Well and Rock: 3rd Sunday of Lent  

 Well and Rock 

Well and Rock figure prominently in all today’s readings. The Forty Days of Lent take their inspiration from Jesus’ Forty Days in the Desert. We always start there on the 1st Sunday of Lent. And so we can see the Season of Lent itself, with all its privations, as a sort of symbolic desert. Today, having traveled through the desert of Lent for two and a half weeks, we find ourselves reading about wells in the wilderness. The 1st reading and the responsorial psalm both deal with a rock in the desert from which a miraculous stream of water flows. In the Gospel, we see another well, with a different kind of water.

The first reading is from the Book of Exodus. The Hebrews “grumble against Moses” because of the lack of water in the desert. The Lord instructs Moses to strike a particular rock, after which water flows from it. This same rock appears in the responsorial, which comes from Psalm 95:

Come, let us sing joyfully to the LORD;
    let us acclaim the Rock of our salvation. (Psalm 95:1)

 The Rock Was Christ 

Here, the Lord is the Rock. The psalm later connects this Rock directly to the Rock in Exodus:

Oh, that today you would hear his voice:
    “Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
    as in the day of Massah in the desert,
Where your fathers tempted me;
    they tested me though they had seen my works.” (Psalm 95:7b-9)

St. Paul later assures the Corinthians that “the Rock was Christ.” (1 Corinthians 10:4)

Living Water 

We come upon another well in the Gospel reading.  Jesus is sitting at a well in Samaria, when he asks a Samaritan woman to get him a drink. We can see Samaria as a sort of desert for Jesus and his disciples. The Samaritans claimed descent from the Hebrews of the former Northern Kingdom of Israel. When the Assyrians conquered Israel seven centuries earlier they had forcibly removed most of the Hebrews. Those who remained intermingled with the new populations that the conquerors settled on their land. The Jews thought of the Samaritans heretics at best, or even just heathens. They considered them unclean, and avoided all contact. As the woman reminds Jesus, “Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.” (John 4:9)

As it happens, Jesus is not really interested in ordinary water:

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.” (John 4:10)

There’s water, and then there’s Water. We can see why the Church has put these passages together.

 Four Senses of Scripture

We can also see why the Church has given them to us now, on a Sunday in the midst of Lent. First, let’s apply the traditional Four Senses of Scripture. In the passage from Exodus, on the literal level we have an account of God bringing forth actual water from a Rock. Allegorically, as St. Paul tells us, the Rock represents Jesus. Jesus himself tells us in the passage from John that the “water” he provides is, in fact, eternal life. The moral meaning of the Moses story is that, even when things look hopeless, God will provide. Anagogically, that only Jesus can provide true life, eternal life.

We can do the same with the Gospel reading. Yes, Jesus meets and talks to a Samaritan women at a well. We can draw the same allegorical, moral and anagogical lessons as in the first passage. But of course, there are always further meanings. For instance, why a Samaritan woman, and what are we to make of her five husbands, none of whom are hers?

“If you knew . . .”

There are a couple of traditional explanations for this particular detail. One is that the Samaritans had five gods, one for each of the five cities from which the Assyrians drew their new settlers. Another explanation is that the husbands represent the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The image represents the fragmentary way the Samaritans practice Judaism. Whatever the allegorical meaning, on the literal level this is a promiscuous women, which means she has a big problem on the moral level. And yet here is Jesus, offering her the water of eternal life, if only she asks.

In fact, Jesus tells her she would have asked, “If you knew the gift of God/
and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink. ‘” In a sense she could represent any one of us. Even if we think we know, do we really know who is offering us eternal life? How often do we instead overindulge in God’s gifts in this world, without truly appreciating them for what they are? And yet Christ will still come to us, if we ask.

Source and Summit 

I pointed out in my Advent posts that the season of Advent works on a number of levels. It points to the arrival of Jesus at Christmas. It is also preparing us to meet him in the Eucharist. Finally, Advent is getting us ready to meet him at the end of time.  Lent works in a similar way. On one level, we are preparing ourselves for the liturgical experience of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. But it also gives us a bigger picture. We should use the observances and penitential practices of Lent to prepare ourselves for our own death and resurrection, by God’s Grace, in Christ.

Sundays are themselves a reminder of Christ’s role as the Rock of Salvation. Technically, they are not included in the forty days of Lent. Do the math, if you don’t believe me. The Church tells us that the Eucharist is “The Source and Summit of the Christian life.” Sounds a little like the Well and the Rock, doesn’t it? And once a week Sunday, the Lord’s Day, comes around to remind us that only Jesus Christ is the well that can give us the Water of Eternal Life. Only He will always be there. In the desert of Lent, and throughout the year in the desert of our lives of worldly preoccupation. On this 3rd Sunday of Lent. it’s good to remember Well and Rock.