Did you notice it in the scene at the well? The Samaritan woman left it as if it were completely forgotten. Seemingly innocuous but speaking volumes, it’s the water jar. The jar rests on the ground, as if carelessly thrown there in haste. It’s abandoned, untended and unfilled. The woman never bothered to fill it. She never even gave Jesus the drink of water for which he asked. It’s a poignant symbol as well as a utilitarian thing. It represents dashed hopes, haunted memories, things done and left undone. It represents the gut-wrenching hunger pains and thirsty aching for fulfillment, even though it’s never satisfied.
And yet, this water jar says everything about what has just transpired at the well in this village. The water jar testifies silently to the hollow pains of haunted, even traumatic memories. It tells part of the story of the present, of this Samaritan woman’s surprising encounter with Jesus. It also tells something of the future. The water jar’s forlorn status, left unused by a deep well and by a thirsty Jesus, represents a woman who has been changed forever.
I wish we knew her name, but we don’t. Perhaps that says something about why her transformation at the well was so significant. She appeared at the well in the middle of the day. I imagine the sun was blazing down upon the village square. She came for one thing only; she came to quench her thirst.
It was wearying to keep returning to the well, day after day, to fill and refill the water jar. But she did it anyway. And when she brings her water jar, she brings so much more, too, even if unspoken. She brings her many marriages and her feelings of being passed around from husband to husband as if she were an object to be used and then put aside. We honestly don’t know whether those marriages were ended due to divorce or whether the woman had married five brothers from the same family, each of whom successively died. After all, in her day, the custom of levirate marriage was intended to provide for a woman’s safety. A man had a duty to marry his brother’s widow and provide for her, even if she were not truly loved. We have no reason to assume the Samaritan woman committed any sexual sin, and frankly, it’s not the point of this story.[1] When she brings her water jar to the well, she brings all the sad endings to her marriages. That’s all that matters.
She brings her loneliness in a culture that treated women as objects to be traded and used. She brings all in her past of which she is ashamed, even if she’s not to blame for some of it. She brings, too, her indelible status as a Samaritan now in close company with this man, a Jew, to whom she shouldn’t even speak.
This woman is looking for water because she’s thirsty, very thirsty. But she’s looking for something else, too. She’s longing for that emptiness inside to be filled, but with what, she knows not. And when she leaves that water jar to run and find others to bring back to the well, she has found only one of the things for which she thirsted, and, ultimately, it’s all that matters.
It's there at the well that Jesus invites her into conversation. He asks her to serve him, and then he serves her. He tells her to bring all that she desires to hide from him and others. He coaxes her into telling the full truth. He tells her everything about herself, and then some. And then, he tells her who he is, and everything changes after that.
After that, the well is no longer a place for Samaritans to keep apart from Jews. After that, the brokenness of the past and all its haunted moments are forgiven and forgotten. After that, many more people with their own empty water jars come to Jesus to be filled. After that, the well becomes not a place for thirst to be quenched but a place where eternal life is given.
And here, this day, we have come with our water jars and, oh, so much emptiness. To this deep well, to this Mass, we have brought our loneliness in an age where we’re more connected than we’ve ever been but perhaps the loneliest we’ve ever been. Three years after a pandemic toppled all our Tower of Babels, we bring humbling silence in the face of life’s mysteries. To this deep well, we bring, week after week, empty water jars that resound with the unanswered prayers of our lives. And each week, we pray that we will leave this well with overflowing jars, sloshing water on our way out. To this deep well, we bring the malaise of our lives, which we try so desperately to assuage on social media, or with academic status, job promotions, or our children’s successes. To this deep well, we bring the aching thirst of anxiety and of worries about ailing parents. We bring our desire to be loved for who we are instead of who we should be. To this well, even if secretly, we bring all the hard knots of emotions inside us that we desperately long for God to unloose.
But each week, it seems, we leave with empty jars. Perhaps we have a bit of water in them, but the thirst is still aching inside us. And this is the main reason why we keep returning week after week. We so badly want our water jars to be filled to the top.
Until one day—only God knows when—something changes. One day, as on the day with that woman at the well, we meet for the first time—and I mean, really meet—a man named Jesus who has been sitting at the well all along. Before, we just never saw him. He has been there all along, weary, and tired by the sins of humankind. He has been there all along, sitting in the heat of the day, thirsty himself, and carrying the wounds of his tragic death still on his hands and his feet. He has been asking us for a drink, but we have not seen him.
But on this one day, for whatever reason, we notice him. At first, we don’t understand how he can be talking to us. He’s Jesus. We are sinners. Jesus and sinners don’t share things in common, we say. But he’s offering us something else, something far more substantial than water from a well. He asks us to bring everything from our past that we have tried to hide from him and others. He tells us all about ourselves, those things done and left horribly undone. He shows us the humiliations, the shame, and the haunted losses of our past. He reveals the emptiness of our present.
We suddenly realize that this vulnerable man, sitting by the side of a deep well, is showing us all things, about ourselves and about our salvation. He knows everything about our past, and yet, he’s still here, waiting for us to receive his gift, the only gift that will quench our thirst.
And we finally understand that our reasons for coming here to the well week after week, even day after day, were the wrong ones. We came trying to show only certain things about ourselves when Jesus wanted it all. We came hoping only for that new job or for the cancer to be taken away. We came so that God might heal our painful past and give us a new direction. But now we know that the only reason worth coming here to this deep well is to be with Jesus.
He has been here all along wanting to draw us into conversation. He has been waiting week after week to tell us all about ourselves and to help us tell him all about ourselves. We realize, as we never have before, that this well may be the only place on earth where the most unlikely candidates do share things in common. Here white people and people of color sup together. Here all things are shared by rich and poor, male and female, housed and unhoused, liberal and conservative. Here at the well, we are known in a way that we are known nowhere else. And so, there is only one response we can make.
We drop with haste the water jars we have brought. We care not that they look empty, because we are no longer empty inside. We cast aside those jars, and we run from the well—from this place—and we find everyone we can to tell them about whom we have met. We don’t promise them easy answers or quickly answered prayers. We don’t tell them they’ll never be thirsty or hungry again. We just tell them the truth. We tell them that here at the well, we have encountered someone who knows everything about us. And even so, he abides at the well, weary and tired though he may be, to talk with us, because this man is Love itself.
And when we return to the well again with friends and strangers, we see for the first time that we have come for a different reason. We haven’t come to fill our water jars or to quench our thirst. We have come only to talk and be with the Risen Christ, the one who has never given up on us and who will never give up on us. We have come finally to accept his invitation and to abide with him forever.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2023
[1] See “John” by Gail O’Day in Women’s Bible Commentary, eds. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 384.