3rd Sunday of Lent 2023 - Thirst for the living water of Christ

 

As we venture deeper into the desert of Lent this weekend, we hear a lot about water and thirst—the thirst of the Israelites in the desert… Jesus himself asks a Samaritan woman for a drink of water, but then a discussion ensues about the woman’s thirst for something for vital than water—a thirst for God.

Thirst certainly drove her to the well that day. . She must have been desperate for water to go to the well at high noon at the height of the piercing sun. Why didn’t she go earlier in the day? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she had married five times and was living with a sixth man who was not her husband. Perhaps she avoided going to the well at the cooler times of the early morning or late afternoon, when the rest of the village was there because she sought to avoid the criticism of her the other women because of her complicated past and present. 

We can detect already a thirst for more than water—we don't know what happened to her first 5 husbands, or why she was living with a man who was not her husband, but she no doubt displayed a thirst for authentic lasting companionship. That she ventured  to the well alone, displayed a thirst for community from which she had become alienated either due to her own poor choices or factors beyond her control. 

But, then she encountered Jesus who fulfilled all these thirsts and more. At the most brutal hour of the day, perhaps the most brutal moment in her life, she encountered the Lord.. And breaking with the social conventions—two social conventions, in fact, Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans and men didn’t speak to women alone in public places — the Lord began to speak to her about the spiritual life: of God’s grace, symbolized by the “living water” he describes, and our desire or “thirst” for that water.

This encounter with the Lord Jesus was life changing. Like the fishermen-apostles who leave their fishing nets behind to follow the Lord, their life changed by Jesus’ invitation, St. John tells us that the Samaritan women left her water jar behind and went into the town to tell people about Jesus. Following Jesus more closely always means leaving something behind. The Season of Lent—the quiet of the season of Lent, the prayerful reflectiveness of this holy season helps us to identify the things we need to leave behind in order to follow Jesus more closely.

Perhaps we need to leave behind a habit of quick cutting remarks, or wasting hours on social media or video games or perverted internet content; perhaps we need to leave behind the habit of looking for reasons to criticize or dismiss the people you don’t like. But there are things all of us are invited to leave behind in order to drink more deeply of the living water of Jesus Christ.

And in leaving those artificial substitutes—those inhumane behaviors, we discover that which is truly life giving in Christ—we rediscover our humanity in Christ.

At his Angelus audience a few years ago, Pope Francis pondered what it meant that the Samaritan woman left her water jug there at the well, “The result of that encounter at the well was that the woman was transformed. She left her water jug with which he had come to get water and ran into the city to tell others of her extraordinary experience. … She had gone to take water from the well but had found another water, the living water of mercy that flows to eternal life. She found the water for which she had always been searching. She ran to the village that was judging, condemning and rejecting her and announced that she had found the Messiah who had changed her life. … In this Gospel, we, too, find the stimulus to ‘leave our own jug,’ a symbol of everything that seems important to us but that loses its value before the ‘love of God.’ All of us have one or more than one of these water jugs. I ask you and ask myself, ‘What is my interior jug, which weighs you down, which distances you from God?’ Let us leave it and listen with our heart to the voice of Jesus that offers us another water, one that brings us closer to the Lord.”

This Gospel also challenges us to consider who we have ostracized like the Samaritan women was ostracized by her fellow villagers. Who have we turned off the water faucet of charity, patience, kindness, and courtesy towards? Who have we written off as irredeemable? That is the judgmentalism that is not our way—when we write people off and withhold charity towards them because they don’t conform to either our preconceptions or even to the Gospel. The people who don’t conform with the Gospel are precisely the people to whom the Lord sends us. We are to approach those lonely souls sitting at the well alone with kindness.

The great Father Faber says “Kindness has converted more sinners than either zeal, eloquence, or learning; and these three have never converted anyone, unless they were accompanied by kindness.” As you become kinder yourself by practicing kindness, so the people you are kind to, if they were kind before, learn to be kinder, or if they were not kind before, learn how to be kind. To engage in kindness is to take a drink of the living water which produces a wonderful effect in us. The wonderful effect of a kind deed makes you wonder why you do not do more kind things. 

Lent helps us to identify those ways in which we withhold kindness, and then impels us into the world to perform acts of kindness and love. Love is patient, love is kind, it is not rude, it is not pompous.

In the last book of the Bible, in which Jesus speaks to us from within the heavenly Jerusalem, he reiterates what he said to the Samaritan woman. He states: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life” He is the Alpha offering each of us a new beginning. And He is the Omega towards which we are to direct all of our actions, our whole lives.

There are so many people in this world dying of spiritual thirst. They go from one fad to the next, one novelty to the next, one addiction to the next, one sin to the next, but the world offers nothing but sand. The world cannot quench the thirst for God. And these people—the thirsty--are in this neighborhood, they are sitting at those empty wells alone, thinking all they need is to find the right thing and then they’ll be happy. But happiness and fullness of life are found not in some thing, but in somebody, and the somebody is Jesus Christ.

