Sunday Sermon: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God

The liturgy of the third Sunday of Lent is based on the following readings: Exodus 17:3-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-2,5-8; John 4:5-42. The main theme is on people’s experience as they search for God. The first reading tells us how God quenched the thirst of the Jews in the desert when they had started to regret having left the securities of their slavery in Egypt. Through Moses, God gave them what they wanted: water which came from the rock. But this did not change the course of their history which continued to be marked by abandoning their God. In Psalm 95, we are reminded of people’s hardening of hearts even after seeing the signs of God’s power in their lives. St. Paul reminds the Roman Christians that God has revealed himself to them in a way that cannot be mistaken: the love of God has been poured into your hearts through the Holy Spirit; he reminded them. The Gospel uses the imagery of water to tell us of a Samaritan woman’s experience of God. In a careful dialogue between the Samaritan woman and Jesus, the woman discovers that she had a latent thirst of knowing the true God. There and then, her thirst was satisfied when Jesus declared himself the Messiah in front of her. The woman ran to tell others of her experience and many Samaritans believed that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus called this experience of the Samaritans the work of conversion which was Jesus’ real purpose and mission. According to Jesus, this is the seed sown by the prophets, which is ready for harvest. The main theme of our liturgy is human thirst: The Israelites were thirsty and Moses gave them water. From her conversation with Jesus who wanted water to drink, the Samaritan woman discovers her latent thirst for God. And the same liturgy reminds us that we all suffer a real thirst for God within ourselves. Like the Samaritan woman, that thirst can be satisfied by our personal experience of Jesus Christ in our lives. This should not be mistaken for only a promise of future happiness; but a possibility in our present life experience. Many saints and mystics have had this profound experience of God in their daily lives here on earth. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is our recent example. When Jesus says that the harvest is ready (v.35), it is precisely this human experience of thirst for God that he means: The divine providence has prepared our hearts and circumstances for the action of the Gospel. There has been a kind of preparation by God for the world, for our world today, to receive the Gospel. We can feel this from our own experience that all around us there is that unsatisfactory nature of human existence. Whereby man is continuously caught up in a series of apparent contradictions; wanting to live but with the knowledge that death is a must. That desire to live for others but finding ourselves selfish in many circumstances. That need of security in which we never feel really sure. It is true that our daily life poses so many questions in our search for God. The doctrinal message of this liturgy is in the metaphor of a certain thirst in man, the kind of restlessness that St Augustine describes in his works ‘The Confessions’ as he ponders on man’s restless search for God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord”. This remains among the best known passages in all of Christian literature. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II tells us what he sees as Jesus´ harvest message. He sees it in young people all over the world as they try to unravel their own experiences, and those of other people around them trying to understand the thirst of God that underlies every man’s experience of life. And the Pope reminds us that young people today are rediscovering a sense of the sacred, even if they do not always know how to recognize it, hence in need of some guides. That is the great signs of thirst and at the same time the harvest which is ready. According to John Paul II, we always tend to lament the present times as unchristian. We might have reasons to do so, but the fact that our youth are asking the right question is still a sign that the harvest is there in abundance. Perhaps we need to change our perspective and expectations of the world, for a better understanding of the core of the Gospel. Perhaps the youth are right that we tend to lean too much on particular ways and customs of other times and fail to appreciate the Gospel in our current ways of thinking and evaluation! Although this may be the reason why those who are dedicated to preaching the Gospel may feel like mountain-climbers whose fingers probe for cracks in a solid rock surface; Jesus continues to tell all of us that the harvest is ready. And it is! Ends