Sunday 20 March 2022
3rd Sunday of Lent
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
3rd Sunday of Lent
From a treatise on John by St Augustine
A Samaritan woman came to draw water
A woman came. She is a symbol of the Church not yet made righteous. Righteousness follows from the conversation. She came in ignorance, she found Christ, and he enters into conversation with her. Let us see what it is about, let us see why a Samaritan woman came to draw water. The Samaritans did not form part of the Jewish people: they were foreigners. The fact that she came from a foreign people is part of the symbolic meaning, for she is a symbol of the Church. The Church was to come from the Gentiles, of a different race from the Jews.
We must then recognise ourselves in her words and in her person, and with her give our own thanks to God. She was a symbol, not the reality; she foreshadowed the reality, and the reality came to be. She found faith in Christ, who was using her as a symbol to teach us what was to come. She came then to draw water. She had simply come to draw water; in the normal way of man or woman.
Jesus says to her: Give me water to drink. For his disciples had gone to the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman therefore says to him: How is it that you, though a Jew, ask me for water to drink, though I am a Samaritan woman? For Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans.
The Samaritans were foreigners; Jews never used their utensils. The woman was carrying a pail for drawing water. She was astonished that a Jew should ask her for a drink of water, a thing that Jews would not do. But the one who was asking for a drink of water was thirsting for her faith.
Listen now and learn who it is that asks for a drink. Jesus answered her and said: If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” perhaps you might have asked him and he would have given you living water.
He asks for a drink, and he promises a drink. He is in need, as one hoping to receive, yet he is rich, as one about to satisfy the thirst of others. He says: If you knew the gift of God. The gift of God is the Holy Spirit. But he is still using veiled language as he speaks to the woman and gradually enters into her heart. Or is he already teaching her? What could be more gentle and kind than the encouragement he gives? If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” perhaps you might ask and he would give you living water.
What is this water that he will give if not the water spoken of in Scripture: With you is the fountain of life? How can those feel thirst who will drink deeply from the abundance in your house?
He was promising the Holy Spirit in satisfying abundance. She did not yet understand. In her failure to grasp his meaning, what was her reply? The woman says to him: Master, give me this drink, so that I may feel no thirst or come here to draw water. Her need forced her to this labour, her weakness shrank from it. If only she could hear those words: Come to me, all who labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Jesus was saying this to her, so that her labours might be at an end; but she was not yet able to understand.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Blessed Francis Palau y Quer, Priest
From the spiritual writings of Blessed Francis Palau
The power of prayer for the Church
God in his providence has ordained not to cure our ills or grant us grace without the intervention of prayer. He wishes us to help in saving each other by means of our prayer (cf Jas 5:16f). If the heavens showered down dew and the clouds rained the righteous One, if the earth opened to bring forth the Saviour (cf Is 45:8), it was God’s good pleasure that his coming should be preceded by the prayers of that singular Virgin who by the beauty of her virtues drew into her womb the uncreated Word of God. The Redeemer came, and by constant prayer he reconciled the world to the Father. If Christ’s prayer and the fruits of his redemptive work are to be applied to any nation or people, or if the gospel message is to enlighten them and they are to have someone to administer the sacraments, it is indispensable that someone or even many persons should have previously won them over and reconciled them to God by earnest entreaties and supplications, by prayers and sacrifices.
For this purpose, among others, the eucharistic sacrifice is offered on our altars. This sacred Victim which we present to the Father every day, accompanied by our own petitions, is not simply destined to recall the memory of the life, passion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also to oblige God in his goodness to show his graciousness in applying the graces of his Son’s redemption to the nation, province, city, village, or to whatever person or persons for whom the Mass is offered. It is precisely here that we plead with the Father for the redemption of the world, namely, for the conversion of the nations. Before the grace of redemption is applied to the world or, in other words, before the standard of the cross is lifted up among the nations, God the Father ordains that his only Son, made man, should plead with him by means of ‘prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears’ (Heb 5:7), in the anguish of death and through the shedding of his blood, especially on the altar of the cross that was raised on Calvary.
In order that God might give his grace to those who do not or cannot ask it, or who do not wish to ask it, he enjoined us to pray for one another, so that we might be saved (Jas 5:16f). If God gave the grace of conversion to St Augustine, it was due to the prayers of St Monica; nor would the church have St Paul, according to one of the fathers, were it not for the prayers of St Stephen.
It is noteworthy in this context that the Apostles, who were sent to preach and to teach all nations, acknowledged that the results of their preaching sprang from prayer more than from their words. In fact, at the election of the seven deacons who were charged with external works of charity, they said: ‘But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the Word’ (Ac 6:4). Notice carefully that they say they would devote themselves first of all to prayer and only afterwards to the ministry of the Word. For they would never convert any nation until prayer had first obtained the grace of its conversion.
Christ prayed throughout his entire life, whereas he spent only three years preaching.
Since God does not distribute his graces to men except through prayer, because he wishes us to recognise him as the source from which all good things flow; in like manner, he does not wish to save us from danger, or cure our wounds, or console us in affliction, except by means of this same exercise of prayer.
Copyright © 1996-2022 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.