In 1990 I was appointed to a parish where both the church and house needed extensive refurbishment. Late one afternoon the clerk of works came to report that the day's plumbing work was unfinished; it could be completed only the following morning and they would have to leave the water turned off overnight.

He advised me to fill buckets for my needs. But what were my needs? I realised that I needed water for drinking and for cooking, for washing up and washing myself, for shaving and flushing the lavatory. It taught me very quickly how essential water is for survival. Water is a source of life. Some time later a woman came to see me to plan a funeral. Her brother had fallen into the local canal and drowned. Water is not only a source of life. It can be an instrument of death.

Then some years later still I found myself here at the Beda College in Rome, where older men from the English-speaking world are prepared for priestly ordination. One was Vietnamese. He had escaped from his country by boat and spent nine days on the open sea. Water was carrying him to safety, but it was also a threat: there was doubt about the seaworthiness of the boat, danger from storms and from pirates. For him water was ambivalent. And water's very ambivalence is one reason why we use it for baptising, when we mark a passage from death to new life in Christ.

People can be baptised at any time, but there is something particularly fitting when they are baptised during the Easter Vigil. Those who are baptised already also renew their baptismal promises. That night, when we celebrate Jesus' resurrection, His passover from death to new life, is the perfect time for celebrating that new life in Him which those who are baptised come to share by being born again of water and the Spirit. In baptism we pass sacramentally from death to life. And the Lenten liturgy prepares us for Easter by reminding us constantly that water symbolises what we are to celebrate.

One example is Jesus' meeting with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, which many people will be listening to again this weekend. Jesus, we are told, is sitting alone because the disciples have gone to buy food. The Samaritan woman comes to the well and He speaks to her. What could be simpler? But so much is packed into that moment. He is on his own, yet He has spoken to her, a Jewish man addressing a Samaritan woman. By addressing her He has crossed the boundaries of gender, race and religion that separate them. He is revealing a new kind of life.

And what He says is significant. He asks her for water: “Give me a drink.” He has no bucket. He wants to share her water. In exchange He offers to share with her water that quenches thirst for ever, what He calls living water, water as the source of new life. At first the woman wants to accept just so that she can avoid the daily walk to the well; by the end she is coming to believe in Jesus as the Christ.

Such a gift of new life seems overwhelming, but those unmoved by Christianity will often be sceptical. If this living water is everything that it is claimed to be, they will argue, it should transform lives. And they are right. It should. In a perfect world the baptised would be beacons of justice and mercy, of peace and love. But often we are not. For sacraments are not magical formulae. How much did the Samaritan woman change? New life in Christ does not shift automatically long-established patterns of behaviour.

We know how we ought to live and we know how often we fall short. We struggle to move from death to new life. A smidgen of self-knowledge makes us aware of the gap between the person we ought to be and the person we are. The gap creates scandal. These Lenten weeks give us the opportunity to narrow it and allow the water of life to renew us.

Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome