Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, A, Vigil

March 11, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.11.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the short homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us tomorrow on the Third Sunday of Lent.

* The Church has us focus on the life-changing conversation Jesus has with a Samaritan woman at a well. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, promised that he would leave all of his other sheep behind and go in search of whichever sheep of his was lost. This Sunday we see him putting that truth into action, in his encounter with the Liz Taylor of her day, who had married five times already and was then living with a sixth man who was not her husband. She was a symbol of what had happened to her Samaritan people, which had intermarried with five succeeding invading nations and began to worship their gods, but now were pretending to worship the one true God, but doing so not according to the Covenant but on their own mountain. The woman’s behavior had led to her being ostracized, as was evidenced by her going alone to draw water at the well at high noon, at the height of the piercing sun, when no one else for obvious reasons would have been there. Had she gone at cooler times in the early morning or late afternoon, she would have been the butt of criticism from other women for her past and present. Jesus went to await her at the most brutal moment of the day. In his conversation with her, not only did he break two social conventions — that Jews never spoke to Samaritans and that men never spoke to unrelated women alone — but most importantly he taught her and through her us about the two essential realities about our spiritual life: God’s grace, symbolized by the “living water” he describes, and our desire or “thirst” for that water.

* Upon the Cross, Jesus said, “I thirst,” and his whole life was an insatiable quest to give us that spring of living water gushing up within us to eternal life. Just like our body cannot exist without water — the human body is in fact 72 percent water — neither can our soul survive without this living water. Jesus, through whom both our body and soul were created, knows both realities, and came as the divine physician to give the needed soul-sustaining remedy to the woman at the well and to each of us.

* What exactly is this “living water”? It is nothing short of God’s divine life — what we call in theology the Indwelling of the Blessed Trinity. The reference to water is an obviously link to Baptism with the gift of spiritual filiation that it brings, but the connection does not stop there. In one part of the Gospel, Jesus identifies the living water as the presence of the Holy Spirit; in another, he identifies it as his own presence through the holy Eucharist. The living water refers to all of these realities, the presence of God in the soul as a result of the Sacraments. Jesus wants to give us this living water of divine filiation, of the Holy Spirit, of his life-giving flesh and blood, of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity. But his will is not enough. He placed a condition on his own omnipotence; he can lead us to the living water but won’t force us to drink. He wants us freely to ask for it, to desire We see this very clearly in his invitation to the woman at the well: “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.” And the woman used her freedom to say, “Sir,