“Come” the Lord says in the book of Revelation, “Come and drink.”  “The Spirit and the bride (the Church) say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift” 

He invites us to drink of the life giving water, then sends us out to make that invitation to others—in words of preaching, in acts of kindness, in prayers and penances, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

Homily: 3rd Sunday of Lent 2017 - The woman at the well

The Gospel of the Samaritan Woman contains many insights which enrich our Lenten journey.
There are a couple important details right at the beginning of the story: “Jesus came to a town of Samaria…Jacob's well was there.” Jesus enters this place, where no pious Jew would go. Samaria was filled with half-breeds—Jews who had intermarried with the Assyrians invaders of centuries past. The Samaritans were no longer considered Jewish, and so they and their land were considered unclean and would be avoided by the pious Jew.

First, insight: Jesus doesn’t go around the unclean land or the unclean person. Jesus loves the unclean, the marginalized, the outsider. In the Second Reading, we are reminded by St. Paul that Jesus loves the sinner so much, he lays down his life for them.

The encounter between Jesus and the woman doesn’t just take place in a random location in Samaria, rather, we hear it takes place on a well.  Last week, Jesus was on top of a mountain, the place where heaven meets earth, divinity meets humanity.

What’s symbolic about a well? If you’ve ever been to a wedding reception, sometimes the repository for the wedding gifts and wedding cards is in the shape of a well. In Scripture, many brides and grooms meet at wells. Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, all meet at wells.
Jesus, has but one bride, the Church. So the sinful, unclean Samaritan woman is a symbol of us all, invited to be wedded to Christ through his death and resurrection.

We know where this encounter takes place, but when does this encounter take place? St. John tells us: it was around noon. It’s the part of the day when the sun is at its most brilliant and most illuminating…in the course of this story Jesus is certainly going to shed light upon something truly important: his identity and the promises available for those who believe in Him.

So this woman of Samaria comes to draw water, and Jesus said to her “give me a drink”. This is a very strange request. In the society of his time, men and women, especially strangers, would not speak to each other publicly; It would be highly unusually and unconventional for a Jewish man to be so frank and direct with a Samaritan woman.

Notice that Jesus invites her to give Him a drink. St. Augustine said magnificently, this is God thirsting for our faith. Yes, indeed. This is God thirsting for our generosity. God thirsts for our generosity because generosity makes us joyful and God made us to be joyful. Sin and selfishness are always a failure to be generous with God and neighbor and result in joylessness.

The woman responds to Jesus’ invitation, not at all aware of the spiritual significance of the encounter: “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?"” To which Jesus responds, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Give me a drink, ' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

Jesus IS the gift of God—the Son is given to us by the Father that we may have eternal life. Jesus is saying, if you knew who I was, you’d ask me to give you what no one else on earth can provide: living water. Living water, what a powerful image for desert people—liveliness, hope, vitality, grace. Jesus is saying, I can give you what you most long for, that which humanity lost through sin, reconciliation with God that will bring you eternal life.

The woman shows she still doesn’t quite understand: “You don’t even have a bucket, how can you give living water?” She’s still thinking simply about physical water. So, Jesus takes her where she is, but then leads her deeper. Everyone who drinks from the earthly well will be thirsty again.

The earthly wells are all those earthly places we go to quench our thirst for the divine, but do not satisfy. All the addictions that leave us longing, all the worldly pursuits we chase after because we think they will make us happy. We’re wired for God, we are built for God, but we seek our happiness in all the wrong places, in created things like money, fame, and pleasure. We drink from those wells, and we are still thirsty. As good as these things are, none of them are God, so nothing can satisfy our desire for the infinite.

The woman so focused on the earthly well is all of us who fail to come to Jesus to be satisfied. What is your well? What is the behavior you go back to over and over looking for happiness where true happiness cannot be found? That’s an important Lenten exercise. What is your well? Hear the voice of Jesus this Lent inviting you to be generous with God, that God teach you a new way of drinking living water.

Jesus wants to give us living water that will bring us wholeness, joy, peace, and eternal life. But we must choose between him and the well.

Jesus then poses another interesting request: “go invite your husband and come back.” And the woman answers, “I don’t have a husband”. And Jesus says, “you are right, you don’t have a husband, you’ve had five husbands, and the man you are living with isn’t your husband.”

Why has this woman come at the worst part of day, the hottest part of day to draw water, and why is she alone? The custom at the time was for women to venture together to the village well, it was a time of comradery, and they’d go to the well either in the morning or evening, not at the hottest part of the day because it’s hard work drawing water.

So this woman has gone to the well, alone and at the hottest part of the day because she is probably a woman of ill-repute, someone who is morally suspect even to her neighbors, she’s had five husbands, she may have stolen seduced men away from their lawful wives.

Jesus invites even her, even us, to drink. We are all sinners. Maybe not exactly like the Samaritan woman, but we have all engaged in false relationships, gone back to worldly wells, isolated ourselves from others through poor choices? And what do we hear from Jesus? The invitation to life. The invitation to drink deeply, to have a deep intimate relationship to Christ through prayer isn’t just for the saints, it is for all of us.

The invitation to life involves change, it involves breaking habits, healing relationships, turning away from attitudes and behaviors which are contrary to our faith, putting an end to selfishness. Jesus invites the Samaritan woman to look humbly and honestly at her sins, and to let go of them, that she may know eternal life, and Jesus makes the same invitation to us.

May our Lenten observances help us to hear Jesus calling us to drink deeply of the living water which only comes through Him, through prayer, through repentance of sins, through reception of the sacrament, through generosity with God and selfless charity towards our neighbors, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.