Third Sunday of Lent 2023
Take a moment as we settle down from a very long Gospel, close your eyes but stay awake. Think of the best person you know who is not a relative. This person, man or woman, is honest, self-controlled, just to a fault, and cheering to everyone. The best person you know. Now imagine you are walking in the mall and come across this friend, hands up, eyes full of fear, held at gunpoint by a robber. The bad guy looks really angry and chambers a round in his gun, looking like he’s going to kill everybody in sight. Do you rush him, and take a bullet for your friend?
Maybe so.
But then imagine that instead of the best person you know, the victim is the worst person you know, a lying, thieving, craven excuse for a human being unloved by everyone. You’d almost certainly run in the other direction. As St. Paul tells us, definitively, “one will hardly die for a righteous man -- though perhaps for a really good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Christ was stretched out on a rude piece of lumber, with disjointed limbs, covered with bruises and welts and blood, yet to the last His prayer was “Father, forgive them,” even adding the excuse, “they don’t know what they are doing.” If you ask what Jesus was doing here on earth, amid thirsty, hungry, often cruel, sniveling people, it’s pretty simple to answer. Jesus was on earth to forgive our sins and raise us to divine status.
Moses, long-suffering man that he was, spent over forty years with people like that, Israelites who usually didn’t get what God was doing for them. St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “it is the trait of mercenary soldiers to want their daily pay at once.” No waiting. Here in Exodus we see the people ragging on Moses for water. Now we can hardly blame them. It’s bad enough for the people to be thirsty, but have you ever heard a herd of dehydrated cattle? Terrifying. There was no well, but Moses trusted in God’s love and mercy and struck a rock, which yielded water as plentiful as the oil was from the Texas Spindletop reservoir. The rabbis tell us that Jewish tradition had that rock following the Israelites all during the forty years of their wandering. When they were thirsty, God provided water from a rock. They sang about it, and still do so, thousands of years later.
Now move forward with me in mind to the travels, the mission, of Jesus of Nazareth. The interaction we heard today should not have happened at all, because, as the Samaritan woman said, “Jews have nothing to do with” the half-breed people of Samaria, half Jew and half pagan. And that’s a feud that’s hundreds of years old. And as far as a good Jew drinking from a Samaritan vessel? Infamia. But Jesus asked for water, and then the good dialogue began. Jesus told her that if she had known the gift of God–He means Himself–she would have asked Him and received living water. The woman would have heard that term and thought about fresh spring water, unlike the brackish and barely potable stuff coming from Jacob’s well. But Jesus must have been talking about the waters of Baptism, because He and His disciples had just come from baptizing people in Judea. Those are the waters that not only wash away sins by the power of the Holy Spirit, but bring men and women and children into the Church Jesus established, where they can gather with us to celebrate the great mystery we will celebrate in just three weeks. That’s the great festival of Holy Week, bringing us into annual, mystical contact with the passion, death and Resurrection of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Let’s redouble our efforts to live as Jesus did, and to pray for all those who will be received into the Church at Easter.
