Sunday 12 March 2023 – III of the Season of Lent

+ From the Gospel according to John (short form) (4, 5-15.19b-26.39a.40-42)

At that time, Jesus came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the land that Jacob had given to Joseph his son: here was Jacob’s well. Jesus therefore, tired from the journey, sat by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water. She tells her Jesus: «Give me a drink». His disciples had gone into the city to stock up on food. Then the Samaritan woman says to him: «How come you, who are a Jew, ask me for a drink, who am a Samaritan woman?». In fact, the Jews have no relationship with the Samaritans. Jesus replies to her: «If you knew the gift of God and who it is who says to you: Give me a drink!, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water». The woman says to him: « Sir, you don’t have a bucket and the well is deep; Where, then, do you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and he and his sons and his livestock drank from it?”
Jesus replies to her: «Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. Indeed, the water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life”. «Lord – the woman tells him -, give me this water, so that I won’t be thirsty anymore and I won’t keep coming here to draw water. I see you are a prophet! Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; but you say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus says to her: «Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you don’t know, we worship what we know, because salvation comes from the Jews. But the hour comes – and it is this – in which true adorers will adore the Father in spirit and in truth: in fact, this is how the Father wants those who adore him to be. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The woman answered him: “I know that the Messiah, who is called Christ, is to come: when he comes, he will announce everything to us.” She tells her Jesus: «It is I who speak with you».
Many Samaritans of that city believed in him. And when they came to him, they begged him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. Many more believed because of his word and to the woman they said: “It is no longer because of your words that we believe, but because we ourselves have heard and we know that he is truly the savior of the world”.
Word of the Lord.