COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPEL Jn 4, 5-42
This third Sunday of Lent gives us the opportunity to delve into one of the deepest, theological, and liberating texts that we can find in the Gospels. It is the passage of the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, recorded by the Johannine communities with the intention of demonstrating that Christianity, at the end of the 1st century, is already consolidated and is a religion that breaks down human, cultural, and religious borders.
This long text gives the impression of being an obstacle course that Jesus is overcoming, freeing fundamentalist religious and patriarchal mentalities.
The first obstacle that Jesus seems to overcome, with a clear liberating intention, has to do with the vision of women, mixed with the religious vision of the Samaritans. It is important to highlight that the Samaritans were very opposed to the Jews because they had not accepted the place of religious reference in Jerusalem but rather on Mount Gerizim. Furthermore, in their origin, this people worshiped other gods, and the Jews had not forgiven them for it, so they continued with this stigma. They were not pure to them.
This woman is stigmatized for two reasons: for being a woman and for being a Samaritan. The matter of the five husbands may have a reading more linked to those gods that, in their origin, the Samaritans worshiped. In fact, Jesus’ conversation with her is more theological than focused on her personal life. A great liberating detail.
Jesus speaks with this woman without any cultural or gender prejudice, alone. A woman conversing with a man at a well, according to Jewish tradition, was a sign of a betrothal. There they would pair up to form a family nucleus and continue the Israelite lineage. This is the first situation that Jesus liberates. The encounter with this woman is based on a look at her integrity, her identity, her dignity. He breaks, in this way, with the role of the Jewish man and recognizes in her her right to privacy, intimacy, without the need for a man to guard her or to desire her to have descendants. This woman establishes an intellectual and theological dialogue that she herself leads towards the question of where God should be worshipped.
The second obstacle lies in the content of the conversation. Jesus is guiding the woman to discover the transcendent dimension of human beings where there is no gender, no culture, no religion. In that inner space is the Source that makes us be at every moment and that shapes us as beings who live in abundance because of what flows from within, and not because of what comes to us from the outside. The religious center is no longer either Jerusalem or Gerizim; the human being is the sacred mountain where our true nature is revealed, permeated by the Divinity. *Living Water is part of what we are*, and Jesus seems to make this clear in this encounter.
The third obstacle appears to focus on religion itself, on the roles and services that different members of the community perform. We see that the woman will recount what she has experienced and becomes a preacher who awakens in her listeners the experience of the essential Christian message; a message that is not moral but existential.
The text clearly expresses that the woman leaves the pitcher. The pitcher represents her former domestic situation of subordination. By leaving it, she becomes the subject of her own story in independence and completeness. She is a woman with her own voice, an antithesis of the silenced and submissive woman, who does theology from herself, from experience, and in communion with Jesus, without needing validation from the male. The text says that many of those who lived there, in Samaria, believed because of the woman’s words, who preaches that she has found the TRUE WELL and there is no need to go anywhere to draw the Water of Life that never ends.
There are life’s coincidences that sound like irony. This gospel corresponds to the 3rd Sunday of Lent, which coincides with March 8th. If we look at International Women’s Day through the filter of the essence of Christianity, we cannot find a better example than this passage from the Samaritan woman to highlight the need for the Church to take clear and decisive steps regarding women. *Do we really still think that the roles and different services performed in the community are sacred and divine excluding women?* According to today’s text, the only thing sacred and divine is the dignity, the value we have IN EQUALITY, for being sons and daughters of God.
HAPPY SUNDAY
Rosario Ramos
March 8, 2026
English version translated with AI