Sunday 3 March
2013
3rd Sunday of Lent (A)
Exodus 17:3-7 Psalm 94: 1-2. 6-9.
Rv. 8 Romans 5: 1-2. 5-8 John 4:5-42
They put the Lord to the test by saying: Is the Lord with
us, or not?
O that today you would listen to his voice
The love of God has been poured into our heart by the
Holy Spirit.
Anyone who drinks the water I
shall give will never be thirsty again.
Readings at Mass
____________________
First reading
Exodus
17:3-7
Tormented by thirst, the people
complained against Moses. ‘Why did you bring us out of Egypt?’ they said. ‘Was
it so that I should die of thirst, my children too, and my cattle?’ Moses
appealed to the Lord.
‘How
am I to deal with this people?” he said. ‘A little more and they will stone me!’
the Lord said to Moses, ‘Take with you some of the elders of Israel and move on
to the forefront of the people; take in your hand the staff with which you
struck the river, and go. I shall be standing before you there on the rock, at
Horeb. You must strike the rock, and water will flow from it for the people to
drink.’ This is what Moses did, in the sight of the elders of Israel. The place
was named Massah and Meribah because of the grumbling of the sons of Israel and
because they put the Lord to the test by saying, ‘Is the Lord with us, or not?’
St. Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 10:4
that the rock was Christ. He is the true source of living water. The living
water is a word to describe the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who
recreates us and as the children of God fills us with love, joy, peace,
patience, goodness etc. These are gifts to us. They are not things that we
struggle to attain or earn. The secret is to welcome Jesus into our lives and
allow him to do whatever he wills.
Psalm
Psalm
94:1-2,6-9
O that today you would listen to his
voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
Come, ring out our joy to the Lord;
hail the rock who saves us.
Let us come before him, giving thanks,
with songs let us hail the Lord.
O that today you would listen to his
voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
Come in; let us bow and bend low;
let us kneel before the God who made us:
for he is our God and we
the people who belong to his pasture,
the flock that is led by his hand.
O that today you would listen to his
voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
O that today you would listen to his
voice!
‘Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
as on that day at Massah in the desert
when your fathers put me to the test;
when they tried me, though they saw my work.’
O that today you would listen to his
voice! ‘Harden not your hearts.’
____________________
Second reading
Romans
5:1-2,5-8
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith
we are judged righteous and at peace with God, since it is by faith and through
Jesus that we have entered this state of grace in which we can boast about
looking forward to God’s glory. And this hope is not deceptive, because the
love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been
given us. We were still helpless when at his appointed moment Christ died for
sinful men. It is not easy to die even for a good man – though of course
for someone really worthy, a man might be prepared to die – but what
proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still
sinners.
Through faith we need to come to know
the person, Jesus, who works out our salvation. He proved his love for us by
offering his life for those who killed him. We all had a share in his death
through our sins. Yet he loved us even though we contributed to his death on
the Cross.
Gospel
Acclamation
Jn4:42,15
Glory to you, O Christ, you are the Word
of God!
Lord, you are really the saviour of the
world:
give me the living water, so that I may
never get thirsty.
Glory to you, O Christ, you are the Word
of God!
Gospel
John
4:5-42
Jesus came to the Samaritan town called
Sychar, near the land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well is there
and Jesus, tired by the journey, sat straight down by the well. It was about
the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Give
me a drink.’ His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan
woman said to him, ‘What? You are a Jew and you ask me, a Samaritan, for a
drink?’ – Jews, in fact, do not associate with Samaritans. Jesus replied:
‘If you only knew what God is offering
and who it is that is saying to you:
Give me a drink, you would have been the
one to ask,
and he would have given you living
water.’
‘You have no bucket, sir,’ she answered ‘and
the well is deep: how could you get this living water? Are you a greater man
than our father Jacob who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his
sons and his cattle?’ Jesus replied:
‘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.’
‘Sir,’ said the woman ‘give me some of
that water, so that I may never get thirsty and never have to come here again
to draw water.’ ‘Go and call your husband’ said Jesus to her ‘and come back
here.’ The woman answered, ‘I have no husband.’ He said to her, ‘You are right
to say, “I have no husband”; for although you have had five, the one you have
now is not your husband. You spoke the truth there.’ ‘I see you are a prophet,
sir’ said the woman. ‘Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, while you say
that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.’ Jesus said:
‘Believe me, woman,
the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father
neither on this mountain nor in
Jerusalem.
You worship what you do not know;
we worship what we do know:
for salvation comes from the Jews.
But the hour will come
– in fact it is here already –
when true worshippers will worship the
Father in spirit and truth:
that is the kind of worshipper the
Father wants.
God is spirit,
and those who worship
must worship in spirit and truth.’
The woman said to him, ‘I know that
Messiah – that is, Christ – is coming; and when he comes he will tell
us everything.’ ‘I who am speaking to you,’ said Jesus ‘I am he.’
At
this point his disciples returned, and were surprised to find him speaking to a
woman, though none of them asked, ‘What do you want from her?’ or, ‘Why are you
talking to her?’ The woman put down her water jar and hurried back to the town
to tell the people. ‘Come and see a man who has told me everything I ever did;
I wonder if he is the Christ?’ This brought people out of the town and they
started walking towards him.
Meanwhile,
the disciples were urging him, ‘Rabbi, do have something to eat; but he said, ‘I
have food to eat that you do not know about.’ So the disciples asked one
another, ‘Has someone been bringing him food?’ But Jesus said:
‘My food is to do the will of the one
who sent me,
and to complete his work.
Have you not got a saying:
Four months and then the harvest?
Well, I tell you:
Look around you, look at the fields;
already they are white, ready for
harvest!
Already the reaper is being paid his
wages,
already he is bringing in the grain for
eternal life,
and thus sower and reaper rejoice
together.
For here the proverb holds good:
one sows, another reaps;
I sent you to reap a harvest you had not
worked for.
Others worked for it;
and you have come into the rewards of
their trouble.’
Many Samaritans of that town had
believed in him on the strength of the woman’s testimony when she said, ‘He
told me all I have ever done’, so, when the Samaritans came up to him, they
begged him to stay with them. He stayed for two days, and when he spoke to them
many more came to believe; and they said to the woman, ‘Now we no longer
believe because of what you told us; we have heard him ourselves and we know
that he really is the saviour of the world.’
It’s experience or it’s nothing
Today the
elect for Baptism at Easter undergo the first scrutiny. We are all preparing to
receive or renew our Baptism during the Easter Vigil. The scrutiny is for us
all. The Gospel is a real-life parable. Jesus comes to the well outside
Shechem. He is tired and thirsty. He sits there alone, waiting. A lone woman
comes to draw water. He asks her for a drink – something unexpected since he is
a man and she a woman. To her way of thinking too, it is something he should
not do- he is a Jew and she a Samaritan. He suggests that if she knew who he
was and the gift God could give her, she would ask him for a drink. She is
intrigued. He has no rope, no bucket and the well is deep. Then he promises her
not just ordinary water – you will be thirsty again - but ‘living water’, which
will become a spring inside her and from that water, she will receive eternal
life. She wants it but misunderstands him. He touches a personal note and tells
her to call her husband. Then he tells her the man she is with is not her
husband and that she has had five. She recognizes him now as a prophet and opens the burning issue
between Jews and Samaritans: the rival Temples , Jerusalem,
or Samaria .
Jesus is not interested in places of worship. The quality of worship concerns
him. She knows that the Messiah will come one day and teach them the truth.
Jesus declares that he is the Messiah.
She is impressed, puts down her water pot, and rushes back to the village. She
calls the people and tells them about Jesus: I wonder if he could be the
Messiah. Because of her testimony, many go out to meet Jesus and when they hear
him, they believe that he is the Messiah. She casually met a man by the well and in her
understanding progressed from stranger to Jew, from Jew to prophet, from
prophet to Messiah and from mildly interested to disciple and from disciple to
apostle.
The
question is, can you and I have the same experience? Not only can we, but if we
want to receive baptism or deeply renew our baptism then we must. Our religion
is to experience Jesus. Jesus has to become a real person in our lives. This
demands the silence of a lonely well, a one to one meeting with Jesus in which
I sit opposite him and focus on his presence and then I listen – ready to shed
my illusions, ready to allow him to reveal my sins and heal me.
Is
your prayer an encounter with Jesus? Is the heart of religion your experience
of Jesus? For you is it ‘simply going to church’ or ‘meeting Jesus’?
Father, may I always experience
your Son Jesus in my prayer, made in spirit and in truth.
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