Homily for 3d Sunday of Lent

Homily for the
3d Sunday of Lent

March 8, 2026
John 4: 5-42
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“You would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4: 10).

Today and for the next 2 Sunday, we break from St. Matthew’s Gospel to take up 3 important (and long) stories from St. John which have to do with water, light, and life.  They’re preparing the Church’s catechumens for Baptism and preparing the rest of us to renew our baptismal commitment to follow Jesus.

In John 4, Jesus and his disciples are hiking from Judea to Galilee and, unusual for Jews, they take the direct road thru Samaria.  As John explains, “The Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans” (4:9).  The 2 peoples were bitter enemies.

But Jesus has chosen this route deliberately, and they arrive at Jacob’s well around noon, tired, dusty, thirsty, and hungry.  While the disciples go into town to buy food, Jesus waits at the well.  Jacob, also called Israel, was the father of 12 sons, the ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel.  He’d dug this well, and probably others, to water his flocks as they roamed over the land some 16 centuries B.C.  This well is a sacred and symbolic spot.

Jesus is waiting there for someone, someone who has no idea that she has an appointment with the Son of God.  The woman who comes to draw water is a social outcast, even among her own people.  That’s why she comes alone in the heat of noon to fetch the water she needs for the day, instead of coming early in the morning with the other women of the town.

But for Jesus, she’s no outcast.  No one is cast out by Jesus—not Samaritans, not sinners.  And this woman is a sinner, as we learn, having gone thru husbands like changing her wardrobe; and now she’s cohabiting with a man.  She’s unnamed, like many of the people whom Jesus saves in the gospels.  Anonymous, she stands in for all of us.

Jesus has a gift to offer her.  He indicates to her that he’s thirsty:  “Give me a drink” (4:7), one of 2 times in the gospels when he makes such a request.  The other time is when he’s dying on the cross and says, “I’m thirsty” (John 19:28).

But he isn’t really after water.  He seeks faith, seeks to establish a living relationship between believers and God the Father.  He offers the woman the gift of “living water.”  This is one of the plays on words that St. John likes.  The Greek word John uses, ζϖν, can mean “fresh” or “flowing,” like water from a spring or a moving brook, or “having life.”  Jesus goes on to distinguish between the water the woman is drawing from the well and “the water I shall give, becoming in a person a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (4:14).

That water is the water of Baptism.  In the preceding chapter, Jesus had spoken with Nicodemus and told him that one must be born again of water and the Spirit (3:5).  Jesus’ living water is the Holy Spirit, which he’s come to give to believers so that they may have life and may offer God authentic worship, worship in Spirit and truth (4:23).

Such worship is not place-dependent—neither in the temple at Jerusalem nor the temple the Samaritans had built on Mt. Gerizim in their own country.  It may be offered wherever someone filled with the Spirit of God may be, and it may be offered by any person regardless of national origin, race, language, or gender.  The Spirit that Jesus offers is for sinners—like this woman at the well, like the 12 apostles, like all of us here today.

He bestowed the Holy Spirit on us at Baptism, making us children of God.  He renewed that gift at Confirmation, and he renews it every time we humbly bring our sorry, sinful selves to the sacrament of Reconciliation.  In that sacrament, Christ’s minister forgives our sins, pronouncing, “God the Father of mercies, thru the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and poured forth the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins,” continuing with the words of absolution.  If we worship the Father in Spirit and truth, we know that we are, truthfully, sinners, and we confess our sins truthfully to Christ (thru his minister in the confessional), and he truly forgives them and refreshes the living water of grace in our souls.  “The water I shall give will become in that soul a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”