In just a few weeks time at the great Paschal Vigil, catechumens in our parish and all around the world, who have been preparing to enter the Church, will reach their goal and be baptized in the faith – and all of us, baptized many years ago, will join them by renewing our own Baptismal promises.
The season of Lent, which we are now marking, had its origins in the early Church precisely as a period of proximate preparation for those about to be baptized, and as a time of renewal and recommitment for all those who were already baptized.
And so the readings we hear in Lent are often about conversion – not only in the sense of turning away from sin – but in its twin sense of coming to belief in Christ Jesus; coming to deeper faith.
On this Third Sunday of Lent we begin a series of three consecutive Sundays on which we will hear readings from the Gospel according to St. John. All three of the gospels for these Sundays are great stories of coming to faith, and all three stories employ the pairing of a symbol, and its spiritual reality: water and spirit, light and faith, death and life.
On this first Sunday of the cycle we are, obviously, dealing with the pairing of water and spirit. Water would have been tremendously important to the people listening to Jesus because they knew the experience of the desert, where water is sorely lacking, and the human need for water can quickly become a matter of life or death.
If you’ve ever been truly thirsty, hiking for hours in a dry climate or working outside in the summer heat, you know just how all-consuming the need for water, the human sensation of thirst, can become.
Indeed, in our first reading the Israelites are in the midst of their forty-year sojourn in the desert after being freed from slavery in Egypt. The reading says that, “in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses” and longed even to return to slavery in Egypt where they at least had water for their children and animals.
This is a physical, bodily thirst. The Israelites are complaining about their parched lips and dry mouths – so much so they say they would prefer the bondage of slavery in Egypt. And so God answers their need and gives Israel “water from the rock” to slake and quench their physical thirst.
But in our Gospel reading St. John helps us understand that the human experience of physical thirst is also a symbol of a deeper spiritual longing and yearning, that can only be satisfied through God’s gift of the Spirit.
In our Gospel when Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well, she is intrigued when He says that, “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.” She responds, “Sir give me this water so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” She too is focusing on her physical, biological thirst. She’d much prefer not having to come to this well three and four times a day to drag heavy jugs of water back to her house to drink and cook.
Instead, Jesus wants to provide for the Samaritan woman’s deepest thirst. As He tries to make clear, the “living water” that He gives is “a water welling up to eternal life.” The water He will give does not take away physical thirst, but it answers a much deeper yearning for fullness of life.
Reflecting on this truth in our second reading, St. Paul writes to the church in Rome: “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” God’s eternal life is once more compared to life-giving water poured out on us.
And St. Paul’s letter also gives us a most important key to understanding the second half of today’s Gospel – to understanding the essential means through which God gives us this wellspring of eternal life.
St. Paul writes: “Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly . . . God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The living water that Christ gives us, is that water which flowed from His side when He was crucified for our sins: it is the water of Baptism, by which we are cleansed of our sins and given the fullness of eternal life. We do not merit this by our purity – rather it is precisely in our sinfulness that Christ dies for us, washes us of our sins, and gives us the fullness of His life.
So in today’s Gospel, when the Samaritan woman fails to understand the nature of the water that Jesus longs to give her, He doesn’t try to explain this to her by quoting Scripture or telling her a parable. He simply asks her to call her husband . . .
By doing so, Jesus reveals that He knows that she has had five husbands and that the man she lives with now is not her husband. The Samaritan woman has been searching and thirsting for something desperately, and has failed to find it in these relationships.
And Jesus, who knows all of her past, all of her sins, all of her shame – He comes to give her the life and love for which she has been searching and longing. In a parallel to several Old Testament couples, who met and married at wells – Jacob and Rebecca at the well of Haran, and Moses and Zipporah at the well in Midian – Jesus comes to Jacob’s well to “woo” this Samaritan woman into a relationship of faith in Him.
Stunned by His knowledge, the woman says, “I know that the Messiah is coming and when he comes he will tell us everything.” It is precisely because of the painful experience of facing the truth of her sinfulness, that the woman is able to make a tentative, yet beautiful profession of faith – this Jesus who “tells her everything” could well be the Messiah!
And responding to her still-small faith Jesus makes one of the most direct and therefore startling admissions in the entirety of the Scriptures: “I am he, the one who is speaking with you.”
Having experienced the non-judgmental, forgiving love of the Messiah, the Samaritan women is no longer controlled by her sin and shame – it has been washed away, and all that remains is her desire to bring others to that same experience of forgiving love. She goes back to her town, admits her sinfulness openly, and invites her neighbors: “Come see a man who told me everything I have done.”
Sure enough, the other townspeople invite Jesus to stay with them. Believing in His word they say to the woman, “we no longer believe because of your word, for we have seen for ourselves and we know that this truly is the Savior of the world.”
Brothers and sisters, in the waters of Baptism we are given that for which we thirst most deeply: the forgiveness of our sins and God’s eternal life. We are also given a mission to help bring others to this wellspring of life, just as the Samaritan woman did.
In these remaining weeks of Lent, the catechumens of our parish and of parishes around the world, will complete their preparation and come to experience God’s forgiving love in the Easter sacraments. And those of us who are already baptized are given the remaining weeks of this season of penance to renew our Baptismal grace. We fast, pray, give alms, and especially important: we celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation – all to restore the fullness of grace and life we received in Baptism, and that we have let slacken through sin and indifference.
Touched by the loving mercy of God may we, like the Samaritan woman, no longer despair of our sinfulness, but boldly invite others to encounter Christ as we have – and as we will once more encounter Him in this Eucharist we now celebrate.
No comments:
Post a Comment