Fr. JC Maximilian

[Henryk Siemiradzki. “Christ and the Samaritan Woman.” 1890. Oil on canvas. The Lvov Picture Gallery, Lvov, Ukraine.  Found on the web at www.abcgallery.com.]

Have you ever grumbled because you were thirsty?  It was probably on a hot summer day, when you were outside working hard on something — maybe cutting the grass, doing some gardening, maybe painting the house — but you became so thirsty that you grumbled at someone to get you something to drink.  I think that all of us can remember a time when we were so thirsty that we grumbled.

There are a lot of thirsty people in today’s readings.  In today’s first reading, from the Book of Exodus, we are told that the Israelites, soon after being set free from slavery in Egypt, started to grumble against God and Moses because they were thirsty.  They started to ask themselves if the Lord was in their midst.  Then in today’s Gospel we hear Jesus tell the Samaritan woman that He was thirsty.  Our Lord did not grumble at her, but He did ask her for a drink.  So why all this talking about being thirsty?

Through our readings today God is trying to help us understand the difference between two different kinds of thirsts; two different kinds of needs.

The first kind of need is what we can call a finite or horizontal need.  These are the needs that we all have for the good things of this earth:  food, drink, companionship, safety, fun, a good income, medical care, success at work or school, etc.  These needs are all part of our nature as human beings, and there is nothing inherently wrong with desiring them.  These are needs that we can usually fulfill through our own effort.  We are hungry so we get ourselves something to eat, and then we are satisfied; at least for awhile.  We are thirsty so we get something to drink.  As long as to do not go to extremes, and we use proper means for satisfying these needs there is nothing wrong with having them.

However we also have another kind of need; ones that are deeper, infinite or vertical.  These needs are part of our desire for meaning and purpose.  These would include our need for love, truth, beauty, justice, and integrity.  These needs are also built into our nature as human beings, but unlike our finite or horizontal needs, there is nothing that we can do to satisfy these needs by our own effort.  Only God Himself can satisfy these needs, because only God is infinite Love, infinite Beauty, infinite Truth, infinite Justice, and perfectly One.  These are the needs that we can never get too much of; the more we experience them, the more we desire them.  God created us with these infinite, vertical needs in the very core of our being so that we would be constantly drawn toward Him, towards intimate, personal contact with His eternal, transcendent and infinite Love.

It is because of these needs that we are always restless, even when we have satisfied all of our horizontal needs.  It is when we forget this, when we try to satisfy our infinite, vertical needs with horizontal stuff that we put ourselves on the road to disappointment, frustration and even tragedy.

The Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel is an illustration of a person who has made the mistake of confusing these two kinds of needs.  Jesus notes that she has had five husbands and that she was not married to the man she was currently living with.  She was coming to the well in the middle of the day in order to avoid the other women of the village, so she had become isolated from her community.  Jesus, in His thirst — not only for water but for healing wounded souls — saw that this woman was living a life of frustration and alienation.  A life of loneliness and inner turmoil.  She had been trying for years to satisfy her vertical needs, which only God can satisfy, with all kinds of horizontal stuff:  human love, comfort, earthly pleasures.  She had started to learn the hard way that that formula does not work.  She started to have the spiritual awakening to realize that she needed a Savior, a “gift of God.”

Then she had an encounter with a man sitting by the well.  She had an encounter with Jesus, and she came to recognize in Jesus the embodiment of that which could fulfill all the deepest desires of her heart; all of her infinite, vertical needs.  While she did not get all the answers, she recognized Jesus did have all the answers, that He was the Christ, the gift of God.  He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that if she truly wanted to take seriously the deepest desires of her heart then she needed to follow Him.  And she did not keep this treasure, this gift, to herself.  No, she went to all the people that she typically tried to avoid, and shared with them the Good News that she had encountered in Jesus, and she brought them to Him.

What can we learn from the Samaritan woman?  Maybe that we too have been trying to satisfy our vertical needs with horizontal stuff, and that doing so will only leave us feeling disappointed and frustrated.  Maybe we can learn from her to have the spiritual sensitivity to recognize the gift of God, to answer the question the Israelites asked in today’s first reading, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”, with a definitive YES!

As we approach the Altar of the Lord, let us be people who worship what we understand in Spirit and truth.  Let us encounter Jesus, the great Gift of God, who is thirsting to heal our wounded souls.  Then, like the Samaritan woman, let us testify to all those around us — even those we typically avoid — that Jesus Christ is “truly the savior of the would.”

