A homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, March 12, 2023
Ex 17:3-7, Rom 5:1-2, 5-8, Jn 4:5-42
Water has been in the news a lot lately.
California has too much of it — in the form of unimaginably deep snow as well as downpours that would have challenged Noah — even as the state’s drought has yet to be solved.
The Great Salt Lake is drying up because the rivers that flow into it are drying up, and scientists and politicians are trying to engineer a way to save it.
Closer to home, March is coming in like a lion after a warm and dry winter. Slush and rain and flooded roads.
Yes, water has been newsworthy a lot lately.
As it has been since the first day of Creation.
Most living things — including people — can live for a lot longer without food to eat than they can without water to drink.
Water washes. Water cools. Water helps heal wounds and illnesses.
Humans are about three-fifths water.
Evolutionary science traces the origins of life back to the water.
And Catholic Christians can trace the origins of their spiritual relationship with our Triune God to the waters of Baptism.
It’s a shame that, in today’s Gospel passage from John, Jesus’s disciples had left him in the Samaritan village and gone to get some takeout in town. They might have benefited — as the Samaritan woman did and we do — from Christ’s words about living water welling up within those who believe. I’m sure they heard something similar during their travels with their itinerant rabbi during his three-year mission, but to see the impact Jesus had on one woman — a woman probably living in shame — would have been dumbfounding. And then, to see how her vibrant faith energized the entire village of people whose relationship with the Jews was icy at best … wow.
From the moment each of us was baptized with water and the Holy Spirit and truth, that same living water has been welling up within us. It quenches our thirst for the love of God. It washes us in God’s mercy. Living water helps heal us when we’re downtrodden.
And just like the water that flowed at Massah and Meribah, and kept flowing, the living water within us overflows.
We can let it trickle down some figurative or literal drain, or we can be like the Samaritan woman whose thirst for true love and truth was quenched by God’s truth, to the point where all she could do or want to do was share it.
Our sisters and brothers all over the world and right in our backyards are asking us for a drink. We have the living water. We have the Spirit dwelling within us.
We must make sure everyone’s thirst is quenched.
