Satiating Jesus’ Thirst and Letting Him Satiate Ours, Third Sunday of Lent (A), March 8, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Third Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 8, 2026
Ex 17:3-7, Ps 95, Rom 5:1-2.5-8; Jn 4:5-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily:

• Over the last couple of weeks, I made a missionary pilgrimage to Nigeria. On our second day we had the joy to visit the minor seminary for the Archdiocese of Abuja, which is Saints Simon and Jude Minor Seminary in Kuje, which has about 300 seminarians. The seminarians were waiting for us in a huge unfinished auditorium, with a thick concrete roof, dirt floors, open sides and five steps leading to a concrete stage area. The seminarians welcomed us with songs and then the rector did with a beautiful speech thanking us for our support in the past and boldly presenting the needs the still have. The first need, he said in words I don’t think I’ll ever forget, is, “Our seminarians are thirsty.” I thought he might be speaking metaphorically about their holy desires. I couldn’t fathom, as I sipped from the bottled water they put next to my seat on a 97-degree day, that he was speaking literally. But he was. It turns out that the seminary only gets about 10 hours of electricity a week and they need electricity to run the pumps in the wells on the property. They have a couple of generators on the property supposedly to fill the gap — like most Nigerian Churches, businesses, and houses, some of which likewise can have solar power — but the seminary’s generators are so old, they constantly break down. That leads to lots of problems, like an inability to have light at night for the seminarians’ study, to run fans in the dormitory to help the seminarians get a decent night’s rest, not to mention affects everything from hygiene to laundry. But the first and greatest need, the rector told me forthrightly, is that the young athletic seminarians, in a very hot and dry climate, simply do not have enough water to drink. They’re thirsty. I hope to be able to help them.
• Today’s readings speak about two thirsts, and how each is quenched. We first have the thirst of Jesus, and it was for far more than a drink of water under the brutal noon day Middle Eastern sun. His entire incarnation, his hidden life, public ministry, passion, death and resurrection can all be summed up by his fifth word from the Cross, “I thirst!” His thirst was not for wine mixed with gall but for us, for souls, that he might fill us with himself, with his love, with his divine life. His whole life can be summarized as an unquenchable quest to give himself to us as a spring of living water gushing up within us to eternal life.
• His thirst was met by the Samaritan woman coming to the same well at midday to fill her jug. She was the Zsa Zsa Gabor or Elizabeth Taylor of her day, who had married five times already and was then living with a sixth man who was not her husband. She was coming to the well not at the cool times in the early morning or early evening but at the time of the most piercing sun because she was obviously trying to avoid being the butt of criticism from other women of the town for her past and present. According to St. Augustine, this woman represents the gentiles prior to the Gospel. And Jesus’ interaction with her is meant to symbolize the interaction he desires to have with every soul. The Eucharistic Preface we will pray later in this Mass reminds us that when Jesus “asked the Samaritan woman for water to drink, he had already created the gift of faith within her and so ardently did he thirst for her faith that he kindled in her the fire of divine love.” Just like our body cannot exist without water — the average adult human body is 50 to 60 percent water — neither can our soul survive without Jesus who identifies himself as the living water. Jesus, through whom both our body and soul were created, knows both realities, and came as the divine physician to give us the soul-sustaining remedy to the woman at the well and to each of us.
• In his conversation with her, Jesus taught the woman and through her us about the two essential realities about our spiritual life: God’s grace, symbolized by the “living water” he describes, and our desire or “thirst” for that spiritual hydration. He began the dialogue at the most basic point of connection, a mutual love for cold drink on a hot day. “Give me a drink,” he asked, and the woman objected because Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans and men didn’t speak to women alone in public places. “How can you, a Jew, as me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” Jesus replied, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ and you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Living water is a play on words, one clear to the people of Jesus’ time with a “Dead Sea” so close. Living water means running or fresh water, in comparison to stagnant and dead. Jesus was saying that the water she was drawing, the old water of her daily existence, was not leading her to freshness, newness, and life. He was offering her a better way. “Everyone who drinks this water,” Jesus said, referring to the water of Jacob’s well, “will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman responded, perhaps with a little faith, perhaps with a lot of sarcasm, “Give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
