Year A

Jan 24 2025

The Tender Voice of Jesus

Around the corner from my office at Notre Dame is a statue by sculptor Ivan Mestrovic of the encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well. The Lord is looking straight at the woman. The woman is clinging to a large jar and looking down. It is midday. What did this woman expect when she woke up that day? Another dry and empty day as the pariah of the town? In Mosaic law, it is the husband who divorces the wife, so she has already been cast off five times. And her current live-in has not married her. Yet here is a bone-weary male Jewish stranger, asking her for a drink. Asking her for a drink. Apparently from her bucket. No wonder she is looking down.

This statue campus freezes time right there. But in the Gospel, we hear Jesus tenderly poke and prod and speak to her until she opens up and lifts her head. He holds out to her an abundance of the water of life, greater than she has ever imagined. And she takes it.

She drops her bucket (to which she clings so tightly in the statue) and runs to tell the news about the stranger. When she comes back, she doesn’t bring a bucket; she brings a whole village!

In art, we look at spaces, not just objects. What most impresses me about Mestrovic’s statue is the tenderness in the space between the two characters. Some of us are preachers, some are teachers. Whatever our ministry in life, when we seek to help people come to God, it is that tone of tenderness that crosses divides. More important than words, come into the space with gentleness. Living water will flow.

Consider/Discuss

Jesus also entrusts his thirst to us. We encounter him in order to be filled. Yet he has no bucket but ours. What is our role in fulfilling Jesus’ mission to the thirsty world in which we live?
Read through the Gospel again, this time imagining great tenderness in the voice of Jesus. How do you hear the passage differently?

Living and Praying with the Word

Like the woman at the well and the Israelites in the desert, Lord, sometimes we wonder if you—or anyone—cares. Yet you continue to tenderly poke and prod and speak to us. Help us to raise our eyes and see you looking at us with love. As we continue on through this Lent, bring us to repentance and to glory, but also deepen our tenderness in our mission to bring living water to those who thirst for you.

Jan 24 2025

Scripture Study for

After their deliverance from Egypt, the work of forming Israel into God’s people continues. Although they have seen God’s power to save, they have not experienced God’s ability to provide. Until they come to trust that their God is capable of meeting all of their needs, they will not be able to be faithful to the covenant relationship. The cry for water, revealing doubts that God is “in their midst,” is thus a “test” of God’s trustworthiness. God’s quick provision is intended not only to provide life-giving water, but also to inspire trust in the God with whom they will shortly enter into covenant relationship.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains that, whereas sin alienates us from God, faith in Christ brings about peace with God. More than this, Christ makes it possible to share in the divine life, which gives hope of future glory. This hope is firm because the believer already experiences the “love of God,” which can mean God’s love for the believer, the believer’s love of God, or both. In the first case, the Spirit and the life of grace are from God, a gift of love and a firm promise for the future. In the second case, the believer is able to love God through the transforming power of grace.

Today’s Johannine reading dramatizes a central theme found in the Prologue. Just as the Word was in the world but the world did not know or accept him (1:10–11), so at first the woman resists Jesus, “knowing” only that he is a Jew, estranged from Samaritans. But Jesus persists, declaring that if she really knew who he was she would have asked for “living water” from him, a metaphor for divine life and grace (“to those who did accept him, he gave power to become children of God” [1:12]). Eventually the woman comes to believe that he might “possibly be the Christ.” As a result of her testimony, others encounter Jesus and come to “know that he is truly the savior of the world.”

Jan 21 2025

Mary Watches Over Jesus as the Lord Watches Over Us

I have an elderly friend who took a hard fall. Now, nurses and family hover over her continually, watching for a brain bleed and signs of confusion. What will her future hold?

I have a grandson who was recently born. His mother and father look at him continually, beholding his tiny hands and feet and admiring his shock of hair. What will this child be?

In our reading, there is a lot of clamor surrounding the shepherds. “They went with speed” and “they told everyone” and “all who heard it were astonished”—it sounds like a lot of noise, doesn’t it? Like the steady stream of visitors to the hospital, they ask, “What does the future hold?”

In the middle of the shepherds’ commotion are these few words about Mary: “She [treasured] all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” She is the quiet anchor in the center of the tumult. She feeds the baby. She rocks him. He is near to her. In the midst of the chaos, she gives a maternal gaze of blessing upon that infant child. Like the Virgin of Guadalupe, she wraps her mantle around him. And all of these experiences remain in her memory.

