The meeting between Jesus and the woman at the well is an extraordinary meeting (John 4). The woman ends up believing in Jesus and bringing all the townspeople to Jesus who also believe in Jesus, and it all happened without a miracle taking place.
The drama started while Jesus’ disciples had gone to the town to buy food and Jesus, tired from the journey, waited by the well for their return. A Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus asked for a drink. The woman had a deeper thirst than thirst for that water. We all have a deeper thirst than thirst for water. Maybe the woman was trying to satisfy that deeper thirst with one husband after another. Jesus offered her his spiritual life to quench her deeper thirst; it was a free offer to her from Jesus which she could reject or accept. Eventually after back and forth during the conversation, she accepted Jesus’ offer. God longs for our love of him but has given us the freedom to love him or reject him.
This encounter between Jesus and the woman gives us insights into our relationship with God and an Italian priest, Fr. Divo Barsotti, who gave a beautiful retreat on this Gospel has shared some of his insights (Jesus and the Samaritan Woman: Spiritual Exegesis on Chapter 4 of the Gospel according to John):
We find it difficult to believe that God loves us, that God would bend to our weakness and give us love. (Kindle Location 123)
We believe that we are waiting and we do not know that it is He who is there waiting for an act of love from you. And He does not reproach you even if you do not give it to Him. Yet He suffers this passion of love and remains waiting in vain, maybe for days on end, for a smile from you, a word from you, an act of attention, of love from you. …when perhaps, you have felt resentful about something that happened … and you have gone into a sulk. (Kindle Location 128-132)
Although God offers us his spiritual life, we may prefer to keep God at a respectable distance; we may become defensive and put up barriers. We can make up all kinds of excuses to keep God at a distance. There had been enmity for many years between the Jews and Samaritans and the woman kept Jesus at a distance saying, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (John 4:9) Do we make excuses for not letting God more into our life? Excuses such as, “I don’t have time; God wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me; why is there suffering in the world; when I die, it will be soon enough to meet God.” Jesus wants to satisfy your deep thirst, but you have to ask him.
Jesus said to the woman to call her husband. This led to her admitting that she did not have a husband and Jesus, with his supernatural knowledge, revealed her past to her. She had already had five husbands and the man she was with then is not her husband. Allowing God into our lives means allowing God even into the problematic and complicated parts. For her to receive Jesus into her life, she had to bring her sinful past to him. Barsotti wrote:
God gives Himself to you, not to that creature you believe you are, but to that creature you are in His eyes; and you need to see yourself in His light, poor as you are, weak as you are. (Kindle Location 563)
He went on:
When a woman wants to make herself attractive to a man, she tries to hide some of her defects, doesn’t she? But with God it is the opposite. Until you have completely unmasked yourself, you will not unite yourself to Him. (Kindle Location 568)
Just think: to possess God, one only need admit to being a sinner! It’s so simple, isn’t it? Please, let us not make ourselves too beautiful. Let us not try to mask our imperfections in front of the Lord. (Kindle Location 631)
During Lent, before the Easter Triduum, a beautiful gift of your love for Jesus would be to confess anything serious to him that you have not already confessed. Barsotti wrote:
Our Lord, you will note, has peculiar tastes, He did not visit the conformists, did not visit the virtuous, did not visit the respectable people . . . He would visit publicans; he spent time with sinners. So you should feel at ease, shouldn’t you?... You must not wait until you are saints to believe that He lives with you. (Kindle Location 1177-1180)
The woman had come to the well on her own in the middle of the day instead in the morning with all the other women almost certainly because she had been ostracized by the townspeople. After meeting Jesus, she went back to the town no longer hiding from everyone but told them all about Jesus. Jesus had changed her life.
The woman encountering Jesus reminds me of others in the Gospels who had similar experiences. Jesus meeting Zacchaeus is bit like what we see in today’s Gospel. Zacchaeus had a past and was rejected by his townspeople. Zacchaeus was not expecting to meet Jesus or have a conversation with Jesus like the woman in today’s Gospel, but Jesus invited himself into Zacchaeus’ house. Barsotti wrote:
He has invited Himself to my house, to your house, to everybody’s house. He wants to come to us: oh, let us open all the doors to Him, let us say to the Lord: “Come, it is all for You”! (Kindle Location 1266)
The difficult thing . . . is to really believe that we are loved. God is madly in love. He is the maddest of us all... and to think that He Himself chose me...? A bad choice, don’t you think? Pure madness! How could He choose me? He left all the angels in Heaven, all the saints, to come to me, to give Himself to me. (Kindle Location 1306)
The woman at the well accepted Jesus’ offer of spiritual life, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus waits for us at the well of our life. We do not have to be perfect to open up to him; he is waiting for us as we are to give us his new life to satisfy our deeper thirst and be merciful to us. Now it is up to us to open ourselves to Jesus to accept his offer of his spiritual life.
© Fr. Tommy Lane 2026
This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.
More Homilies for the Third Sunday Year A
The Living Water of Jesus 2020
God has a plan that we find our identity in Christ 2011
Putting the picture of Jesus back together again during Lent 2008
Drink the Living Water of Jesus and you will never again thirst
stories about conversion