HOMILY for the 3rd Sunday of Lent (A)

Ex 17:3-7; Ps 94; Rom 5:1-2. 5-8; Jn 4:5-42

The woman who came to the well to draw water stands for every human being – not only because the human body is mostly water, and so we need around 4 litres of water a day to remain healthy – but, moreover, the Samaritan woman's personal life showed that here was a woman thirsting for love. And this is an even more fundamental human need - for love, for relationship, for a genuine connection with another person. Yet, in our time, so many people are connected online but we remain disconnected from real relationships, and so many would gather at the wells of social media or search the internet looking for affirmation and ‘Likes', but we often find that the well has run dry. So we come away thirsting for love, acceptance, and friendship. 

In this way, too, the woman at the well stands for us. For she has had five husbands and is living with a sixth man who still leaves her loveless, still searching for a genuine connection. And she is very isolated from her community. For women usually came to the well together – this was a sociable event like a tea break at work when people would gather to exchange news and gossip – but the woman of the Gospel comes to the well at high noon, a time of great heat when she knew that few people would be around because it is likely that she was the object of the town's gossip. Her circumstances and particularly her sins isolated her from others, as is often the case. However, it is precisely because she is living in sin, and is thus isolated and thirsting for love, that Jesus comes to her. For he, our God, is love. And so it is simply to those who need love that Jesus is here for us for he alone can satisfy the fundamental thirst of the human heart. 

Nobody puts this better than St Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” When I first came across these words, as a lovesick teenager several decades ago, they captivated me. I was looking for love, looking for acceptance, looking for true friends, and I found myself let down and hurt in so many ways. And it was in those teenage years that I first came to know Christ more personally, and that I was told those words from St Augustine, and they helped me make sense of life and to survive my heartaches. For I knew then, as I know now, that only God can satisfy our longing for love and friendship, even though I now realise that God works in and through the people we meet to mediate his care and love for us; nobody can live without friends, as St Thomas Aquinas says, and so we cannot simply forsake the world and other people for God alone. Rather, God comes to us in human form, hidden as it were in the guise of another, and we love and serve him, present in another person, even as he first comes to love us and serve us in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Hence, Jesus comes to the Samaritan woman at the well; he comes to us who are seeking friendship and love, who long for a living relationship, and he offers us his friendship, his divine love which alone can satisfy our deepest human longings. So, “anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again”. For the tragedy of our time is that we seek connections and relationship, we seek healing for the wounds that other people have dealt us, and yet we look for love and acceptance in all the wrong places, in all the fatally flawed and inherently limited ways that we think will give us the happiness we seek. As it's been said, “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.” Yes, for our hearts are restless, looking up and down in all the wrongs places, until they rest in God. 

St Augustine thus reflects in his beautiful autobiography The Confessions that: “You were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong – I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Augustine expresses well, I think, the thirst of the human soul ultimately for God, and also the persistent search of God for humanity. As Jesus says in the Gospel today: “Give me a drink”, and then, later, when hanging on the Cross and dying for love of Mankind, Jesus cries out: “I thirst”. For God thirsts for our love, he thirsts for a living relationship, a genuine friendship with us sinners. In June 1675, therefore, Jesus appeared to St Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun in France, and he showed her his sacred Heart, saying: “Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love”. Christ revealed his sacred Heart to this saint, and he asked her to tell others about God's unfathomable love for mankind so that all people, who seek love, will go to Love himself. Let us draw the living water of love from the true fountain of salvation, Jesus Christ, rather than to seek love frustratingly and fruitlessly in all the wrong places! 

As St Margaret Mary said, Jesus “revealed to me that it was His ardent desire to be known, loved and honoured by men and woman, and His eager desire to draw them back from the road to perdition, along which Satan is driving them in countless numbers, [that has] induced Him to manifest His Heart to [Mankind] with all the treasures of love, mercy, grace, sanctification and salvation that It contains.” Indeed, Jesus has made known to us his great love for you and me, and for all people, for as St Paul says: “What proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.” Jesus is the true rock of our salvation who was struck on the Cross, whose side was pierced by a lance, so that the living waters of his love and saving grace could flow to satisfy our deepest human thirst. For our thirst and our need is for love, that is to say, for God himself. For as St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, our truest good and deepest happiness comes only from knowing and loving God eternally in heaven. It is this for which we seek when we gather around the wells of this world that promise us only a temporary slaking of our desires. Thus Jesus declares: “Whoever drinks this water will get thirsty again; but anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again: the water that I shall give will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life.'”

And so, once more in this Lenten season, Jesus calls us to go to him, and to drink the water that he gives. How? He tells us to love his sacred Heart, which is the Holy Eucharist. He calls us to come and adore him in the Blessed Sacrament. He invites us to spend time in prayer with him, present and waiting for us in the Tabernacle of this church. This is heaven on earth, for God is present, loving us in the Eucharist, and Christ thirsts for our love, for some of our precious time, for a moment of prayer when we can come to him, heart to Heart. 

With this in mind, and for the renewal of this parish and for the good of souls in our community, where so many hearts have been wounded and seek healing and true love, I shall consecrate this parish to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 16th of June, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. For this reason, too, we have Adoration every day at 5pm in this church, and daily confessions, because these are the principal means by which Christ gives us the living waters of his grace and love. Many, perhaps, might still grumble like the people of Israel did at Massah and Meribah. They grumbled because they did not find God as they wanted him, in the food and drink and other pleasures of this life, even though God is in fact the source of every good and every worldly delight. But, more importantly, God reveals himself to us in ways that are beyond human imagining, in a way that is so humble and silent that many still question it. For behold Christ has given himself to us, day after day, in the Holy Eucharist. Therefore, Jesus said to St Margaret Mary: “Behold the Heart which has so loved men and women… and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for Me in the Eucharist.” 

Therefore, let us go to Jesus, present for us in the Holy Eucharist. Let us worship him “in spirit and in truth”, and so let us, like the Samaritan woman, receive from him the truth that heals us and sets us free. In the Sacred Heart of Jesus may we find our consolation and our peace and the full satisfaction of our thirsty restless hearts on this earth. So as the psalmist says: "If today you should hear his voice, harden not your hearts."