• That’s when Jesus upped the ante and spoke about how to receive it, suggesting she needed to begin to live in a way consistent with living water. “Go call your husband and come back,” he said, and after she confessed that she didn’t have a husband, Jesus, engaging her gently where she was, told her that she was right in saying she didn’t have a husband because “you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.” At that the woman tried to change the subject twice, first to whether Jews or Samaritans were right about the right place to worship — Mount Zion or Mount Gerizim — and then to express her hopes about the coming Messiah. Jesus brought both conversations back to the essential: that he was coming as the Living Water to irrigate her whole life. He said that the time had arrived to worship God in Spirit and in truth, not on any mountain, but in communion with Him who is the union between God and man, and about the Messiah, “I am he, the one speaking with you.” It’s an incredibly direct admission from Jesus, because he knew already where the woman’s faith was. She replied with faith. Having imbibed the living water Jesus was serving her, she left her jug— a sign that she was leaving her old life — and ran into the town, saying to everyone — the five men who had left her, the sixth man who was using her without commitment, the women who used to deride her and everyone else, because she was a new woman and was no longer afraid! — “Come see a man who told me everything I have done! Could he possibly be the Christ?” They all came out with her and discovered for their own that Jesus was not only the Messiah, the Savior of the Jews, or the Samaritans, but the “Savior of the World.”
• Jesus wants to have a similar dialogue with each of us, to take us from our early hopes, hungers, and loves to what they all ultimately hunger for: him. This woman had a deep thirst for God and when the Living Water came and made himself known, everything changed, and changed in an instant. That’s what he hopes to find in each of us. In one of the most beautiful psalms, which the Church prays in the Liturgy of the Hours on the first Sunday of the month and on every major feast day, this God-given thirst for God is highlighted: “O God, you are my God, for you I long, for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water” (Ps 63:1). The question each of us needs to ask today, and as we go more and more into the spiritual desert of Lent, is, “Do I really thirst for God?” “Does my soul pine for God?” “Can I really say in spirit and in truth, ‘Give me that water?’” We know from the first reading and the Psalm that often we don’t respond that way to God. The Israelites in the desert, even after the ten miracles to free them from Pharaoh, even after the wonder of crossing the Red Sea, still grumbled as if God had led them into the desert just to die of thirst and hunger. The responsorial Psalm had us pray, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts,” because they had heard God’s voice and had responded with stiff-necks and sclerotic hearts. He who made water flow from the rock can pierce our hearts and make it flow with living water, but we have to want it, pine for it, thirst for it, like someone in the desert for 40 days would long for a glass of cold water.
• What is this “living water” exactly? Jesus describes what it is later in two places in St. John’s Gospel. It is nothing short of God’s divine life — what we call in theology the Indwelling of the Blessed Trinity. In one place, he identifies the living water as the presence of the Holy Spirit; in the other, he identifies it as his own presence through the Holy Eucharist. But we know that whenever one of the divine persons is present in a soul, the other two persons in the one God are likewise present. Jesus’ two descriptions of that living water show us how that holy H20 quenches our deepest thirst:
  • In John 7, Jesus said: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” St. John tells us: “He said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive” (Jn 7:37-38). This presence of the Holy Spirit within us is what St. Paul is describing in the beautiful passage from today’s second reading: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” The Holy Spirit is what allows us to worship God in Spirit and in truth.
  • And in John 6, when Jesus prophesied how the “bread” that he would give would far surpass the Manna in the desert given to the Jews, he stated: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.…  for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (Jn 6:35; 55-56). The indwelling of the Blessed Trinity occurs through the Sacraments, when people who are thirsty come to Jesus who fills their hearts with this living water. This reality begins with the life-giving waters of baptism when we first receive within us Jesus, the water who saves. That’s why we have these readings today on the Third Sunday of Lent, to help the catechumens, the elect, who are now preparing for the waters of baptism to thirst for what Jesus desires to give them. But this saving water continues in every sacramental encounter, most particularly in the Eucharist, when we receive Jesus, the incarnation of that life-giving water, within our bodies and souls.
• Whether we respond to Jesus’ invitation today is something of great stakes. If we really drink of the life-giving water of Jesus, it will lead us to heaven. But if we don’t, if we respond to his offer with hardened hearts, our lives will be desiccated in this world and we risk having them absent of Christ’s living water forever. Jesus tells us that the living water he wishes to give us will form a geyser welling up within us flowing up to eternal life. We are marking this year the 400^th anniversary of the dedication of the new Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican and the 1700^thanniversary of the dedication of the Constantinian Basilica that preceded it. The Basilica of St. Peter’s is built over a pagan necropolis, today called the “Scavi” or “excavations” where I was a Vatican guide during my years in Rome. When the emperor Constantine in the 320s was planning to bury the entire necropolis underground so that the altar of the Basilica of St. Peter could be built right on top of St. Peter’s tomb, he allowed the pagan families to remove their deceased family