The Samaritan Woman at the Well: An Encounter with Christ Who Reveals the Human Heart

When the Samaritan woman hurried back to her town and began calling her neighbors to come and see Christ, she said:
“Come and see a Man who told me everything I ever did!”
And the people gathered and began to listen to what Christ had to say to them.

And we sometimes think: how simple it all was then! How easily this woman was able to believe, and how natural it was for her, after the astonishing encounter she had just experienced, to turn to others and say:
“Come and listen to a Man who speaks as no one has ever spoken; a Man who, without a single word from me, looked into the depths of my heart, saw the darkness of my life, understood everything, and revealed everything!”

But does not the same thing happen to each one of us? Christ did not say anything outwardly extraordinary to her. He simply revealed to her who she was, what her life was like, and how God saw her.
And this is exactly what He can say to us as well — every day of our lives. Not necessarily through some mystical experience, as happened with certain saints, but in the simplest possible way.

If we turn to the Gospel and read it every day — or at least from time to time, with that openness of heart which is not always available to us — we may sense that Christ is holding a mirror before our eyes.
In this mirror we see ourselves as we truly are: sometimes rejoicing in what we see, and sometimes, on the contrary, deeply shaken by how different we are from the image we present to others, or from our own illusions about ourselves.

Christ said to this woman:
“Call your husband.”
She answered:
“I have no husband.”
And then Christ said to her:
“You have rightly said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.”

Some spiritual writers, commenting on this passage, have said that Christ, as it were, was saying to her:
“Yes, you were bound, as though in marriage, to everything your five senses could give you. And you discovered that in none of these things could you find fullness or true satisfaction. And now you are left only with yourself: your body, your mind. Yet they too, no more than your five senses, can satisfy you or give you that fullness without which you cannot live.”

Is this not what Christ says to us when we read the Gospel? When He sets before us the face of what we could become? When He calls us to the greatness to which we are summoned?
To that greatness of which the Apostle Paul speaks when he calls us to attain
“the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”:
to be truly human as He is; to become a true human being in His image — just as Christ is the true Man, Who has attained the fullness of complete and all-embracing communion with God.

So let us learn from this woman. All of us — each one of us — have turned in many directions, seeking something in this world that might satisfy us. And all of us, if we look at ourselves honestly, have discovered that nothing can truly satisfy us.
For the human person is too deep for material things alone. The human person is too deep and too spacious even for psychology alone.
Only God can fill this depth and this inner spaciousness.

If only we could understand this, we would find ourselves in exactly the same position as the Samaritan woman.
We do not have to meet Christ beside an earthly well. For us, the well is the Gospel: the place from which the water of life can break forth.
But this is no longer a material well. That well is an image, a symbol. And the water we need to drink is another kind of water.

Let us then begin to imitate this woman.
Let us come to our senses. Let us understand that everything to which we have been bound, as though in marriage, has not become our fulfillment.
And let us ask ourselves the question:
“Who am I in the dimension in which God sees me?”

Then we will be able to go to others and say:
“I have met a Man who placed a mirror before my eyes, and I saw myself as I truly am. He told me the whole truth about myself. Come — see! Come — listen!”

And people will come. They will listen. And then they will turn to us and say:
“Now we believe no longer because of your testimony. We have seen for ourselves, we have heard for ourselves, and now we ourselves know and believe.”

Amen.
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh