The Fount of Living Water

Scripture Reflection for the Third Sunday of Lent (March 23, 2014)

Scripture Readings:
Exodus 17:3-7
Psalm 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9
Romans 5:1-2, 5-8
John 4:5-42 or 4:5-15, 19b-26, 39a, 40-42

“Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.” (Jn 4:14)

With spring just beginning and chilly temperatures not allowing us to thaw out from a bitter winter, it is hard to imagine the hot noonday sun in the desert of Samaria which caused Jesus to ask for a drink at the well. A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel to the Holy Land with the Catholic Theological Union, and I experienced firsthand how relentlessly the desert sun can parch and dehydrate a person. In his humanity, Jesus’ thirst was real and intense.

Many people in our generation are experiencing another kind of thirst which is real and intense – a thirst for God. Though they may not know that it is God for which they are thirsting, young adults today experience a great yearning and desire for something more. We know that we are worth more than what Buzzfeed quizzes define us as. We know that we have a greater purpose than as consumers, which is how the media sees us. We desire a community richer than our Google+ Circles. We try to quench this thirst for more by our own means, which inevitably leads to spiritual individualism and isolation. In his pastoral exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis says, “Today, our challenge is not so much atheism as the need to respond adequately to many people’s thirst for God, lest they try to satisfy it with alienating solutions or with a disembodied Jesus who demands nothing of us with regard to others” (89).

We experience the abundance of God’s grace only in communion with others, and when we have such an experience, we cannot help but share it with others! The Samaritan woman, after her encounter with Jesus, left her water jar and went into the town to tell others what she had witnessed. The woman was thirsting for something which she could not fulfill herself. The fact that she was getting water at noon in the heat of the day, rather than at dawn and dusk with the rest of the women shows that she was most likely shunned by her community. But her conversation, or more accurately her verbal jousting, with Jesus satisfies her thirst and gives her the confidence and a joy-filled sense of mission to share the Good News. Many people in the town came to believe from her testimony.

This bold proclaiming of the Gospel is what we are called to do as well. We who drink from the cup of God’s grace, must allow that cup to overflow to others who are thirsting. Pope Francis warns us to not be afraid or pessimistic because of the skeptical and cynical attitudes of others towards the Church: “The evils of our world – and those of the Church – must not be excuses for diminishing our commitment and our fervor” (EG 84). Our friends and family members are thirsting and restless. How can we not introduce them to the One who can give them living water so that they never thirst again?

Image: Leather Bucket of a well. Found on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.