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.