Homily for 3d Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
3d Sunday of Lent

March 12, 2023
John 4: 5-42
Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

(Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament)

In 1887 Katherine Drexel had a private audience with Pope Leo XIII.  Katherine was a young woman from Philadelphia, she was devout and practiced charitable works, as she’d learned from her parents, and she was the richest single woman in America, thanks to an inheritance.  She’d traveled around the U.S. and seen the needs of many people, especially African Americans, many of them former slaves or their children, and of Native Americans recently subdued by the Army and confined to wretched reservations.  She pleaded with Pope Leo to send missionary priests and nuns to help these poor people.  Leo, a wise and perceptive man, challenged Katherine:  Why don’t you go yourself to these unfortunate black and red Americans?

Katherine took up the challenge, became a nun herself, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and dedicated her vast fortune to founding schools, including Xavier University in New Orleans, to educate and evangelize Indians on their reservations and impoverished, discriminated blacks in the South.  St. Katherine Drexel died in 1955 at age 97 and was canonized in 2000.

In today’s gospel, another woman was challenged by Christ at a well in Samaria and took up Christ’s message to bring it to the people of her town.  She became an evangelist who led them to Christ and to faith:  “Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him because of the word of the woman who testified, ‘He told me everything I’ve done’” (John 4:39).

(artist unknown)

Since the 2d Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Church and the Popes have taught us that all of us who belong to Jesus are missionaries.  All of us have a mission to share the Good News of Jesus within our families and among our neighbors, friends, schoolmates, and co-workers.  This doesn’t mean we have to go to a reservation or go door to door like a Jehovah’s Witness.  It means living virtuously and joyfully, and if opportunity comes, explaining why we’re joyful, what Christ means to us; testifying to his effect on our lives because he offers us living water that quenches our thirst for meaning in our lives (4:10-14).  Yesterday I came on a webpage that proclaimed, “You might be the only Bible someone ever reads.”[1]

Christ welcomes us, forgives our sins, invites us to intimate friendship with him, and pours God’s love into our hearts (Rom 5:5) so that we might come to share in the same eternal life that Jesus himself enjoys.  “Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us joyfully sing psalms to him” (Ps 95:2).

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[1] OSV Live Catholic online, March 11, 2023.