Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa on the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A

In the following you can find the Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, on the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A, on Sunday 12 March 2023.

(Jn 4:5-42)

The readings of the Sundays of Lent, particularly those of Year A which we are living, offer us a path of growth for living as disciples. Today’s passage, together with those of the next few Sundays, constitutes a lengthy baptismal catechesis that we cannot fully appreciate. We will, therefore, limit ourselves only to a few ideas.

On the First Sunday of Lent, we were taken to the desert, where knowing our hearts have been given to us, where who we are and to whom we belong have been revealed to us. On the Second Sunday, the disciple learns on a high mountain, gradually, to listen and see Jesus, His life in the total gift of self.

On this Third Sunday, discovering which desire dwells deeply in us is given to us.

The location where this happens is Sychar, a city of Samaria where Jesus, coming from Judea and going to Galilee, tired from the journey, stops at a well while His disciples go to the city to stock up on food (John 4:3-8). Here Jesus meets a Samaritan woman and begins a long and complex dialogue with her, in which the two conversationalists seem not to understand each other.

Yet this woman, who always seems to misunderstand the words of Jesus, gradually comes in small steps to the faith.

The first step is given by the fact that Jesus simply speaks to her: it is He and not her, that begins the conversation. This creates a great astonishment in the woman: “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (Jn 8:9). Actually, Jesus could and should have avoided this dialogue, for various reasons: because, first of all, His partner in conversation is a Samaritan woman and therefore a sort of heretic; also because she is living with a man who is not her husband and therefore, by law, she is considered an adulteress, a sinner; and finally, simply because she is a woman, and no Teacher of the Law would have stopped in public to speak with a woman.

Jesus, instead, speaks to her. “I am he, who speaking with you,” He will tell her at the end of the dialogue (Jn 4:26).

And He speaks to her not by reproaching her, and not even a catechesis; much more simply, He asks her for a drink.

The second step leads the woman to understand that there is something about herself that escapes her, something that’s missing in her, that can only be revealed to her: “If you knew the gift of God…” (Jn 4:16).

Sometimes we may think, like the Samaritan woman, that our life is entirely what we already know, in the habits that make up our daily life, in our past, but this is not so. Our true colors are still before us…

This meditation was originally published on the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Please click here to read the full text.