In every faith community are those people who will hopefully someday be recognized by subsequent generations as holy, faithful and saintly. Sometimes these saintly people are known for their kindness, goodness and holiness from the very early moments of their lives, seeing good in others and presenting an image of Christ to all they meet. Others find holiness later in life through a process of conversion. Perhaps some singular event in their lives, either great or small and yet profound, made them see things from a different perspective and caused them to put away lives that may have been typified by sin, selfishness or worldly pursuits, for a clearer vision of Christ in the world. Once converted to Christ, nothing could change their minds and people who knew them, knew them to be changed.

In my own life, I have had the privilege of meeting many people who have practiced holiness with the ease of breathing and others who have struggled with it as one who is trying to fly without wings. In one instance I knew a woman who was honored by all who knew her as a woman of faith and upon whom the radiance of God’s love seemed to shine through the kindness of her smile. When she contracted terminal cancer, it came as a difficult blow to many people. No one wanted someone they loved so much to suffer, and one friend who had a difficult time accepting this reality wondered out loud, what terrible thing this holy woman must have done, to have God punish her so.

Apart from a basic misunderstanding of how God operates in our lives, this person also had not been paying attention to her holy friend, because to visit her in her illness was to soon find that she considered the cancer a gift from God, not a curse or a punishment. To those who would listen, she would tell them that her cancer was a gift from God, because it allowed her to unite her pain and suffering to the pain and suffering of Jesus on the cross, who had won salvation by His sacrificial suffering and by uniting her suffering to His, she was helping to further that same salvation in the world, which gave purpose and dignity to what she was experiencing. What she had received from God as a gift, she was offering back to God as a gift.

Perhaps you could say, that her perspective on her cancer and her pain and suffering was just the result of finding the best in everything, and that she was incapable of seeing the reality of things, but if you did, you would be wrong. Holy people don’t just try to sugar coat life to make it easier to swallow, they actually see the presence of God in things where others only choose to see a world apart from God. Harsh as that may sound, it lets us know that a life of holiness is a matter of choice. We can either choose to bring Christ into the way we live our lives and thus seek holiness, or we can struggle against it and wonder wrongly why God is punishing us.

In the gospel for this weekend, the Samaritan woman is someone who has been struggling against holiness, from all appearances, for all of her life. She is out getting water during the middle of the day, instead of in the morning with the other women of the village, because as someone who has struggled against holiness all of her life, she has become a source of ridicule and gossip for the other women, and rather than face them and the issues of her life, she chooses to avoid them and the harassment they offer.

As fate would have it though, Jesus and His disciples are traveling through her village, and as she encounters Jesus, she experiences a profound moment of grace that allows her to see a life filled with the love of God, instead of a life of hardship and failed relationships. Jesus offers her living water, in other words, holiness of life through the saving grace of God. He helps her to see a world apart, and infinitely greater, than the world and life she currently knows, by inviting her to seek the holiness of a life founded in His love and focused on salvation. This living water Jesus speaks about is the grace of God, that once accepted in life and lived as a way of life, offers not only that which is holy, but a whole new perspective on life is not confined by the parameters of a simply worldly life.

For those who are approaching the Easter Sacraments here in this parish and all around the world, this gospel and the example of the Samaritan woman offers a perspective of holiness of life that is given freely to all who seek to have Christ in their lives and are willing to embrace the race of their own personal cross. In Christ we are called to a conversion of spirit founded not in seeking a holiness that is perfect but a holiness that is obtained through an imperfect life. What that means is that sometimes it will be easy and sometimes it will be difficult, but it always means embracing the cross as a means finding and realizing God’s grace in our lives. The woman who had cancer found it in suffering, the woman at the well found it in healing, for us, it means finding it where we are in life as we seek Christ in love and life.