Having descended the Mount of Transfiguration, let us now resume our journey. The Third Sunday of Lent takes us to Samaria, to the town of Sychar to be precise, which is near Mt. Gerizim in the heart of Palestine. Tired and thirsty, Jesus stops at the local well, where he meets a woman who has come to draw water. This woman, a Samaritan, is assiduously looking for water, that is, for a love that is eternal. She does not know that the font her desire is not the familiar town well, within easy reach and available to everyone. Nor can her thirst be quenched by the well of the Law or by the narrow prospects offered by a disorienting religiosity. Instead, her desire can be fulfilled only through her unexpected meeting with the One who possesses the Living Water of the Spirit–the ever-fresh Water that creates, transfigures and vivifies.
The long conversation between the Samaritan woman and Jesus reaches its peak when the woman touches on the religious aspect of life, namely: Where should God be worshiped? This phenomenon has continued down the ages: the perennial search for a place of worship, for a place of spiritual security, for a place where human beings can interact with God. But this search could also be transformed into a subtle temptation to possess God. In fact, many people run the serious risk of trying to assign God a fixed “dwelling place” so as to imprison him in the cage of strange and unsubstantial ideologies/religions. Because of this danger, the Samaritan woman is gifted with one of Jesus’ greatest revelations about God: “Woman, the hour is coming–indeed is already here–when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth…. God is spirit….” (Jn. 4: 23-24).
The time has come to worship God in the Lord Jesus: he is the Temple, the “mountain” set aside for this purpose. Jesus is the Truth and it is only thanks to the Spirit that we can enter into that Truth. If Jesus is the “place” where we worship the Father, then the Spirit is the “place” where we worship Jesus. The word “spirit” (Greek, pneuma; Hebrew, ruah) nullifies every human attempt to possess God, even if only on the intellectual level, because in the Bible the word spirit means “whisper,” “breath,” something infinite–a “wind” that blows unseen and unrestricted across immense distances. The Spirit blows where he pleases. We do not know where he comes from or where he is going.
At most we hear the murmur of his voice, hidden in the living font of the eternal Word.
