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Discover the deeper meaning and connections found in this week's readings, through these great commentaries written by our priests.
Explore this week's readings and hear what God is saying to us through His Word.
Find out more about how we can mark this special day in our liturgy.
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Conversations are a beautiful thing.
Many are superficial – a short greeting followed by some remark about the weather. Such conversations are not life-changing events. Did a conversation about the weather ever change your life? Such conversations are difficult to remember after several weeks.
Other conversations can be very life-changing. Some conversations we will never forget – like a conversation with St Teresa of Calcutta or St John Paul II or some other remarkable person. We can even remember the time and the place after many years.
Today’s Gospel records one of the most beautiful conversations in human history. Jesus enters into conversation with a Samaritan woman - a Samaritan! This conversation is unique partly because at that time Jews did not speak with Samaritans, considering them to be heretics, and a Rabbi would not normally speak alone with a strange woman. Jesus is demonstrating something profound here. He begins with a simple request: “Give Me to drink”. This request turns into a life-changing conversation.
Jesus draws out the deepest aspirations of the woman’s heart (she had searched for love in vain, having had five husbands). Deep down, everyone wants to love and to be loved authentically, for who he or she is, to experience unconditional love, but many seek it in the wrong place, expecting a finite fellow human being to fulfil this longing, looking for perfect love in imperfect creatures. Jesus awakened her desire for God’s gift, for God’s love: “If you knew the gift of God…”
Note the deep respect Jesus has for the woman in her brokenness, sinfulness, life disappointments, experience of rejection; He can point out the brokenness and sinfulness without making the woman feel even more discouraged and rejected. On the contrary, she feels authentically loved for the first time! She experiences how Jesus meets her where it hurts the most and opens up a new door to authentic love. It fills her with new hope, new resolve. It transforms her. She runs back to her village and convinces everyone to meet Jesus and they all come to faith in Him. One authentic conversion can lead to many other conversions!
Prayer is essentially the gift to be able to enter into conversation with Jesus. In authentic prayer we experience how Jesus knows every detail of our lives, how He draws out the deepest aspirations of our heart and leads us to the experience of unconditional love, a love that can and should totally transform us and make us His witnesses to others.
Every prayer can and should be a life-changing event. Lent calls us to look at the quality of our prayer, the quality of our conversation with Jesus. Are we allowing Jesus to address the broken areas of life that need healing? Among all the desires, expectations, and yearning of our hearts, are we allowing Jesus to draw us to Him?
The third Sunday of Lent marks an important moment in the Church's catechetical programme for those preparing for baptism at the Easter Vigil. The catechumen undergoes the first of three scrutinies, which are rites of self-searching and repentance.
The Gospel of the day is especially appropriate for this ceremony. It tells of the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well of Sichar. Jesus brings the light which exposes the darkness of human sin, but also promises the living water which quenches the thirst for forgiveness and for an eternal, incorruptible life. This living water is the gift of the Spirit of God, poured out, first of all, in the sacrament of baptism.
The Gospel goes on to promise more. Jesus proclaims the vocation of Christians to be true worshippers of God, who will worship the Father in spirit and truth. This vocation is fulfilled above all when the Holy Eucharist is celebrated. This completes the Christian initiation begun in baptism.
Hearing this Gospel, catechumens and faithful alike are inspired to look forward together to the holy feast of Easter with renewed fervour and hope. With the compatriots of the Samaritan woman they confess that Jesus is indeed the Saviour of the world.
Do you have questions about the liturgy and how we are called to participate in it? Explore how the Church councils, saints, and popes have answered this key question and many more.
Every movement of the Mass is rich in meaning but we can become over-familiar with it. Rediscover the Mass and explore how it relates to the Exodus story, where many of its rituals come from, and how it makes Jesus present to us today.