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[Temptation of Christ, 1854, by Ary Scheffer]

In today’s first reading we encounter that familiar first scene in the long, complex drama of human history.  Even though they are not named, we know it is the story of Adam and Eve, our First Parents, who were created in the image and likeness of God, filled with the breath of God’s own Spirit so to live as children of God.  They were crowned with glory, and given dominion over the world.  They were made to worship God; that is, to live not by bread alone but in obedience to every word that comes from the mouth of God.  However, they decided to put the Lord to the test, by trying to seize for themselves all that God had already promised to give them.  Why?  Because they chose to believe the lie of Satan, that they could be “like gods who know what is good and what is evil.”  We call this first scene “Original Sin.”

The final scene in this drama of human history will be Christ’s Second Coming and the Last Judgment.  Everything in between is connected to both Original Sin and to the Last Judgment.

However, today’s world has largely forgotten about these two pivotal milestones in human history.  We think that we have made so much progress in science and technology, and this leads to the temptation to think that we are totally self-sufficient.  We are tempted to think that we are not affected by the consequences of original sin, and that we will not be judged by a higher power — namely God — after we die.

The temptation to think like that is just another version of Satan’s original lie to our First Parents in the Garden.  Satan has convinced us that since we have learned to dominate our physical and material world, that we have no need for God, because we have become gods ourselves.  It is the same lie that tricked Adam and Eve.

As we begin the holy season of Lent, the Church is exposing this ancient lie.  The Church calls us to pay special attention to our sins and sinful tendencies, precisely because we do not want to forget the bigger story that gives real meaning to our lives by reminding us that we are not self-sufficient.  In fact, it is only by acknowledging our dependency on God that we are truly free and fully human.

Since Original Sin is one of the most important chapters in the drama of human history, and one of the most misunderstood, let us take a few minutes to recall what this most important of doctrines is all about.  There are three things to keep in mind about Original Sin: the Fact, the Cause, and the Effect.

The fact is that Original Sin happened.  It is part of God’s revelation.  In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, this fact is clearly stated:  “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place in the beginning of the history of man.  Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC #390).

As fallen human being we are constantly tempted to blame evil on abstract social structures, or to chalk up sin to psychological traumas.  In other words, we are tempted to deny, ignore, or belittle the real source of evil in the world:  Original Sin and its effects.  If we give in to those temptations we will end up closing ourselves off from God.  We will lose touch with reality.  If our sinful behaviors are only due to poor upbringing and psychological trauma then we do not need a savior to bring us forgiveness, we just need psychotherapy.  If all the evils in the world stem from inept politicians and faulty economic systems then we do not need God’s grace to change our hearts.

The second key doctrine about Original Sin has to do with what actually happened.  In other words, what was the cause of Original Sin.  The Church points out that the account from the Book of Genesis that we heard in our first reading is told in figurative language; not historical or scientific language.  This means that the Scriptural account expresses the truth about WHAT happened, but not necessarily the exact details of HOW it happened.  While we can speculate about the HOW, we can never speculate about the WHAT.

Adam and Eve were created by God as morally free beings.  God created them in His image and likeness, which meant that they were capable of living in friendship with Him, of knowing Him, and loving Him.  However, friendship with God is unique because God is God and we are dependent on Him.  To live in friendship with God, who is the only source of our true happiness, we must admit and accept the fact that we are dependent.  The Catechism puts it this way, “The ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust.  Man is dependent on his Creator and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom” (CCC #396).

Adam and Eve uprooted themselves from the soil of God’s friendship because they resented the fact that they were not equal to God, and this is the essence of Original Sin.  Again, from the Catechism, “Man let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command.  This is what man’s first sin consisted of.  All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness” (CCC #397).

So now we know that Original Sin happened, it is a fact, and that it consisted of our First Parents rebelling against their dependence on God.  The third key point about Original Sin is that it affected not only Adam and Eve, but the whole human race.

As God is a communion of Three Divine Persons, He created us as a communion, the communion of family.  So when our First Parents rebelled against God, the whole family suffered the consequences.  Adam and Eve’s hiding in the garden symbolizes the alienation that they felt from God; an alienation that has been passed on to us.  The fig leaves that they wore symbolizes the tendency to be selfish that we all have.  Eve’s pain in childbirth and Adam’s toil and sweat to earn a living symbolizes that there is now an adversity of the forces of nature.  Lastly, “By our first parents’ sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free” (CCC #407).  Original Sin was not only the origin of sin, but of the whole battle between good and evil that marks the history of every human life and community.  We all now have two tendencies built into us; the tendency towards goodness, which is that part of our nature that God created us with, and the tendency towards selfishness, which is that part of our nature that is fallen.  We only need to read the daily newspaper to see the effects that the battle between these two tendencies in the human heart has on the world.

