Thirsting for the Living Water in the Desert of Lent, Third Sunday of Lent (A), March 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Third Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 15, 2020
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 points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today many Catholics in various Dioceses in the United States, in Italy, in Spain and various other places are unable to go to Mass because Mass will not be offered due to the threat of coronavirus virus transmission. Bishops have dispensed the faithful from the precept of the Church to attend Mass while encouraging them on their own to keep holy the Lord’s Day. For Catholics who really love the Lord, who come to Mass not out of obligation but out of love, who hunger to receive him, and who seek to make him the source and summit of their life not just on Sundays but each day, this is, and will be, a very difficult time. God, however, seeks to make everything work out for the good for those who love him (Rom 8:28) and one of the goods he might bring from this public Mass shutdown would be to have us grow even more in our recognition of the importance of Jesus in the Eucharist in our life. Sometimes “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” We pray that this will be one of those times.
• Today’s readings are right on cue. The speak about two hungers, two thirsts, and how each is satiated and quenched. We first have the thirst of Jesus, and it was far more for 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 was 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 Liz 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 human body is in fact 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 situation 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, life and that 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 conversational 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 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, 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 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 during the coronavirus situation, 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. 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 in two places later 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. 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.
• Today Jesus comes like a drilling company wanting to drill a deeper well within us. We know that when drilling companies come to make a well in a yard, they often need to burrow through layers of rock and various geological formations to tap that underground stream or aquifer. But that’s only the beginning. The family needs to keep that well free of leaves, of debris, and of various contaminants. They need to pipe that water into their house. And they have to use the water to give life to their daily activities. It’s the same way with our souls. We need to ask God to drill the well. He’ll need to get below the surface or superficial layers of our life, to burrow through the various rocky strata, to go deep, to unleash that source of living water. Once it’s drilled in baptism, we need to keep that well clean of the toxins of sin and free of the various debris that can clutter it up: all those daily activities that we think we “have to do,” when the only thing we really have to do is to let God love us and love him and others in return. The next step is that we need to have that living water pumped into the various rooms of our life and put the water to use. We need to drink that water and have it fill our souls. We need to use it to clean ourselves of whatever dirt we can into. We need to bathe in it. And we need to use it to water the various gardens of activity that characterize our life. Some of us haven’t cleaned the well in years. Some of us have pipes full of rust. Some of us have allowed it to become contaminated and hence, we’re receiving poison when we think we’re receiving only life giving water. Some of us have pure water, but turn on the faucets so little, like an hour on Sundays or a few minutes before we go to bed, that we’re not nearly as hydrated with God’s living water as he wants us to be. Lent is time for us to examine that water system and help us to take advantage of that gift! It is the season to help us allow the water to flow unimpeded. We’re called to increase the quality and the quantity of our prayer time, going to the source of life-giving water and begging him to give us a drink. We’re called to fast, which is a means by which we “clean the pipes” of all types of spiritual rust. We’re called to sacrifice ourselves and what we have, sharing that life-giving water with others in need. The greatest alms of all is when we give others the greatest gift of all — who is Jesus. Just like the Samaritan woman who ran to spread news about Jesus to all her townspeople, so we, too, this Lent, are called to leave our jugs, our security blankets and whatever weighs us down and go to our friends, family and even critics and bring them to the one who wants to give us this saving water. With the coronavirus scares, we made need to do that more on the phone, on Skype, in letters, than we ordinarily do, but just as the coronavirus is not an obstacle to our loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, so it’s not an obstacle to our loving our neighbor, although we might need to be versatile and creative in how we do both. Jesus will provide the living water of his grace. We need to provide the thirst.
• 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!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: