Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

There is in every human heart an empty chamber which echoes. We attempt to furnish it with wealth, romances, fancy job titles, and little private kingdoms of our own making; yet the echo remains blaring. We are rather like children who, having been promised the sea, are content to paddle in rain-filled ditches. The tragedy is not that our desires are too strong, but that they are too easily satisfied with the fragility of the world's delights. 

We flee from God; maybe not always with clenched fists, but often with busy hands. We build, we acquire, we admire ourselves in mirrors held up by other people we so eagerly try to impress. And all the while there is a thirst—persistent, unembarrassed, and immune to flattery. We name it ambition, or love, or freedom. But it returns in the quiet hours as a dryness of soul.

Consider the woman at the well in the Gospel of John. At high noon, the Gospel tells us, an hour when respectable company is kept indoors, she comes alone to draw water. She has sought her portion of fulfillment in the arms of five husbands and now in a sixth relationship not sanctified by God. One can almost hear the echo in her heart sloshing louder than the water in her empty jar.

Yet there, seated wearily upon the stones of Jacob’s well, is Jesus. He does not wait for her to ascend into moral respectability. He does not send her away to tidy her history. He asks her simply for a drink. It is a curious God who makes Himself thirsty for us.

He speaks to her of “living water”—a spring that does not depend upon the depth of our wells nor the sturdiness of our ropes. She has come for something to carry home; instead, she is offered something that will carry her. And when He gently unveils the catalogue of her broken loves, it is not to shame her but to show her that He has traced every path she has taken to avoid Him—and has arrived there first.

We are all, in some fashion, that woman. We lower our buckets into relationships, achievements, and earthly pleasures, hoping at last to hear the satisfying splash. But the water drawn from such wells must be drawn again tomorrow. Only the water Christ gives becomes in us a refreshing spring.

The marvel is not merely that we seek substitutes; that is the oldest of human habits. The marvel is that Christ continues to cross Samaria for us. He passes deliberately through the territories respectable people avoid. He sits beside the wells of our compromise and waits for us in the heat of our own making.

And when at last we are startled into recognition, when we perceive that the Stranger who knows us entirely is not scandalized by our sins, our worldly water jars fall forgotten at our feet. We run, as she did, not to hide our shame but to proclaim our discovery: that God loves us still and he has not abandoned us. 

The heart’s chamber ceases to echo when it is inhabited. For the One we have been attempting to replace is the only One who refuses to be replaced—and who, in holy persistence, seeks us still.

Jealously can be a fierce emotion, causing us to dastardly, unimaginable things -- just look at the readings in today's Mass. Our precious Lord shows us the antidote. 

For the first time Jesus in the Gospel passage predicts his torture and death. The response of his disciples is disappointing. 

When you look at Jesus, what do you see?

It is a question that refuses to sit quietly in the corner of the mind. It presses forward. For to look at Jesus is not merely to observe a figure in history, nor to admire a moral teacher whose sayings decorate greeting cards. It is to stand before a Person who demands to be reckoned with.

Some see only a carpenter’s son: a man of dusty roads and rough hands, who spoke kindly to children and sternly to hypocrites. They see compassion, certainly; courage, perhaps; even genius. But nothing more. He becomes, in their sight, an admirable chap, someone nice and maybe wise.

But if you look longer, if you allow the Gospels to speak without interruption, you begin to notice something unsettling. The authority in His voice is not borrowed. He does not argue as though piecing together secondhand truths; He speaks as though Truth were His native tongue. He forgives sins as though they were committed against Himself. He commands storms as one might quiet a restless dog. He speaks of God not merely as Father, but as His Father, in a manner that places Him on the very side of the throne.

And then there is His humility.

Here lies the great stumbling block and the great splendor. For if He were merely divine in the sense of distant and untouchable, we might admire Him from afar and remain unchanged. But this is a divinity wrapped in swaddling clothes, kneeling to wash feet, sweating blood in a garden. It is a majesty that stoops. A glory that bleeds. If this is not God, it is blasphemy of the highest order. If it is God, then we are looking at the very heart of reality.

