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!

I Thirst For You!

Third Sunday of Lent

            If you’re anything like me, when you hear this Gospel, during Mass or outside of Mass, you inwardly prepare for the homily about how we are supposed to be thirsting for the water that Jesus wants to give us, just like God provided water for the Israelites in the desert, and just like Jesus was drawing the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well to in our Gospel passage.

            Instead, I would like to focus on someone else’s thirst: Jesus’ thirst.  When Jesus first meets the Samaritan woman, he tells her, “‘Give me a drink.’”  Jesus is thirsting.  But for what is Jesus thirsting?  Water?  Unlikely, since Jesus, had spent forty days and forty nights fasting, and was used to being deprived of water.  For what was Jesus thirsting?

            Jesus was thirsting for the soul of the Samaritan woman.  Jesus, the one who, fully human, was talking to her and engaging her in dialogue, was also the one who, fully divine, willed her into existence when she was conceived in the womb of her mother.  As her Creator He wanted her to be in spiritual union with Him, the only way she could be happy.

            She had tried other ways to be happy.  She had tried to find her true happiness in a spouse, but, whether those first five spouses died, divorced her, or she was an adulteress, she had not found that happiness that she was looking for.  Her thirst was not being quenched in human relationships.  And so she was cohabitating, living together without the sanctity and protection and benefit of marriage, with her boyfriend. 

            She had tried to be happy by following false gods.  The Samaritans were excluded from the Jewish people because, from the very beginning of their nation, they had worshipped other pagan gods instead of the one God who had brought them from the land of Egypt, that place of slavery, into the promised land; the one God who had given them manna and quail when they murmured against the Lord in their hunger; the one God who had given them drink from the rock when they grumbled against God and against Moses.  And this abandonment of the true God was only solidified when the Northern Kingdom of Israel, which came to be called Samaria after the name of the chief city in the north, was conquered by Assyria, who displaced many of the Israelites and made them intermarry with the other pagans, which God had expressly forbidden.

            Yes, she was thirsting for God, but God was also thirsting for her.  He wanted her to be happy, truly happy, not just the passing happiness of doing whatever she felt right.  And so Jesus expresses to her His thirst.  But she tries to put Him off, to keep Him thirsting for her, rather than quenching it with the conversion of her heart and life to God.  She first puts Jesus off by trying to argue about who Jesus is, and how He can give her life-giving water.  She then tries to put Him off by lying about her relationship status.  Finally, trying to go for something that surely would put Him off for good, she talks about liturgy, figuring that no two people who are so different in liturgical practices would ever be able to talk about where to worship properly.  But Jesus wants His thirst quenched, and He will not give up. 

Icon of the Crucifixion at the
Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem

It is no accident that it is in John’s account of the passion that one of Jesus’ last words on cross is, “‘I thirst.’”  Because on that cross, more than He is thirsting for water, as He gives His human life up and puts His entire life into the hands of His heavenly Father, He wants all people to be drawn to Him as He is lifted high on the cross and dies so that His children, all His children, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, woman or man, might find life from the water and blood that flow from His pierced side. 

We know the agony of being thirsty ourselves, yet so easily we can find some way to drink.  Whether it’s a water fountain, a vending machine, or the local store, we can find some way to quench our thirst.  But the only way that Jesus’ thirst is quenched is by our love and obedience to Him, a love which does not burden or enslave us, but a love and obedience which truly sets us free.  What are the ways that we keep Jesus thirsting for us, increasing the pain He suffers by us not being united with Him?

Do we feel that we know better than Jesus, and that He cannot truly quench our thirst for happiness?  Do we argue with Jesus that only by the passing pleasures of this world can we truly be happy?  Do we figure that Jesus is not greater than our father Jacob who provided for his family by digging a well, just as our fathers and mothers provided for us by their hard work that bought us toys and relaxation?

Do we feel that only with the right relationship can we truly be happy, trusting that, if we just found that special someone, we would no longer yearn for a deeper relationship, the infinite relationship which only God can satisfy?

Do we keep Jesus away by arguing with Him over which translation of the liturgy is better, which one we like the best, and how we want to worship?  Do we try to put Jesus off, to keep Him at arms’ length because we only want to do the least that we can?

Jesus is thirsting for us, and only our love will quench that thirst.  While His love lacks nothing, He wants us to be joined to that perfect love in the union of the Communion of Love of the Trinity.  If we choose, we can keep Jesus thirsting for us, thirsting for our love in a deep and abiding relationship with him.  Or, we can be like the Samaritan woman at the well, who quenched Jesus’ thirst by the conversion of her life, and the preaching of the Gospel to her friends, and, most importantly, her love of Jesus.  As Jesus hangs on this cross he says to us today, “I thirst.”  Will we give him the drink of our love?