This reflection on the nature of Original Sin can seem very discouraging at first glance:  that life is a battle that we cannot escape and will not end until we die.  However, Original Sin is only the beginning of the story.

God did not abandon us.  He had every right to, but He didn’t.  Just as God searched out Adam and Eve when they were hiding in the garden, God searches for us too.  And most importantly He has sent us a Savior:  Jesus Christ.

Unlike the first Adam, Jesus, the new Adam, never disobeyed God the Father.  Jesus never allowed His trust in His Father to die.  That is the lesson from today’s Gospel.  Despite the dire temptations in the desert, Jesus stayed faithful to His Father by being dependent on Him.  Jesus’ battle with Satan did not end after those forty days in the desert.  Satan continued to tempt Him right up to His death on the Cross.  Jesus defeated the devil, repairing the rift torn open by Original Sin, not by becoming all-powerfully self-sufficient but by being faithfully dependent on the Father.

Christ gives us food for the journey, the Eucharist, to strengthen us for the battle.  He has promised to walk with us, leading us every step of the way.  Lent is a time to renew our commitment to follow Christ.  Trust and depend on Him!

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Ash Wednesday has to be the most messy day of the liturgical year, and the ashes that we receive on our foreheads are the least of the mess.

The real mess are with the people.  The secretaries and priests go crazy with all the phone calls wanting to know when people can get their ashes.  The past couple of years I have even gotten calls from Robert Wood Johnson Health & Fitness center wanting me to go over there to distribute ashes to the people getting a workout during their lunch break.  We even have people wanting to know if they could get their ashes early; say on Monday or Tuesday.  There are so many people wanting ashes that the phones ring off the hook.

It seems as if more people come to church on Ash Wednesday, which is NOT a holy day of obligation, than on Christmas and Easter the two most important holy days of obligation.  As a priest I often wonder why so many people feel such a strong need to receive ashes.  There are so many unfamiliar faces on Ash Wednesday, so many who come for ashes but do not even stay for the reception of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Are they all here for the right reason?  How long has it been since some of them have been to Mass or Confession?  Are they faithful to the Church’s teaching?  Are they in a state of grace or a state of sin?

Whether people understand the real meaning of Ash Wednesday or not, it seems that all of us acknowledge at the most gut level the fact that we belong in church on Ash Wednesday.  I pray that part of the reason for this gut reaction is that deep down, we all know that we are sinners in need of forgiveness.  We all know that there are times, too many in fact, when we are selfish, impatient, angry, hateful, and just not nice to the people around us.  Deep down we know that we are too often ungrateful to God for all the blessings that He has given us in our lives.  We know that we are not able to live the good life on our own, and we so often fail to do the good that we want to do and do the evil we do not want to do.

Hopefully this awareness that we are all sinners also brings us to a more important awareness; that through the grace of our baptism we have all been made members of the one body of Christ.  Our baptism, which can never be “undone” no matter how much we sin, links each of us inextricably to Christ and to one another for ever.  “The ashes on our foreheads are a reminder to ourselves and a proclamation to the world that somehow, we belong to Another.  Our lives are not our own but are bound up with a greater Reality.  Some are more actively aware than others that this Reality has a name:  Jesus Christ” (Fr. Rich Veras, “The Experience of Being a People,” Magnificat, February 2008, Vol. 9, No. 13, p. 89).

Most of us do not like messes.  Messy people often make us annoyed, yet as followers of Jesus we need to recognize that Jesus was followed by a crowd of messy people.  They didn’t all come to Him for the right reasons.  Many of them were not faithful to Jesus, especially when the going got tough.  Yet all of them were welcomed by Jesus, who looked upon the mess of women and men, and loved them.

And on this Ash Wednesday Jesus looks on us — very messy people — with that same love and acceptance.  As a people of God let us enter into the holy season of Lent by acknowledging the mess of our lives so that the mercy of Christ can renew us as His Holy People.

[I really need to give Fr. Richard Veras, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, most of the credit for this homily.  Monday night, as I was working on my homily for Ash Wednesday, I got a phone call from one of my sisters concerning a serious crisis with her daughter.  The rest of the night was tied up with my family.  Fr. Veras and I know each other through our involvement with Communion and Liberation, so when I saw he had an article in this month’s Magnificat I read it.  I thought he had a wonderful reflection for Ash Wednesday on the messiness of our lives.  Given the mess in my family, it really struck home for me, so I took that theme and basically said what he said, but in more of my own words.] 

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