3rd Sunday of Lent - A

We can never underestimate what a gift faith is for us.

In today's gospel, Jesus in many ways is speaking in riddles both to the Samaritan woman and to His disciples. In the end, even after growing in their faith and in their knowledge of who Jesus is, neither the woman nor His disciples are capable of understanding Jesus and the words He speaks as well as we do today because of the gift of faith that we have received.

When the Samaritan woman questions Jesus about how and why He, a Jew, is asking he, a Samaritan and a woman, for a drink, Jesus responds by saying that if she knew who it was who was asking her for a drink, she would ask Him and He would give her living water and she would never thirst again.

This woman surely came to a deeper knowledge of who Jesus was as a prophet, as the Messiah, and eventually as the Savior of the World, but even with this knowledge she did not understand as we do that the water Jesus was speaking of was the water of Baptism in which our sins are forgiven, we become children of God, and we become members of the Church -- the Body of Christ, the People of God.

In a similar way, Jesus was speaking in a riddle when His disciples told Him that He ought to eat, and He responded that He had food to eat which they did not know of. His disciples presumed that He was speaking of food that would have nourished His body. With our eyes of faith, we can see that Jesus here was making a reference to the Eucharist which feeds and nourishes and satisfies our souls in a way that no other food can satisfy hunger.

The faith we receive in Baptism, which is nourished so often in the Eucharist, is not a faith that makes us wonder-workers who can literally tell mountains to be raised up and cast into the sea, but the faith that we receive in Baptism which is nourished so often in the Eucharist is a faith that enables us to see life and the world in which we live with a perspective that is impossible for those who do not share this gift.

The faith we share enables us to see our gathering this morning not simply as a group of unrelated persons hoping to find encouragement or inspiration from a magic ritual or a motivational speaker. The faith we share enables us to see our gathering is an assembly of God's People, brought together by Baptism and the Holy Spirit to hear the Word of God and to enter into a true communion with God and with one another in our sharing the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.

The faith that we share enables us to see that the daily lives we lead are not simply the result of what fate is our or what cards we have been dealt in life. The faith that we share enables us to see that in Baptism, God has given us all a call to holiness and that we live out that calling within our families, in our particular vocations to marriage, the single life, parenthood, in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools each day.

The faith that we share enables us to see tragedy and pain, sorrow and suffering in whatever form they may take in our lives and in our world, not simply as ours or others' bad luck, or as the product of an irreversibly broken humanity or a cruel world. The faith that we share enables us to see that even suffering can have meaning as a share in the suffering of Jesus whose death and resurrection promise us the hope of a final victory of good over evil and life over death.

In our gospel today, Jesus may appear to be speaking in riddles to some. But with the eyes of faith we can see and understand the true meaning of His words.

May we always be grateful for the gift of faith, and let us pray that God may increase this gift in our lives and in the lives of the Elect and our RCIA candidates whom we continue to pray for in a special way during these weeks of the season of Lent.

Thomas P. Ferguson
March 19, 2006