Homily at Mass for Sr. Patsy’s Diamond Jubilee, Aug 25, 2012

Céline Mangan, O.P.

Preaching on the story of the woman at the well from John’s Gospel.

The woman is not named; John doesn’t always give names to the characters in his Gospel so that, in fact, Christians of his time and ours could put themselves into the story and enter into dialogue with Jesus about the meaning of life and relationships.

The meeting of Jesus and the woman takes place at a well. We are not so familiar with wells nowadays with water on tap, but when I was very young we had to go to the well for drinking water and it was a place where people met one another. But, as in Jesus’s time, you didn’t talk to everyone you met if they did not belong to your social circle, so the Samaritan woman was very surprised that Jesus as a Jew would talk to her, since Jews thought Samaritans were heretics and so would have nothing to do with them and certainly not look for a drink out of their water jar. (I remember once in the Holy Land staying in a Jewish hostel, I went to borrow a jug and was about to touch one on a shelf when the Jewish woman there bawled at me – that I a Gentile would touch a Jewish jug that had been koshered!)

But Jesus in the story does not make a distinction between race or gender. When they come back into the story the disciples are shocked that Jesus is talking to a woman, since in the society of the time, and in many societies still today, a man wouldn’t be seen dead chatting up a woman in a public place. Jesus probably shocked people a lot of the time since those he associated with were often outsiders: prostitutes, publicals, “sinners” – but no-one is an outsider to God.

So Jesus enters into a serious dialogue with the Samaritan woman. She is well able for him and he seems to take a delight in her challenging questions and leads her by means of them to a deeper realisation of where God is in her life and how to bring the knowledge of God to others. Unlike Nicodemus earlier in the gospel who came to Jesus by night and who stayed in darkness, the Samaritan woman came to Jesus at high-noon and comes into the light of what worship of God is all about. Jews believed that the only place you could worship God was in the Temple in Jerusalem, but Samaritans said no – that their holy mountain, Mt Gerazim, was the place to worship.

Jesus shows the woman that place is all very well, but we are called to true worship which depends on true knowledge of God, a knowledge which comes to us as Christians through faith in Jesus. Our ordinary everyday lives, lived in the light of that faith is what brings us to God in the long run. One of the great mystics of the Dominican Order, Meister Eckhart, said that the everyday living of the Christian life is more than enough, if it is lived out of a deep faith and a sense that we have the love of God within us. For as a modern writer has put it on the effect Jesus had on people round about him:

Suddenly everything spoke to them of the nearness of God: the seeds they sowed and the bread they baked, the birds in the sky and the grain in the field, their family weddings { celebrations] and meals shared with Jesus.

By her dialogue with Jesus the woman in the story came to realise the reality of that love and couldn’t wait to share it with her own people. Sharing the word of God is what the Dominican vocation is all about – that vocation which Patsy embraced over 60 years ago. Along the way she has found her faith deepened and shared in the most unlikely of places and through the most unlikely people. This, to my mind, is the greatest message of the story of the Samaritan woman: no-one is an outsider in God’s book; everyone can come to the meaning of life if they listen, ask questions and respond to life at its depth.