3rd Sunday of Lent "A"
Ex 17, 3-7; Rom 5, 1…8; John 4, 5-42
March 8, 2026
H O M I L Y
In this Gospel, there is something surprising, which carries a lesson for us. It is that Jesus never got the drink he was asking for! He was tired and thirsty; he asked the woman for some water, and that provoked a long and lively conversation between the two of them; and the end, the woman is so excited that she leaves her bucket there on the ground and run to town to tell people about Jesus. At least, if we limit ourselves to the narrative we have, she did not draw water for Jesus.
There might be a lesson in this. Our needs create in us an openness to relationship. And when we express our needs to someone else, we establish the relationship. And the relationship is itself more important than the satisfaction of the need. Jesus' relationship to the woman was more important to him ‑‑ and to her ‑‑ than his having or not having a cup of water to drink.
And maybe that is also the meaning of prayer. When we express all our needs to God, we establish a relationship between ourselves and God; and that relationship is much more important than whether or not we get what we are asking for. On the Cross, on good Friday, Jesus will cry : "I am thirsty". And then again he will not get any water; only a few drops of vinegar placed on his lips with a sponge at the end of a long stick. But a few minutes later he will say: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit".
The reading from the Book of Exodus describes to us the people of God in the wilderness. They are weary, they have been on the march for a long time, they are fatigued and have nothing. It is quite understandable then, humanly speaking, that they should rebel against the God who has already done so much for them. They forget the past and the Lord's constant care for them, and, with mindless violence, begin to complain and grow angry: "Give us water to drink". (Exod. 17:2) Their cry, addressed to Moses and through him to God, might have been a confident appeal in time of trial, a request inspired by optimism and sure of a saving answer. In fact, it was a kind of curse uttered in despair. Nevertheless God heard it... He gave them water from the rock.
It is easy to establish a connection between that account and Jesus' words on the true "living water" in John's Gospel (4:5‑42). "Whoever drinks the water that I shall give him, says the Lord, will have a spring inside him, welling up for eternal life."
But it would be wrong to see in today's Gospel text only the theme of "living water". It is much richer than that. We have here several carefully intertwined elements. The Gospel of John is built around a series of signs, each one of them being explained by a discourse or a dialogue. Here we have two signs and two dialogues. First, Jesus is tired and asks his disciples for bread (v.8). When they bring it to him at the end, he makes them realize that there is another nourishment (vv. 31‑34). Likewise, in the very middle of this, after the disciples have left, and before they come back, he asks the Samaritan woman for water to quench his thirst (v.7), and when she answers him with questions he tells her about another kind of water (vv.13‑14). We have similar transposition when he turns from the mention of the Samaritan and Jewish material cult to speak of a cult in spirit and truth (vv. 20‑24), and when he bids his disciples contemplate the material harvest to prepare themselves for the spiritual harvest.
The lesson is twofold. The first one is that we should not be concerned only with material food and drink and external worship and harvest, but we must also be concerned with the spiritual drink, that is the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (cf. reading from Paul), the spiritual food, which is to do our Father's Will, the spiritual worship that is in Spirit and Truth, and the spiritual harvest that consists in witnessing to the Good News.
But the second lesson, which is really the heart of the teaching we have here, is that those two dimensions ‑‑ the material and the spiritual ones ‑‑are so essentially related to one another, that the second one cannot exist without the other.
It is noteworthy that Jesus speaks of living water only to a person whom he has asked to give a drink of real water to an enemy; and that he mentions eternal bread only to followers whom he has already sent looking for material bread to appease physical hunger.
This is an important lesson: we have material and spiritual needs; and God looks after both. Likewise, our brothers and sisters have material and spiritual needs; and we too must look after both. Unless we do the first we cannot even begin to understand the second!