From the Parish House

The world and its people could not live without water.  It is interesting that only in the twenty-first century has water become a human right.  In 2001, the United Nations Secretary at that time, Kofi Annan, declared, “In this new century, water, its sanitation, and its equitable distribution pose great social challenges for our world.  We need to safeguard the global supply of healthy water and to ensure that everyone has access to it.”  Countries like Australia also know what it is like to suffer a drought and to slowly watch the life being drained from the ground around them.  We have also known in more recent times, the incredible damage that waters can cause as floods have ravaged vast areas of the East Coast of Australia.  Water is powerful.  Water gives life.

On this third Sunday of Lent the scriptural readings are filled with images of water.  The reading from the Book of Exodus begins, “Tormented by thirst, the people complained to Moses.”  Did you bring us out here to die? they cried.  After appealing to God, Moses is able to provide water to his people.  Similarly in the Gospel of John this week, Jesus meets a woman drawing water from a well.  He begins by asking her for a drink.  However, it is not long before the tables are turned and she is asking him for ‘living water’.  Ironically at the end of the encounter the woman puts down her jug at the foot of the well and goes back to town empty handed.  Or does she?  John the evangelist, wants to tell us that Jesus himself is the living water who can truly bring us life and quench our thirst.

This woman from Samaria, who has no name in the Gospel, is one of the first to realise that Jesus is life.  It is he who can provide living water and refresh our dry and weary lives.  It is he who can quench the searching of our souls and the desires of our hearts.  It is he who can ‘revive our dropping spirits’ as the psalmist says.  It is he who can flow compassion and mercy through our veins and lift us up as his own!  The woman from Samaria became an evangeliser.  She went back to her town and told everyone about the incredible person, Jesus Christ, who had changed her life.

I wonder if that woman were here today what she would make of our world.  I think, she would definitely join the world’s attempts to ensure access to fresh water for all.  She would know that no-one can survive on this planet without water.  I think she would be an advocate for water.  She would be the first to support our Caritas, Project Compassion campaign this year to end poverty, promote justice and uphold dignity.  I think she would also be a catechist.  She would particularly want to be involved in talking to others about their lives and how important faith in Christ has become for her and how it has changed her life.  She would probably be running the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) in her parish!

The woman from Samaria was animated and joyful about the faith she found in Jesus Christ.  Her story is an inspiration for us to think about what we will do with ours!

By Fr Brendan Reed