3rd Sunday of Lent, Year A
First Reading: Ex 17:3-7
Second Reading: Rom 5:1-2; 5-8
Gospel Reading: Jn 4:5-42
Water is central in this Sunday’s Readings. In British Columbia, where water is plentiful, we can easily forget how precious it is.
In the First Reading, the Israelites thirst for water in the wilderness, and God gives them water from the rock. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for water, but says that if she had known who he was, she would have asked him.
During the blessing of the water at baptism, the Church recalls the events in salvation history that prefigured this sacrament: the Holy Spirit’s breath on the water at creation, the saving of eight people in Noah’s ark, the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and their crossing of the Jordan River into the Promised Land.
Then the Church prays, “Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament.”
A priest is the ordinary minister of baptism, but “in case of necessity such as danger of death, anyone may baptize.” Baptism is administered by pouring water three times over the head, saying, at the same time, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
However, Baptism – from the Greek baptizein, meaning “plunge” or “immerse” – “is performed in the most expressive way” by immersion of the whole body three times.
“Since the beginning of the world, water, so humble and wonderful a creature, has been the source of life and fruitfulness,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but “the water of the sea” is also a symbol of death.
Water symbolizes “the mystery of the cross” and our “communion with Christ’s death,” says the Catechism. At the same time, it symbolizes our rebirth by “water and the Spirit,” St. John says.
A “sacramental” symbol is called “efficacious,” for, by the power of God, it actually brings about the spiritual reality it signifies. In baptism, water symbolizes and accomplishes both our death to sin and our rebirth with divine life: our “purification” from sin, including original sin and any personal sin, “and new birth in the Holy Spirit.”
“As by one Spirit we were all baptized, so we are also made to drink of one Spirit,” the Catechism says; “the Spirit is personally the living water welling up from Christ crucified as its source and welling up in us to eternal life.” For the rest of our life, we can say with St. Ignatius, “There is living water in me, water that murmurs and says within me Come to the Father.”
Our “hope does not disappoint us,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”
Like the Samaritan woman, we seek water at the well beside which “Christ comes to meet every human being,” the Catechism says. “It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink.” Jesus thirsts; “his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us.” God “thirsts that we may thirst for him.”
“Paradoxically,” even our “prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living God,” the Catechism says, quoting God’s words in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water!”
One of the last things Christ said from the cross was, “I thirst!” In the chapels of Mother Teresa’s nuns, these words can be read on the walls near the crucifixes.
As we say in this Sunday’s Preface, let us allow Christ, “in his thirst,” to accept our faith and awaken in our hearts “the fire” of God’s love.