The Samaritan woman meeting Jesus at the well is one of the richest pericopes in the New Testament. There is so much to unpack in this episode: Jesus walking through Samaria, talking not just to a woman (gasp!), not just to a Samaritan woman (double gasp!), but to a Samaritan woman who is very likely considered to be the village hussy (does anyone still use that word?). It has been speculated that her reason for going to the well at noon, instead of early in the morning, is to avoid contact with others, which may have been shaming for her. Without a doubt, this woman's relationship history is troubled, to make an understatement.
There are two deep misunderstandings: the woman misunderstands the "water" Jesus offers and his disciples misunderstand the food to which he refers. His disciples are not only puzzled but slightly scandalized that he is talking to an unaccompanied woman.
It is important to point out that Jesus, despite knowing "everything" that woman had done, does not condemn her. In fact, he mildly praises for her telling him the truth about not having a husband, even though any interested reader can easily see, in light of what Jesus says about her being married five times and currently living with a man to whom she is not married, that she's being just a bit misleading. Again, Jesus does not condemn, rebuke, upbraid, seek to set her straight, or give her unsolicited relationship advice. He doesn't even see fit to give her some kind of "absolution" for her alleged sins.
It is precisely through her odd relationship history that she begins to recognize who Jesus is. Jesus doesn't let her sit and spin. She calls him a prophet and makes the connection to the Messiah. Then Jesus, making himself vulnerable, tells her that he is the Messiah, the one for whom she and her people are waiting and who will tell them "everything."
Upon her encounter with the Christ, she becomes an evangelist to the other inhabitants of her village. Talk about being saved by grace through faith! She invites her fellow villagers to come and see for themselves. Like her, after their own close encounter with Jesus, many of them come to see for themselves who he is.
Only water will slake a terrible thirst. If you've ever been really thirsty, you don't want anything but water. Thirst in this passage is metaphorically equated with what today we might call our existential angst, our desire for meaning and purpose, our dissatisfaction, even in the wake of something good and enjoyable. That dissatisfaction is like thirst and keeps coming back no matter how many ways you try to satisfy it, just like the woman had to keep coming back to the well to draw water.
Water in this passage is a metaphor for God. And, as Edward Schillebeeckx noted in the title of his first major theological work, Jesus Christ is the sacrament of God. If Jesus Christ is the sacrament of God, the Eucharist is the sacrament of Christ. In and through this sacrament Christ becomes the food that satisfies our hunger and the drink that quenches our thirst.
Given the centrality of food and drink, of water and grain, it is easy to see that this passage is deeply Eucharistic. Like the woman misunderstanding Jesus about water and his disciples not grasping what he said about food, our understanding of the Eucharistic is often highly reductive. This is to our detriment and that of the world.
This passage also brings into bold relief something Pope Francis pointed out in his first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium: "The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak" (sec. 47).
While "tradition," in all its manifest humanity, has given the Samaritan woman at the well a name ("Photine," meaning "the luminous one"), she is not named in the Gospel. Why? Because you and I are her.
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