In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost.
When the Samaritan woman came back in haste to her
town and called all those who lived around her to see Christ, she said:
'Come! Here is a Man who has told me everything I have done!’ And the
people flocked around, and listened to what Christ had to say.
At times we think, how easy it was for this woman to
believe and how easy it was for her, from within this shattering
experience to turn to others and say: Come! Listen to one who has spoken
as no-one else has ever spoken, One Who, without a word of mine has seen
into the depth of my heart, into the darkness of my life, has seen and
known everything.
But is it not something that can happen to each of
us? Christ did not tell her anything very singular; He told her who she
was, what her life had been, how God saw her. But this He can tell us
every day of our life, and not in a mystical experience, not as it
happened to some saints, but in the simplest possible way.
If we turn to the Gospel and read it every day, or if
we simply read it once in a while with an openness that we do not always
possess, we may think that Christ holds before our eyes a mirror in
which we see ourselves as we are: either by rejoicing at what we see, or
by contrast, being shaken by the fact that we are so different from what
we seem to be, or what we imagine we are.
Christ said to the Samaritan woman: Call your
husband! And she said: I have no husband. Christ replied: You have
spoken the truth. You have had five husbands, and the one who is your
husband now indeed, is not your husband more than anyone else.
Certain spiritual writers have commented on this
passage by saying that Christ was saying to her: Yes - you have been
wedded to all that your five senses could give you, and you have seen
that you find fulfilment, satisfaction in none. And now, what is left to
you is your own self, your body, your mind, and this, no more than your
five senses can fulfil you, give you that fullness without which you
cannot live.
Is this not what Christ says to us when we read the
Gospel, when He presents us with what we could be, when He calls us to
that greatness which is ours by vocation; the greatness that Paul
describes by calling us to reach the fullness of the stature of Christ -
to be human as He was, in the same way as Christ is true man, fulfilled
by total final, full communion with God.
So let us learn from this woman that we have turned,
all of us, to so may ways in which we could receive the message of this
world and be filled, and we have all discovered that nothing can fill
us, because man is too deep for things material, too deep for things
psychological, too vast - only God can fill this vastness and this
depth. If we only could realise this, we would be exactly in the
position of the woman of Samaria. We need not meet Christ at the well;
the well, indeed, is the Gospel, the place from which the water of life
may gush - but not a material well, that well is a symbol. The water
which we are to drink is different.
And so, let us emulate this woman, let us come to our
senses, let us realise that all we have been wedded to was not our
fulfilment; and let us then ask ourselves "Who am I, with regard to
myself in the dimension of God's vision?" And then we can go to others
and say: I have met someone who has held a mirror before my eyes, and I
have seen myself as I am, He has told me about myself: come and see!
Come - and listen to Him!.. And others will come, others will listen,
and then they will turn to us and say: It is no longer your testimony
that makes us believe - we have seen for ourselves, we have heard for
ourselves, we know for ourselves. We believe. Amen.