members to necropolises elsewhere in the city. At the same time, Christians took advantage of the change in laws to move their dead into the necropolis. They didn’t care that it was going to be buried underground, presumably forever. They just wanted to bury their loved ones as close as possible to St. Peter, so that he would show them a special “love of neighbor” and pray for them to enter eternal life. And in that necropolis, you see a huge contrast between pagan and Christian burial practices. One of the pagan understandings of the afterlife was that it was a huge frat party led by the god of drinking Bacchus (also called Dionysius) who would be dragged around the afterlife by a centaur-driven carriage with a large carafe of wine in his hands keeping everybody’s glasses full and spirits high. The pagans also used to take out huge straws to pour wine down into the sarcophagi or the urns of their loved ones so that their deceased family members could join in their wine-filled celebration here on earth. When Christians came into the necropolis, what you started to see was that they would place a counter-image on their title plates. I remember one —of a woman named Amelia Gorgonia — whose husband scratched on the flip side of a former pagan marble title plate an inscription to his wife. On the side her epitaph, he depicted an image of the woman at the well, indicating that his wife was like the Samaritan woman today, who had asked Christ for the living water welling up inside of her to eternal life. Because of that living water, there was no need for Bacchus to keep everyone’s wine glasses full, because we had Christ, the living water, the one who had turned water into wine, on the inside, quenching all our thirsts, all our desires, forever. If we wish to have our desires fulfilled forever in heaven, the way we prepare ourselves for that is by imbibing Christ the living water as much as we can now.
• This two-fold thirst — Jesus’ and ours — is central to the life of Missionaries of Charity. This morning I returned to Saint Mother Teresa’s March 25, 1993, Letter to you in which she wrote to you about Jesus’ thirst to satiate our and others’ deepest thirsts and the importance of our thirst to satiate Jesus’. “How beautiful is our vocation,” she wrote. “How great God’s love for us in choosing our Society to satiate that thirst of Jesus, for love, for souls — giving us our special place in the Church. At the same time, we are reminding the world of his thirst, something that was being forgotten. … For me Jesus’ thirst is something so intimate. … Everything in MC exists only to satiate Jesus. His words on the wall of every MC chapel, they are not from the past only but alive here and now, spoken to you. Do you believe it? … Let it become as intimate for each of you. … Jesus must be the one to say to you, ‘I thirst.’ Hear your own name. Not just once. Every day. ‘I thirst’ is something much deeper than Jesus’ just saying, ‘I love you.’ Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you, you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you or who he wants you to be for him. The heart and soul of the Missionaries of Charity is only this — the thirst of Jesus’ heart, hidden in the poor. This is the source of every part of MC life. It gives us our aim, our fourth vow, the spirit of our Society. Satiating the living Jesus in our midst is the Society’s only purpose for existing. Can we each say the same for ourselves, that it is our only reason for living? … The thirst of Jesus is the focus of all that is the Missionaries of Charity. The Church has confirmed it again and again — ‘Our charism is to satiate the thirst of Jesus for love and souls, by working for the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor.’ Nothing different. Nothing else. … Only the thirst of Jesus, hearing it, feeling it, answering it with all your heart will keep the Society alive after Mother leaves you. … Even when Mother leaves you, Jesus’ thirst will never leave you.”
• In the last book of the Bible, in which Jesus speaks to us from within the celestial Jerusalem, he reiterates what he said to the Samaritan woman within the context of the gift of heaven and our need to desire it. He states: “It is done! 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” (Rev. 21:6). Then he gives us an incredible invitation; he is not forcing anything on us, but as with any invitation, we have to respond. “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” (Rev. 22:17). Jesus is inviting us to the eternal wedding banquet, where he will quench our thirst forever. He gives us the means to anticipate that life, in prayer, in the sacraments and in the moral life that is life according to the Holy Spirit and truth.
• In the beatitudes, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for holiness.” To thirst for sanctity is to thirst for God. Jesus promised that those who so thirst “shall be satisfied,” and he’s faithful to his promises. If we are truly thirsting for him — and not for something or someone else — the Eucharist will be the greatest earthly satisfaction and joy we could possibly receive, because here we receive Him for whom we thirst “like a dry-weary land without water.” We consume Him “for whom our soul pines.” And we enter more fully into that life giving stream that brings us back to its Source, God himself, in that kingdom were we hope to drink of that life-giving stream to the dregs forever. We are grateful for our Mass today where God’s thirst meets ours. We pray that God will continue to provide means for all those who thirst for him to come to receive in the Holy Eucharist that living Water and to increase the desire, through spiritual communions, among all of the people of God. The Holy Spirit and the Church are saying, “Come! Take the water of life as a gift!” And we reply, “Jesus, give us that life giving water always!”

