Christ is risen!
“He told me all that I ever did,” declares the Samaritan woman to her fellow residents of Sychar. All that she ever did – shouldn’t this be a source of shame and regret? After all, she has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband. However, when the Lord tells her what she has done, this does not cause her to shrink back, reproached; it causes her to go to her neighbors with joy, even excitement.
This Gospel passage is an ever-timely reminder that God loves us regardless of our many sins, our ugly past, our current struggles. We may find the memory of the Samaritan woman’s liberating happiness especially encouraging whenever we prepare ourselves for the sacrament of confession. When we approach this sacrament, we are not informing God of things he does not know; rather, we are declaring what he already knows, in the presence of his priest as witness, so that we can experience the same joy and freedom that the Samaritan woman once experienced. He knows all that I ever did – and yet he has come to me in the heat of the day and granted me to recognize him as Christ, my Savior, my Lord and my God, and thus to know his unbounded divine love for me, his creature.