It is midday, the time when the sun shines the brightest, the time of day that is the hottest, which is why most people would be taking a siesta at this time, no one would be outside. Yet, someone is outside, it is a woman who hoping to avoid everyone, knowing her lowliness, knowing her status, and how everyone would talk about her if she had gone out at a decent hour.

Someone, is at the well already, however, and He is thirsty and wants a drink, but she refuses, she cannot understand why a Jewish person would want to speak with her, a Samaritan, her sworn enemy. In fact, though the shortest way to Galilee is through Samaria, most Jewish people would avoid that route altogether.

And not just that, she could not understand why a man would speak to her, look at her, treat her as a woman, when she has been used to quite the opposite; ridicule, derision, condemnation. And, her entire life has been reinforced by this, she has had 5 husbands and she is living with someone who is not her husband. 

But in the words of a poem I once heard: “No drink passing from these hands to your lips could ever be refreshing only condemning as I am sure you condemn me now, but you don’t.”

He does not thirst for her condemnation but for her conversion, for her very soul. This is why He has no bucket, because, in truth, He wants her to know that His thirst should be her thirst for Him, for He is this living water, the water of which He has promised: “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.”

And it is this water that she had been looking for all of her life, and had never found, this is why Jesus has her confess her sins, because then she recognizes this longing in her heart, this desire to satiate a thirst for love that went unfulfilled until this very moment.

She has spent the majority of her life looking for this love, looking for the only thing that only God can fulfill. In fact, St. Augustine, an early Father of the Church put it best, he said: “Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised . . . Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

It is no wonder then, that she would immediately abandon her jars and run into the town, no longer fearing the people, because, she has experienced the fullness of God’s mercy, she has been reconciled to Him and to one another.

To her, her life was hopeless, to her it was impossible to reclaim her life, yet, as we hear elsewhere, with God nothing is impossible, with God all impossibilities become possible with Him. In fact, in our first reading, Moses was getting anxious because the people were starting to lose trust in him. So, he placed his trust in God, and, as a result of that trust, He was told to strike a rock in order to satiate their thirst.

He hit a rock with his staff and water poured out; that is what it means to place our trust in God. It doesn’t mean that everything will make sense; instead, it means that we allow ourselves to be led by God, that we seek to be obedient to His Will no matter what, no matter the consequences.

That is why each moment of each day we are given an opportunity to grow in holiness, we are given an opportunity to experience that reconciliation in the confessional, the opportunity to become better Catholics, to show our trust in God, no matter the situation, no matter what He may ask of us. And while He may take us to the well and back, while He may take us to Hell and back, He does so, not to draw us away from Him, but to draw us closer to Himself.

If that doesn’t make sense, then we need only look at the cross to understand this, for, as St. Paul says in our second reading: “He proves His love for us in that while we were yet sinners [He] died for us.” In other words, the price of our redemption, was His death, He hung upon the cross because He thirsts for us, in fact, one His 7 last words was simply that: “I thirst.”

Let us then allow Him to quench that thirst, let us allow Him, like that Samaritan woman to give us the strength and confidence to always be ready to follow Him, to do His Will so that, indeed, neither He nor us will ever thirst again.