SEEL - Preparation Week Day 1 The Samaritan Woman

Today's post marks the beginning of a 9-month-long retreat on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Viewing faith through the lens of Ignatian Spirituality is an interesting sojourn for someone who has been immersed in Benedictine Spirituality for more than a decade. And away we go...

John 4 1-15

He had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and who 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 do not even have a bucket and the well is deep; where then can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks? Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Today this statement strikes me: "Jesus had to pass through Samaria."  This was not strictly true. While Samaria lay between Galilee and Judea, most travelers from Galilee chose to cross the Jordan into Jordan and then travel south to Judea and cross back the river back into Israel. Samaria was hostile land and Jewish travelers tended to avoid the danger by going around rather than through Samaria. Jesus did not have to go through Samaria yet it was still necessary. Why? He had an appointment to keep with the Samaritan woman, so he puzzled his followers by going directly to a specific town not necessary on the way to Judea and then to then pausing at the well of Jacob after shooing away his disciples. There he waited for her to come, and she became the first disciple not born of the historic Jewish faith.  

I have reflected on this passage many times and often use it to introduce folks to Ignatian contemplation; each new examination offers a new revelation. Today I zeroed in on verse four. I am overwhelmed by the recognition that the meeting at the well was not just some serendipitous happenstance. He went out of his way even though his followers would have been reluctant to make a potentially hazardous diversion. 

What comes to me this morning is the sudden recognition that Jesus will go to great lengths to encounter us in a way that can redirect the arc of life as it did for this woman. In prayer, I am assured he has traveled from afar to meet me where I am and invite me to be in his company. Me. He has come to me. He knows me in the same he knew the woman. He is asking me to drink from the wellspring of everlasting life. Me. He has invited me, a sinner, a person of inconsistent and incomplete faith to drink from the cup he offers.

The woman responded to the invitation with wholehearted and complete acceptance. I wish to do the same. I accept the offer. The woman rushed back to her hometown to tell others of her experience and bring them to meet Jesus. I am in a different setting, at a different time with a different calling but I pledge to live today in a way that might allow others to encounter Jesus through me so that they might be encouraged to go to the well to meet him.