OMELIE / Omelie EN

12 mar 2023

12/03/2023 - 3rd Sunday of Lent - year A

12/03/2023 - 3^rd Sunday of Lent - year A

Reading 1 EX 17,3-7 Psalm 94 Reading 2 ROM 5,1-2.5-8 Gospel JN 4,5-42

Water, is the image which frequently comes up in the first reading and the Gospel. Water, as the source of life, as a thing which is necessary to men. Water the people was looking for in the desert and water Jesus was looking for at noon in Sychar. The man needs water, not only for his thirst, but for his internal life too. What is water for internal life?

Is there something that can give men a true spiritual satisfaction, a sense of fulfillment in his journeying on earth? Who can clench this thirst of ours?

The people murmurs against Moses in the desert: Moses does not know what to do, he does not have a solution. Where can he find water for a whole people and its livestock? Moses’s only resort is his God. And God does not disappoint him. God listens to the prayer, but asks him to obey, even blindly. Moses has to pick his rod up, a rod which has nothing special but having been given him by God Himself, and with it he needs to hit a rock. Surely it is not the rod which is going to break the rock, and it is not going to be the rock which is going to become water, but God wants to answer His servant Moses in front of his whole people; its leaders will be witnesses of that.

And water springs abundantly from the rock. God has listened to Moses’s prayer for the people which was complaining and was not able to be trustful.

All that happened is a sign. It is Jesus who gives true water for the man’s true thirst. In Sychar of Samaria Jesus meets a thirsty humanity, unable to find the source of peace, joy, life. Men are looking for temporary satisfactions, ephemeral, which last a moment, and then they need to look again, in an unending race between delusion and disappointment. In their running after and grab temporary satisfactions, men commit and break commitments among one another and create mutual distrust and disappointment.

«You had five husbands and the man you now live with is not even one!»: Jesus is summarising in this way man’s running towards happiness.

The man is looking for relationships, because he expects joy from these, but relationships between human beings disappoint, if they are not anchored in God, in His stability and eternity. This is why Jesus shows himself and promises himself to be the one who satisfies our most inner desires. “I am he, the one speaking with you”, He tells the Samaritan woman who knows a man who cannot disappoint has to come, because he has been promised and sent by God.

Jesus is truly the source of the water which the man’s thirst needs, and the thirst of all humanity. They who meet Him and listen to Him and let themselves being loved by Him can see it.

The Samaritans, who have welcomed Him for two days and have listened to Him, have understood that He is the «savior of the world», the one who gives the world the life it lacks. Jesus knows God, knows the man, knows what God can give to the man to fill his life with joy, to save him.

What is filling the man, if not the Holy Spirit? And the latter is given us exactly by Jesus, as Saint Paul is telling us today. “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly… God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us”.

Jesus is the well of the living water which quenches humanity's thirst. He dies to give us the Holy Spirit and, through Him, the fullness of life.