Gospel
JN 4:5-42

Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar,
near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Jacob’s well was there.
Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well.
It was about noon.

A woman of Samaria came to draw water.
Jesus said to her,
“Give me a drink.”
His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him,
“How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?”
—For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.—
Jesus answered and said to her,
“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.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep;
where then can you get this living water?
Are you greater than our father Jacob,
who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself
with his children and his flocks?”
Jesus answered and said to her,
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again;
but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst;
the water I shall give will become in him
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty
or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her,
“Go call your husband and come back.”
The woman answered and said to him,
“I do not have a husband.”
Jesus answered her,
“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”
The woman said to him,
“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain;
but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus said to her,
“Believe me, woman, the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
You people worship what you do not understand;
we worship what we understand,
because salvation is from the Jews.
But the hour is coming, and is now here,
when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth;
and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.
God is Spirit, and those who worship him
must worship in Spirit and truth.”
The woman said to him,
“I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ;
when he comes, he will tell us everything.”
Jesus said to her,
“I am he, the one speaking with you.”

At that moment his disciples returned,
and were amazed that he was talking with a woman,
but still no one said, “What are you looking for?”
or “Why are you talking with her?”
The woman left her water jar
and went into the town and said to the people,
“Come see a man who told me everything I have done.
Could he possibly be the Christ?”
They went out of the town and came to him.
Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat.”
But he said to them,
“I have food to eat of which you do not know.”
So the disciples said to one another,
“Could someone have brought him something to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“My food is to do the will of the one who sent me
and to finish his work.
Do you not say, ‘In four months the harvest will be here’?
I tell you, look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest.
The reaper is already receiving payment
and gathering crops for eternal life,
so that the sower and reaper can rejoice together.
For here the saying is verified that ‘One sows and another reaps.’
I sent you to reap what you have not worked for;
others have done the work,
and you are sharing the fruits of their work.”

Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him
because of the word of the woman who testified,
“He told me everything I have done.”
When the Samaritans came to him,
they invited him to stay with them;
and he stayed there two days.
Many more began to believe in him because of his word,
and they said to the woman,
“We no longer believe because of your word;
for we have heard for ourselves,
and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.”

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