Filling Up What is Lacking

Tenth Week in Ordinary Time-First Scrutiny Readings
    Mia, your preparation for baptism, which will happen at the end of this month, is so important that the Church has us take a break from the usual progression of readings and has us focus on thirsting for God, thirsting for Christ, especially as we heard about in the first reading and the Gospel.

    In the first reading, the people thirst for water because they have not yet arrived at the Promised Land.  And even though they complain and say that slavery seemed better, God gives the people water after Moses strikes a rock.  In the Gospel, the Samaritan woman thirsts for water because the town ostracizes her, and she has to draw water at the hottest time of the day, when no one else in their right mind would have drawn water.  But Jesus shows her that she truly wants something more than physical water.  She desires God.
    In both the first reading and the Gospel, the Chosen People and the Samaritan woman want someone to take care of them.  They want someone to provide them with water, but they don’t see how that can happen.  They don’t trust that God will care for them.
    In your life, you have come to acknowledge that your life lacks something.  Like so many times in life, it is an encounter with another who helps us to recognize what we are missing in our life.  And through your continued friendship with the Pietras family, you explored what might be lacking in your life.  You attended Mass with them, and eventually worked up the courage to acknowledge that you needed God, just like the Israelites did in the first reading; just like the Samaritan woman did in the Gospel.  
    But while you were thirsting for God like a deer that longs for streams of water, as Psalm 42 says, another thirst also existed.  When we have these readings we often focus on the person who will undergo the scrutiny, the time of prayer and acknowledgment of sin, and the thirst of that person.  But God also has been thirsting for you.  He has desired that you come to Him and discover the soul-saving relationship that He wants with you.  He wants you to become His child, not just because you are human and are made in His image and likeness, but by Holy Baptism, which configures you to Christ and makes you a child of God by grace, so that Christ can truly become your brother by adoption, and you can become a joint-heir to heaven and eternal life with Christ.
    That thirst of God comes from Jesus’ very lips as He was dying on the cross when He said, “‘I thirst.’”  St. Theresa of Calcutta, whom we often refer to as Mother Theresa, connected deeply with those words and wanted to satiate the thirst of Christ for souls by serving the poorest of the poor.  But it was also present in the first reading.  God wanted the Chosen People to trust in Him, to trust that He would provide for their every need.  God didn’t want the Israelites to doubt His love, or to think that their foreign masters cared for them more than He, their God and husband, did.  All they had to do was ask, and God would satisfy their every necessity.  
    It was also present in the Gospel, as Jesus drew out from the woman her desire for a savior, her desire for the Messiah.  The Samaritan woman had tried to plaster over that desire with physical desires, with liturgical arguments, and even with multiple marriages.  But none of them satisfied.  And Christ could cut through all of that to name her true desire, for God, and let her know that He could provide for what she needed.  
    Today, the Lord invites you to trust in Him, and allow Him to satisfy your every necessity.  Trusting is not always easy.  And the ancient enemy wants you to think that you have to take care of yourself.  He tempted our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the same way, and got them to doubt God’s care for them when He told them they could not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Adam and Eve doubted that God would give them what they needed, so they disobeyed Him, and they lost everything: they lost the innocence that was theirs so that they had to cover up their nakedness; they lost the ease of the garden providing for their every need so they had to toil for the food they would eat; they lost the painlessness of giving birth so that new children could only come through suffering; and they lost paradise, as God cast them out from the Garden of Eden.  That all happened because they did not trust God to provide for them.
    Today, over these next three weeks in particular, and for your entire life as a Catholic, God will invite you to trust Him.  Yes, we can cry out to God in our need, but He invites us to trust that He will provide for us.  Satan will try to get us to doubt God, but do not give in to those temptations.  Whatever ways you have doubted God before, trust in all the more now.  Thirst for His love; satiate His thirst for your love by trusting Him.  You are being led to the waters of new life, which when you drink from them you will never thirst again.  May your preparation for Holy Baptism strengthen your trust in God and in His will for the rest of your life!