When Lent began this year, I resolved to meditate on Scripture every day. Using my handy-dandy Magnificat magazine or the missalette in church, I went over the Mass readings for the day. Then I talked to God about them — trying, at least, to let the conversation be a two-way street.

While meditating on the Sunday gospel in which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, I was struck with unusual force by Christ’s first words to her. “Give me a drink,” he says.

Was Our Lord’s request — demand? — just a conversation-starter? Was it Jesus’ way of letting the woman know that he was reaching out to her, a Samaritan? Or did he really want a drink of water?

It may have taken me until Easter, but now I think I get it.

The Samaritan woman was taken aback: “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (John 4:9).

Without hesitating, Jesus turned the whole situation on its head. “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’” he answered her, “you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. …[W]hoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Clearly, Christ’s first request for water was meant to steer the Samaritan woman toward the themes of water and identity. It’s important that you ask the correct person for water, she says. You couldn’t be more right, Our Lord replies. The right person will give you the right water, the water you need. Acknowledge that you are parched for lack of the life of God, and turn to him through Jesus. Then the Holy Spirit will flow into your soul with his healing and vivifying presence. Not bad for a conversation starter.

Jesus may well have been, at the same time, genuinely physically thirsty. But even more, he thirsted for the Samaritan woman’s soul — for her salvation. He asked her to help quench the longing that would later make him say, while on the cross: “I thirst.”

It’s quite clear that, on her own, the woman couldn’t really help Jesus’ thirst at all. She didn’t even understand what he was asking for. But as Christ told her how to quench her own thirst for God, he told her how to quench his thirst as well.

When we receive the grace of God and the gift of the Holy Spirit, a spring of living water wells up in us for eternal life. God, in his infinite generosity, gives us the means to be generous toward him. We can quench Christ’s thirst by accepting and living to the full the gift of salvation that he, alone, gives.

I think it’s also telling that, once the woman drank of the water Jesus revealed to her, she didn’t keep it to herself. She told the entire town, “Come and see.” In doing so, she set an example for each of us. When was the last time we went out of our way to tell people what Jesus has done in our lives? 

Those first words of Christ to the Samaritan woman at the well — “Give me a drink” — were much more than just a conversation starter. They represented the Lord’s heartfelt wish that his people aid him in the work of salvation.

This Easter, I’m more aware than ever before how insistently those words reverberate all the way to the present day. New Evangelization, anyone?

Wendy-Irene Zepeda writes

from Colfax, California.