Can you see His divinity?

It is not always visible in the way lightning is visible. Often it is more like the sun behind a veil of clouds, perceived not by staring at it directly, but by the way everything else is illuminated. Stand near Him long enough and you begin to see yourself more clearly: your pride, your hunger, your longing for a love you cannot manufacture. His presence exposes and heals in the same breath.

To see His divinity is not merely to conclude that He is God. Even the demons, we are told, reached that conclusion. It is to behold in Him the startling claim that the Author of all things has written Himself into the story. That the Maker of the stars allowed nails to fasten Him to wood He Himself designed.

When you look at Jesus, you are not simply looking at an example. You are looking at an invasion—heaven breaking into earth, mercy interrupting rebellion, love refusing to remain abstract.

And here is the quiet wonder: the more clearly you see His divinity, the less crushed you feel by it. For this is not a cold omnipotence, but a wounded one. Not a tyrant’s power, but a shepherd’s. His divinity does not diminish His tenderness; it guarantees it.

So I ask again: when you look at Jesus, what do you see?

If you see only a teacher, you may admire Him. If you see only a martyr, you may pity Him. But if you see God—God with scars—then you will do something far more dangerous and far more glorious. You will worship.

Jesus today in the Gospel talks about one of the most mysterious and misunderstood Christian doctrines -- hell. 

Jesus tells us simply -- never stop praying!  

You can sum up all of Salvation History as God's attempt to prove to humanity one simple fact -- that He is good. 

When Our Lord was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, it was not merely to endure hunger or solitude, as though sanctity were a matter of stoic self-denial. No, He went as a gladiator going into the Coliseum. The encounter with the devil was not an unfortunate interruption of His ministry; it was its opening engagement of hand-to-hand combat. Before He preached to crowds or healed the sick, He faced our ancient enemy on ground chosen by Divine Providence.

We are much mistaken if we imagine the temptation in the desert to have been a private moral struggle, like a man wrestling with a troublesome habit. It was, rather, the clash of two kingdoms. The devil, that parasite of God’s good creation, could offer nothing truly his own – only distortions of what the Father already delights to give. Bread without obedience. Power without suffering. Glory without the Cross. In each temptation there lies the same hissed suggestion: “Take the crown, and leave the thorns.”

Here, then, is the great comfort and the great terror of Lent: we are not fighting alone, but we are truly fighting. The same enemy who dared to whisper to Christ will not scruple to whisper to us. The spiritual battle of Lent is not fought with grand gestures, but with small obediences. We fast, and discover how much of our supposed “need” is but appetite masquerading as necessity. We pray, and find how quickly our minds stray. We give alms, and feel the resistance of self-love. In each act we stand, in our measure, beside Christ in the desert, answering the tempter not with cleverness, but with trust.

The devil’s stratagem has always been to persuade us that God is withholding something essential, that obedience will diminish us, that surrender will impoverish us. Yet in the desert we see the opposite. It is precisely in refusing the shortcut that Christ prepares the true victory. What seems like deprivation becomes preparation; what feels like hunger becomes strength.

And so Lent is no mere annual exercise in religious gloom. It is training for joy. We strip away the lesser loves, not because they are evil in themselves, but because they so easily become rivals to the Greatest Love. We learn that man does not live by bread alone, and that the Kingdom cannot be seized but must be received.

Thus Lent is the Church’s campaign season. We march not toward despair, but toward Easter. The wilderness is not our destination; it is our battleground. And because He has fought there before us—and triumphed—we may take courage. The devil’s promises glitter; Christ’s promises endure. In the end, it is not the tempter who has the last word, but the One who answered him and overcame.

When you look at the eyes of Our Lord, what do you see? 

Lent is the holy season by which we willingly choose weakness over strength, pain over comfort, and the love of Jesus over my own will.