In the cycle of Readings in the Church's Lectionary for Year A - the current year - Sunday in weeks 3, 4 and 5 of Lent present us with three quite long but quite wonderful "encounter with Jesus" accounts taken from John's Gospel. The first, for today the Third Sunday in Lent, is the encounter which Jesus engineers between himself and the Samaritan woman at the location known as Jacob's well, near the town of Sychar in Samaria. 

Jesus arrives at the Well with his apostles but sends them away to the town to buy some food. It doesn't need twelve men to go to buy food for thirteen people and so the sending away of the apostles is done for a purpose - to clear any obstruction or obstacle against open exchange between Jesus and the woman. Jesus is never embarrassed, hesitant, reluctant or unable to deal with conversation with any person, man or woman - he is the perfect human being in, and also through, his ability to relate to others. The woman on the other hand tries repeatedly to keep obstructions and obstacles in place between her and Jesus. She has good cause to be cautious or suspicious of strangers and to act so as not to breach cultural barriers by speaking to men while alone. She would have been cut off from her own community because of the succession of husbands there had been in her life. Both women and men in the village would have regarded her with suspicion and the women there would also have regarded her with dislike. Therefore she has to come to the Well for water at a time when no one else would be present there. No one from the village but the woman, through her isolation, would venture out into the noonday heat.

Her encounter with Jesus is the model journey through Baptism. Jesus offers invitation, disclosure, and ever deepening levels of understanding and intimacy in and through this sacred encounter. He provides the opportunity to to be connected to God through being connected to him in this meeting and exchange. The woman is wary; she presents cultural and then religious reasons why there should be no connection between them. Jesus disarms her by telling her to call her husband. In so doing, he touches her sense of self. He declares who he is to the woman. He explains that the day will come when all cultural and man made divisions among people, in their relationship with God and in their praise and worship of God - their connectedness to God - will be dissolved, and worship of God will be universal in Spirit and Truth. The woman hurries off to the village, forgetting all about the jar she had brought to draw water. She had drunk from the cup of living water, which Jesus had offered her to quench her social, emotional and spiritual thirst, and she will never be thirsty again. 

Jesus identifies the woman as both reaper and sower of the harvest - the role which comes to her through this encounter. He describes to the disciples when they return how such reaping and sowing is happening all around them - he asks them to open their eyes to this reality and see. At that very moment the woman, by the power of her testimony, has overcome all of the personal resentment against her in the village - this being yet another obstacle and obstruction to conversion, baptism and discipleship - and has led many to Jesus by what she has told them of him. The villagers then have their own encounter with Jesus and they declare openly that they now believe because of what they have experienced of him and no longer because they accept what she has told them of him. Their connectedness is personal and intimate. We, who have come to faith through the influence and teaching and example of our parents, grandparents, teachers, relatives and friends have shown us of Jesus, are called to that same personal conviction through our own personal sense of encounter with him. Without such personal conviction, faith dies.  We are called to reap the harvest of the labour of others in spreading the faith in Jesus as Lord and then to become sowers of the seed of that same faith in our daily lives.

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