This same gaze of blessing is found in the blessing of Aaron in the book of Numbers. Watch over, keep, hover, safeguard—these are all images of protectiveness and care. We too are watched over. It is a blessed hovering, a nearness that we should not fear: The Lord bless you and keep you, watch over you; The Lord let his face to shine upon you. Life can sometimes worry us. But no matter what the future holds, a gaze of love enfolds us. We know Who holds our future.

Consider/Discuss

Put yourself into the Gospel story as a townsperson or a friend of one of the shepherds. How would you respond when he tells you this remarkable story of angels and a baby in the manger?
When a pregnant woman sits down with a group of older mothers, they suddenly and naturally start swapping birth stories. To whom do you think that Mary might have later told Jesus’ birth stories? What stories did your mother tell about your birth?

Living and Praying with the Word

Hover over us, Spirit of God. We want to be independent. We want to believe that we can succeed in life all by ourselves. Yet when we were children, we needed a mother’s care. Today, we need your care, too. We cry out from our hearts, “Abba, Father!” You are the source of our elation. Stir us to taste more deeply the sweetness of your love.

Jan 16 2025

Dividing Day

Every so often when I am driving, I see that old bumper sticker calling us to commit random acts of kindness. Good advice in light of the story of the Last Judgment. Did you notice that the story makes no mention of many of the sins we usually worry about as the basis for the Last Judgment? This is not to say such things don’t matter. But the emphasis here has to do with getting out there and responding to people really in need, basic needs relating to hunger, thirst, being a stranger—an unwelcome immigrant? (that one is certainly ripped from today’s headlines!)— lacking clothes, needing health care (another relevant one), and being imprisoned.

While it is always interesting to watch other people being judged, it is not something most of us enjoy experiencing ourselves—especially when it comes to evaluating our moral lives. It is much easier to think of Jesus as the forgiving, compassionate, tender shepherd who is out there looking for us than as the one who comes in glory to judge and separate out the goats and the lambs. Who wants to be counted among the goats?

So, pick your area that will help you to be counted among the sheep. Food distribution, environmental concerns, immigration reform, clothing—include here those nets that can save lives threatened by various issues surrounding health care, or prison reform. Perhaps you thought this was one of those quaint stories Jesus tells that seem so long ago and far away. The last we hear from the Gospel of Matthew for this year invites your participation—now. The reason? When you do something for them, you do it for him.

Consider/Discuss

Have you had any experiences of being judged that proved helpful?
Can you bring together images of Jesus as both shepherd and judge?
Can you hear in today’s Gospel an invitation to a fuller life?

Responding to the Word

We pray with confidence to the Father to whom all things will be handed over by Christ, the new Adam, through whom we have become children of the king dom. We ask the Spirit to teach us to recognize the freedom that comes from sub jecting ourselves to God’s rule and serving, as Christ served, those most in need.

Jan 16 2025

Scripture Study for

The image of the good shepherd aptly characterizes God’s concern and personal intervention in the shepherding of the flock. The first reading describes how God fulfills the role of shepherd primarily in two ways: by caring for the sheep and by separating the good from the bad. Those who were responsible for the sheep failed to carry out their responsibilities. They were not attentive to their charges and so the owner of the flock steps in to shepherd the flock personally. The rest of the oracle of salvation confirms this. The final scene is one of judgment, an appropriate theme for the last Sunday of the liturgical year.

Paul brings together several of his most treasured themes: the effectiveness of Christ’s resurrection, human solidarity in Adam and in Christ, the sequence of events surrounding the end of time, the victory of Christ, and the ultimate reign of God. The reading carries us back through time to the primordial period of beginnings, and then forward to the end of time and the eschatological age of fulfillment. Every aspect of these events is grounded in the resurrection of Christ. At the final consummation, God will be all in all. All came from God; all returns to God. At the end, all purposes will be realized. All reality will have come home.

The scene of the Last Judgment as it unfolds before us today is both sobering and surprising. It is a scene of apocalyptic splendor and majesty, a scene of separation of the righteous from the unrighteous, a scene of reward and punishment. The image of the shepherd separating the sheep from goats would have been quite familiar to Jesus’ original audience. What is surprising is the reason given for the judgment. It is not the accomplishment of some phenomenal feat. Rather, people are judged on whether or not they meet the very basic human needs of others. The scene is sobering because one gets the sense that there is no way of escaping it.