No discovery is complete until the desire to share it fills our hearts; and we cannot communicate Christ to others until we have discovered him for ourselves. The Christian life is based on these twin pillars of discovery and communication. The Samaritan woman in today's Gospel passage is filled with that joy of her discovery of the Messiah and she cannot but communicate this to others. This is also true in the life of the saints who could not just stop speaking about the Lord after encountering him. St. Paul encountered and discovered Jesus on his way to Damascus and could not but communicate this good news to others.

In his letter to the Romans St. Paul says that when our hope is in God, it cannot turn to dust and ashes. When our hope is in the love of God, it can never be an illusion, for God loves us with an everlasting love backed by an everlasting power. In the reading from Exodus we can compare the rock which Moses struck, with Jesus, who is the eternal rock through which we get the life-giving water.