Third Sunday of Lent March 12, 2023

Readings: Exodus 17.3-7, Romans 5.1-2,5-8, John 4.5-42

Today, like the Samaritan woman, we encounter Christ as the living water. God reveals his mysteries to us by means of things we can understand. We need water and we know what it feels like to thirst. But we also need God. Just as we cannot exist without water, we cannot exist without God, and we thirst for him. We go to a well to find water, but where do we go to satisfy our thirst for God? We go to the Church, where God has transformed the ordinary water of Baptism into the means by which we first drink from the living water that is Christ. 

Where do we come to quench our thirst for God? We come to the Church. We come to the Sacraments, which God established for the very purpose of giving himself to us. They are like oases in the desert; places of refuge where we find spiritual nourishment. It is true, God can satisfy our thirst anywhere because he himself is not bound by the Sacraments, just as he brought forth water from the rock to satisfy the thirst of the Hebrew people during the Exodus. God’s grace will always be given to those who ask in faith.

But God does not want to be hidden from us. He thirsts for us. He thirsts for our thirst. He wants us to be able to come to him and that’s the very reason why he established a Church, and why he has linked his grace to the Sacraments; so we will know where to find him; so we will know where to come to quench our thirst. Let us pray that by our Lenten prayers we may have our own well-side encounter with Christ, remembering that it is he who first seeks us and asks for a drink. “He thirst, that we may thirst for him” (St. Augustine).

                                                                                                             Fr. Terry