What is the most essential element we need in order to live? Water. Without water, there is no life. NASA has a motto in their search for life beyond our planet: “Follow the water.” Wherever there is water, there is life. Humans can survive better without food than we can without water. It comprises most of the material in our body and is essential to almost every activity we do in order to live. Without water, there is no life. Jesus in our Gospel today offers the Samaritan woman not just any ordinary water, but “living water”, as He tells her. What is this living water? How do we get it? And can we lose it?
The living water which Jesus offers is our union with God in the Holy Spirit, who is poured out for us in the sacraments. We should automatically think of baptism whenever we hear about water in the Scriptures, for just as water gives us earthly life, baptism gives us heavenly life, opening for us the gates of heaven to be joined with God. We listen to this Gospel on this Sunday of Lent in order to help our catechumens prepare to receive baptism, hence the beginning of the scrutinies on this Sunday. We should recall our own baptism which gave us this living water to drink. But this is not the only sacrament in which we receive this living water, in which we receive the Holy Spirit.
Brethren, it is possible to lose this living water, to allow the well to dry up and become spiritually parched. And just as we have no physical life if we lose water, so too do we have no spiritual life if we do not have the living water of the Holy Spirit. How do we lose this water? How do we become spiritually parched? This happens when we fall into sin, when we violate our baptismal promises to reject Satan and all his works and all his empty show. It happens when our hearts become hardened by sin, as were the hearts of the Israelites in the first reading and the psalm. It happens when we lose faith in God, and thus begin to lose our justification, as Saint Paul says in the second reading.
Is it possible to regain these living waters? Is it possible to regain our faith and thus regain our justification? It is quite possible, but there is only one means of doing it. How? Through the confessional. God does not pour out His Spirit upon us only once at baptism or confirmation, but He desires to renew us constantly, just as the earth is renewed by rain. Yet we must not seek rain where it cannot be found. Would it not be foolish to build a house in the Sahara Desert and plant a garden and wait for the rains to come? Then is it not also foolish to ask God to increase our faith and pour out His Spirit upon us if we remain in the spiritual desert of sin?
Brethren, I spend one hour before this Mass in the confessional not because I’m bored or I need to be somewhere. I am in there because God has given me the authority to forgive sins and to restore the living water to you. I am in there because, like Jesus, I thirst for your salvation. In my nine months of being here, there are many of you whom I have never seen nor heard in there. Why? What prevents you from coming and receiving the mercy of God? What prevents you from being refreshed with the living water that Jesus wishes to give you? What prevents you from being free of your sins in the ordinary means God has given to you?
Many of you go to confession perhaps once a year yet come up to receive Communion every week. Would to God that it were the reverse! What’s the point of receiving Communion if you’re still parched by your sins? Why receive the Bread of Life if you still eat the bitter herbs of sin? Jesus does not want you to remain in your sins, that’s why He died on the Cross. But we must imitate the Samaritan woman and acknowledge our sins before Jesus if we wish to be truly refreshed by His living water. We must imitate her humility in order to be elevated to glory.
Brethren, let your hearts not be hardened! Hear the voice of the Lord calling you to repentance, calling you to drink deeply of His living water. Do not be like the Israelites at Meribah - testing God, challenging God. Do not remain in the desert of sin but come and be refreshed by confession. Yet we should not do this only in Lent, in this season of penance and sorrow. We need to take every opportunity to be freed of our sins and refreshed by the Holy Spirit so as to continue to be justified. I encourage you not only to go to confession this week, but to also go at least once a month. Then we can be like those who heard the Samaritan woman’s testimony and encountered Jesus themselves: they not only believed because of what she said, but because they joined her in humbling themselves and recognizing Jesus as the one true savior of the world. May we do the same, so that we may boast not in arrogance but in hope of the eternal and joyful glory of God.
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