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Reflections on the Third Sunday of Lent

By Donna Brett

The readings for
this Sunday:

Exodus 17:3-7

Romans 5:1-2,5-8

John 4:5-42

Our twenty-five-year-old daughter came for a visit last weekend. She's been an animal lover since infancy and likes to relax watching dog shows on "Animal Planet". After that program was over, she became upset and called me in to watch as numerous dogs found in a man's house were displayed on the screen in various conditions of maltreatment. I had to leave the room; I told her I just couldn't deal with the sight of animal abuse in addition to being bombarded on a daily basis with incontrovertible evidence on all the "Human Planet" television stations of the suffering we inflict on our own species because of our fear, hatred, apathy, and greed.

In our day and age, we are instantaneously made aware of human suffering the world over and the magnitude of it causes us to grow impatient with our God who seems to "allow" this. We thirst in a driven way for justice. We want a latter-day Moses to rescue us immediately from our anger and frustration by finding and striking that rock in the desert that will gush forth with water to quell our thirst. We sometimes let the tragedies of war, hunger, sickness, and economic and racial injustice overwhelm us. But we can be overcome by inertia if we dwell on the world's sorrows and we will certainly become even more frustrated if we wait for a wise and compassionate leader to rise up from amongst us to lead us to the Promised Land where justice reigns.

Does the story of the Samaritan woman give us a hint as to how Jesus coped with the injustices of his day? For one thing, simply by engaging her in conversation at the well, he did not succumb to the prejudices of his ethnic and religious group against the "other"; that she was not only a woman, but a Samaritan of questionable reputation and religious belief, was irrelevant to him. When the itinerant prophet showed an interest in her welfare despite their differences, it sparked her inner spirit and gave her the insight to recognize God's loving presence face to face. This could have been viewed as a very minor victory indeed: one woman's conversion, affecting the populace of one small village in a tiny, inauspicious province. But Jesus chose to see it as much more. Instead, it was something that gave him such immediate pleasure that he no longer felt the hunger he had felt when he first stopped at the well. And he felt his spirit so uplifted that he felt compelled to offer his disciples some encouraging words: "Well, I tell you, look around you, look at the fields; already they are white, ready for the harvest.... Already the reaper is bringing in the grain for eternal life, and thus sower and reaper rejoice together."

There are many who have sown the seeds of justice before us. Some of those seeds have already been harvested and some seem to lay dormant, but one day all the seeds of justice ever sown will produce a fine harvest and sower and reaper will rejoice together. In the meantime, perhaps through a single conversation with one person who is not quite respected in the circles of our society, who then shares that good news with her family and her neighborhood, we too are sowing our seeds on a daily basis. From that we should derive some joy.