted all along to tell her who He is. When He does so, He says, “I who speak to you am he.” He uses the Name of God which was revealed to Moses in the burning bush, “I am who am.” Jesus has not even said this yet to his disciples. But He says it to this woman, as if she were a female Moses, whom He has lovingly engaged in conversation and whose sin He has forgiven. Moses means “drawn from the water.” Jesus wants to draw her into it.

We don’t hear whether Jesus ever did get a drink of ordinary water from the woman. But His thirst for her love and faith was quenched in the course of the conversation with her. In the same way, Jesus gradually poured into her heart and soul as they spoke the living water of His love, His Spirit. When He then revealed His divine identity to her, the living water became a spring within her. How do we know that? Because she left her bucket behind at the well in the urgency and enthusiasm with which she went to tell the whole town about Jesus. Through her, that whole people’s thirst for living water led them to Jesus and to faith in Him.

For our RCIA elect, and for all of us, this Gospel invites us to scrutinise ourselves for Easter: am I open to meeting Jesus in the course of ordinary activities; am I alert to His straightforward and amiable approach to me; do I hear His request for a drink from the well of love and faith in my heart; do I thirst for a drink of living water or for the refreshment of the spring of that water already within me; do I allow Him in that exquisitely kindly way to prompt me to see and confess my sins without fear of rejection; do I therefore worship the Father in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Truth; do I long for Him and let Him reveal His divine identity and presence to me in ways that are ever new and ever more comforting; do I allow the living water of Baptism to well up and pour out from me to others as I witness to what marvels the Lord does for me in my deeply personal relationship with Him?

We are all the Samaritan woman. Jesus sits today and every day at the well of our hearts, thirsting for love and for faith. In intimate and friendly conversation, He desires to draw us away from sin, to quench our hearts with living water and to draw us to worship the Father in Himself and the Holy Spirit. Every day, He desires to reveal Himself to us and to send us out to reveal Him to others. For, as He said, “Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest.” So, let the waters of your Baptism flow unhindered within and without. And may our RCIA elect long for Easter Night when the well of living water will open for them and quench their thirst and refresh their hearts and souls as they continue to flow from the pierced side of the Redeemer.