FASTING... FROM LACK TO FULLNESS

Helplessness to hopefulness; hardheartedness to humility; hurt to hunger!

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

March 08 - Exodus 17: 3-7; Romans 5: 1-2, 5-8; John 4: 5-42

Listening and Fasting: Lent as a time for conversion... we have reached the third Sunday of the season. The last two weeks we have been reflecting on the term “Listening” and we now move towards the next term, “Fasting”! It is a central theme of reflection for us, every lent – what fasting really means and what significance it can have for our lives. We have a great lesson in the Word today, a lesson of some key themes – thirst or hunger; change of heart; and growing towards fullness!  Said therefore in one phrase, it is a movement from lack, a thirst or hunger, through a change of heart, towards a fullness that God offers us. This is what the Holy Father so simply puts in his Lenten message – to have a hunger to move from lack to fullness.

The first trace of this movement from lack to fullness has to be from helplessness to hopefulness: At times our fasting and abstinence remains merely an accentuation of our deprivation or self-deprivation. Our fasting has to be more a clarity about what we wish to fill ourselves with in stead of what we are claiming to renounce… we renounce eating, what do we wish to fill that space with – self pity and frustration? …we renounce meat and other desirable things but what do we fill that absence with – self-righteousness and rash judgement of others? This is what Jesus spoke against… it cannot be a lack which would only lead to a lament as we see in the first reading. If it has to be a spiritual act, it has to be hope-filled, that I have something, someOne with me who can give me that real fulfilment in life, who alone can lead me to fullness. This is hopefulness!

The Samaritan woman who was all the time looking so helplessly at her lack – lack of water, lack of a respectable identity in the public, lack of some one who would love her, lack of a sense of fulfilment – was gradually led by Jesus to look at the hope that he was intending to give her. Finally she does get it… she who was all the time asking for water so that her material need could be fulfilled, leaves her jar by the well and returns to the village – a powerful symbolism to say she had moved from helplessness to hopefulness.

A second sense of this movement from lack to fullness, is from hardheartedness to humility: meribah, massah, ‘even when we were still in sin’, ‘you a Jew who thinks you are greater than our father Jacob’… these are various elements of hard heartedness that we are presented with by the Word today. This is the hardheartedness of humanity – humanity which hates God like the Samaritan woman hated the “Jew” who was sitting by the well and asking her water; humanity which mocks God like that woman who spited Jesus asking him how he would give her water when he had no means for himself to drink; humanity which challenges God with inquisitives just as that Samaritan woman who began to question Jesus about the Jewish claims of truths! However, Jesus responds to that hardheartedness with such an embrace of compassion that she slowly gives into humility.

The Samaritan woman recognises and accepts her failures when she says – he said all that I ever did… that was an implicit acceptance of her weakness and fragility, an act of humility. It is of course not an act of self-belittling – that is never the intention of God with regard to us. When we were still sinful, God chose to send God’s son for our fullness sake! It is only in true humility, that is accepting the truth as it is, we open ourselves to encounter the insurmountable compassion of God.

The third dimension of the movement from lack to fullness is from hurt to hunger: There can be no person who has not had his or her own share of hurts in life. But as psychology reiterates more than emphatically, these hurts do not have the same effect on everyone invariably… there are different effects depending on how one has dealt with these experiences. Personal, social, historic hurts abound among us leaving us handicapped in really encountering the other… we are so filled with prejudices and precautions we fail to see, to listen or to understand. There needs to be a hunger, a thirst to know, to know the other, and to know the Other. That is what the Spirit calls us to. When Jesus speaks of worshipping God in Spirit and truth, he is speaking of this hunger and thirst for God that springs from within, pushing us to look for that fount of life-giving water.

Fasting has to prepare us and lead us towards this hunger, not leave us further hurt neither physically nor psychological or spiritually. Fasting has to be an instrument that leads us to look for God in our own lives, seek God within our inner selves, and encounter God as the “spring inside us welling up to eternal life”. Fasting has to become that experience of thirst, that feeling of hunger, that leads us from lack to fulness, from sinfulness to salvation, from looking for material satisfaction to yearning for eternal life.