Dignity of His Daughters

A Reflection on the Gospel for March 12th, 2023:
Third Sunday of Lent

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John 
4.5-15, 19-26, 39a, 40-42

Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)  The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?  Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”  Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”  The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” 

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”  The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’  for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”  The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.  Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” 

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him. 

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.” 

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.”

There is a tagline from a Catholic podcast that I often reference: “God loves you – and there’s nothing you can do about it!” It reminds me in a humourous way that no matter what road we’ve travelled to our relationship with our Lord, He loves us as precious and priceless in His sight. God cannot “unlove” us as it were, for God IS Love and He cannot deny Himself.

This is perfectly illustrated in today’s well-known scripture passage on The Woman at the Well. Having had five husbands and now living with a sixth man, the Samaritan woman has likely had a lifetime of wagging tongues, sideways glances, and perhaps even smirks.  Few of her fellow villagers would choose to engage with her and she has likely experienced the world as cold, judgemental and isolating.  Simply by being born a Samaritan, she is despised by the Jewish people, due to the Samaritans’ historical mixing of Jewish and pagan ways and their rejection of traditionally-practiced Judaism. 

To retain a small semblance of control of her life, she chooses to walk to the well under the heat of the noonday sun rather than be the object of scorn of the other women in her village.  

It is hot. It is dusty. It is so very lonely. And I can relate.

I wish I could press the rewind or undo button on a whole bunch of my life choices. The shiny surface offerings of the secular world mostly won out over life-giving ones. Instead of finding a way out I continually returned to recurring themes and old habits.

Like the Woman at the Well, by opening my heart a crack to let Jesus in, I eventually experienced an understanding of what it meant to have “a relationship with Christ.”  He had restored my dignity of personhood, and that has found its way to my soul.  And, as the saying goes, once you have lived this transformation you cannot “unknow” it. Jesus loves us in our stories, but that pales in comparison to the dignity He restored by seeing my soul first.

So, this Lenten season, perhaps we could all spend time with this question: Who have I passed over or ignored, and in doing so, dismissed their very dignity as a daughter of Christ?

Lord, I repent for the times I’ve neglected Your daughters in words or action. Help me genuinely engage and interact with your daughters in dignity as You see them. Amen.




Patty Viscount

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