20170319 FULFILLMENT IN LIFE THROUGH THE LOVE OF THE SPIRIT IN OUR
HEARTS GIVEN TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAITH IN CHRIST
Readings at Mass
Liturgical
Colour: Violet.
|
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?’
|
Responsorial
Psalm
|
|
Psalm
94(95):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.
|
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!
EITHER:
|
Gospel
|
John 4:5-42 ©
|
|
A spring of
water welling up to eternal life
|
|
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.’
FULFILLMENT
IN LIFE THROUGH THE LOVE OF THE SPIRIT IN OUR HEARTS GIVEN TO THOSE WHO HAVE
FAITH IN CHRIST
Thirst is an
experience we all can identify with. When we are thirsty, we feel
restless, uncomfortable, tired, weary, irritable and unable to focus on what we
are doing. Perhaps, for this reason, today’s scripture readings use the
symbol of thirst to express these feelings of ours which extend beyond simply
physical thirst. Indeed, we are all seeking something in life that can
fulfill us. Such a need can be as tormenting, as the need for
water.
Firstly, for many
people, their thirst is for material things, like the Israelites in the first
reading. Like them, we are always grumbling that our material life is not
comfortable enough. The word ‘enough’ simply does not exist in our vocabulary
because we have a well that cannot seem to be filled. Once something is
given, we immediately seek something else. That is the trouble with human
beings. Look at the Israelites. Once their thirst was quenched, they
complained about the lack of bread, and then after being satisfied, they
complained that they had no meat. So you see, no amount of material goods
can satisfy the physical needs of a person. Such satisfaction will not
turn into a spring of fulfillment but only emptiness and frustration.
Of course, for some
people, it is not physical needs that they are looking for. This group of
people have gone beyond the survival level. They are seeking emotional
needs, like the Samaritan woman. We are told that she had five husbands.
She must have gone through quite a number of broken relationships. She
must have been a broken and bitter lady. So you can imagine how surprised
she must have been when Jesus, a Jew at that, took interest in her and
initiated a conversation with her. To know that somebody is concerned for her
and interested about her life, as she remarked at the end of today’s gospel,
“he told me all that I have ever done” certainly uplifted her.
Yet, in the final
analysis, our physical and emotional needs, while certainly important, cannot
give us the fulfillment that we are really seeking. Even if our body is
well looked after because we have attended to our physical needs; and even if
our human spirit is satisfied because we have healthy relationships with
people; yet our divine spirit is starved because the Spirit of God is missing
in our lives. God, it must be said, is irreplaceable. No human
person can rest so long as his divine spirit is not in touch with the Spirit of
God. For this reason, we need more than simply water and human
relationships to satisfy us. We need living water, which is the Spirit of
God, to nurture and strengthen us. This living water is Jesus Himself,
who comes to give us His Spirit. This is what St John and Paul speak
about. On this basis, we could say with Paul that “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.”
But the fact is that many of us do not
feel the love of God present in our hearts – the kind of experience that Paul
speaks about. In fact, we are just like the Israelites who in their
emptiness and thirst questioned: “Is the Lord with us, or not?”
Many of us too are asking the same question; ‘Is God real? Where is
He? If He is real, why don’t I experience Him and why doesn’t He seem to
care?’ Yes, questions like that imply that somehow we are distant from
God. Is there anything we can do to improve our relationship with Jesus,
our living water, the source of life?
Yes, only one thing
is necessary. We need to give faith a chance. St Paul wrote to the
Romans that it is “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.” Faith, then, is the pre-requisite for entering into a deep
experience of God’s love and grace which is the experience of being loved even
in our sinfulness, nothingness and brokenness. This is the kind of love
Paul meant. Hence, he says “what proves that God loves us is that Christ
died for us while we were still sinners.” Only such an experience of His
overflowing love will buttress our hope in Him, a hope, Paul reassures us, that
is not deceptive.
If faith is the answer to such an
experience, necessarily we must ask exactly the nature of faith that is
required of us. Is faith simply a blind surrender and trust? Nay,
faith is a surrender based on a real and personal knowledge that what we hope
for is well founded in truth. Of course, faith entails trust and
surrender as well. But faith is not founded on falsehood. That would be
fideism and superstitious. Rather, faith is founded on the promises of
God which are true. Thus, Jesus tells the Samaritan that true worship,
that is, a true experience of God, is not based on whether we worship at the
right or wrong mountain but whether we worship in spirit and in truth.
Concretely, to worship in spirit and in
truth implies two things. Faith requires a sharing of the same spirit of
Jesus, which is the sharing of the same mind and heart. So, to worship in
spirit and in truth presupposes that firstly, our minds must be
converted. It requires an open mind. It is said that education is
to replace an empty mind with an open mind. Precisely, Jesus comes as
prophet to fill our mind, but we need an open mind to listen to Him. The
Samaritan woman was open to what Jesus had to say and could recognize that He
was a prophet. If we truly want to have the mind of Jesus, we too must
listen attentively to His word that is read and proclaimed. Reception of
the Word is therefore one aspect of being given the living water of the Spirit
from Jesus.
Of course, listening
is not sufficient. We can listen and yet not be converted. We need
to open our hearts as well. We must be careful not to reduce our
relationship with God to an intellectual enterprise. Rather, the words of
Jesus must help us to open our hearts to Him so that He can reveal to us who we
truly are. This was the case of the Samaritan woman. Because she
was open to Jesus, she was able to have a real relationship with Him. She
came to know herself more truly and thus was liberated from her bondage to her
broken life. We too must learn to relate with Jesus in prayer in a
personal manner. Our relationship with God is not with someone impersonal
but someone who is real to us. In speaking to Him about ourselves, we too
will be released from all those bondages that imprison us from becoming the
person God meant us to be.
In this way, we will come to experience
Jesus not only as a prophet or a teacher but our Messiah and saviour. This was
what happened to the Samaritan woman. At the end of the conversation, the
faith of the woman progressed from recognizing Jesus as a prophet to that of
the Messiah. Unless, we see Jesus as the Anointed One, the Messiah of God
who died for us even in our sinful state, we cannot really come to affirm that
God is love in Jesus. But if we do, then we will experience that
unmerited love in our hearts which cannot but touch the very core of our
beings. This is what Paul meant when he speaks about the love of God
being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. True experience of God
is the experience of the unlimited and unconditional love of God for us even in
our unworthiness. This is what ultimately transformed Paul and it will be
for us as well.
But all this can happen only when we, as
Paul tells us, by faith enter into this state of grace, that is a relationship
with the Lord. Thus, today, we must be like the Samaritans who begged
Jesus to stay with them. And He obliged their request by staying an extra
two days with them. And because they were open in their minds and in
their hearts, they were nurtured with the living water as Jesus shared His mind
and heart with them. At the end of it all, the conclusion of the
Samaritans was this: “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.” Yes, unless we can say that we have faith in Jesus, not
because of what others have told us about Him but because we have seen and
experienced His truth and love, and therefore His Spirit in us, we cannot claim
to have a true faith in Jesus. Only this kind of faith will truly justify
us, make us wholesome and restore us to fullness of life.
Let us therefore, on
this third week of Lent, deepen our prayer life and our relationship with
God. Let us make use of the Lenten works, be it fasting, prayer or
penance, to come to a deeper realization of our sinfulness so that the love of
God can become clearer and more real to us. The day we experience both
our sinfulness and unworthiness; and also the love of God for us in Jesus, we
will find that the promise of Jesus is true – the promise that a spring of love
will well up in us to eternal life, a life of God.
Written
by The Most Rev William Goh Roman Catholic Archbishop of Singapore © All Rights
Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment