A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent
Readings: Exodus 17:3-7 Romans 5:1-2, 3-8 John 4:5-42
Last weekend in our parochial school, I watched middle school students effortlessly operate a classroom smart board. It was the same classroom in which, some 60 years earlier, Sister Theresa taught me first grade. It is impossible, at least for me, to hold both classrooms, one present and one long past, in my mind at the same moment.
I now pastor the parochial school I once attended, which is rather unusual for a priest. The smart boards are new this year. My memory is old. It recalls desks made of wrought iron, with holes in their wooden tops for inkwells, not that those were used even in my day. (I am old, not fossilized.)
When I am in those classrooms now, my mind does not return to the eight years I spent in them as a primary school student. Only when I am alone in the building, and, even then, only when I am not thinking about whether we can afford new air conditioners or a cost-of-living increase for the faculty and staff. Preoccupations and memories do not mix.
There is only one constant in those 60 years between my two sojourns in the school. I am not the continuity, because I am, at least hopefully, not unchanged. No, the constant is Jesus. He was there when I first climbed that grand flight of stairs as a first-grade student. He was in my fifth grade classroom when I resolved to pray a daily rosary. He is still in those rooms.
Jesus calls himself “living water.” To make sense of that metaphor, we must grapple with what it means to thirst, an aspect so obvious that it can be overlooked. No matter how much we drink, thirst will return. We are only sated for a time before thirst returns.
I cannot imagine life without Jesus. All these years, he has been the one who gives it meaning.
Thirst is a constant of human life, from our mother’s breast to the syringe, which a hospice nurse might use to wet our parched mouths. Thus, the body was fashioned. The soul must also be replenished. If we have not found something it can swallow, something that nourishes it with meaning and purpose, how parched it must be!
Jesus is like water because we must repeatedly drink of him. Each time, he will quench our thirst, meet our needs. I cannot imagine life without Jesus. All these years, he has been the one who gives it meaning. When I have been afraid, he has given me courage. When I am hurting, he has been my soul’s salve.
In one way or another, Jesus has always been the explanation for what I am doing. He is also the reason I often reproach myself for what I have done or failed to do. I do not stop growing thirsty, and Jesus continues to be “a spring of water welling up into eternal life” (Jn 4:14).
Who still carries the fears or hopes of childhood? Maybe we all do. Many of the early fears and hopes remain, though they do weather and wane. But was Jesus not there for you when you were a child, and then again when you were a youth? Will he not still be your living water if you return to the well? He waited there for the Samaritan woman. He knew, more than she did, how thirsty she was.
Your ladle cup might be roughed up now. It might even leak a bit. No matter. If you know the gift of God given to you in Jesus, drink!
