March 7, 2021

There were two different sets of readings, and thus two different homilies for this Sunday:

• one for the Mass with the 1st Scrutiny of the Elect,
• and the other (immediately below) for the regular readings for the Third Sunday of Lent.

3rd Sunday of Lent (B)

The Two Sides of Anger

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio                     

Were I to take a survey of this assembly and ask you to give a characteristic of Our Lord, I am sure I would hear descriptions such as: merciful, loving, gentle, healer, compassionate, forgiving, faithful, humble, meek, and generous. Jesus is all of these and more. 

Yet, these descriptions stand in stark contrast to the episode in today’s Gospel. Another side of Jesus is revealed. Here we encounter Jesus who is angry, severe, controversial, and even inflexible. From this dramatic scene I would like to extract a lesson on anger.

Everyone gets angry and everyone can be on the receiving end of anger. Of course, this is true even for Our Lord. One great misconception that we have in the spiritual life. is that we must always have positive emotions, and that we should radiate “positivity” all the time. Somehow, we have come to believe that it is wrong or sinful to be angry. But this is not the full or accurate understanding of anger.

Anger is an emotion that God implanted within us along with the other emotions. In fact, it may sound strange, but anger is designed to be constructive. This is what is called justified anger. It is right and proper that we should be angry at evil: acts of injustice and discrimination, violations to the dignity of human life, abortion, euthanasia, attacks on civil and religious liberties and so on. Anger is allied to our instinct for justice and goodness. This is of course the kind of anger Our Lord exhibited in the Gospel.

Our Lord was angry at the vendors in the Temple who exploited the pilgrims who came to the Temple. He was angry at the desecration of the God’s Holy Dwelling. The Temple had become commercialized, and people had forgotten that it was a place of prayer, the place to encounter God.

The person who cannot feel anger at evil is a person who lacks enthusiasm for good. If you cannot hate wrong, it's very questionable whether you really love what is right and good. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that it is a sin to let evil reign without protest.

There is also the anger that is sinful. This was the type of anger that St. Gregory the Great listed as one of the seven capital sins. It is the anger that Jesus condemns so often in the Gospel. This is anger out of control, the anger that becomes cold, vicious, and vengeful. It can show itself in long, cold, resentful brooding, sometime in red rages, and even physical violence. This is the anger that we must strive to restrain. We need anger management! 

How many of us have carried resentments within our hearts, perhaps even for years? Allow this Lent to be a time when we bring these to the Lord, that we come to resolve them in the presence of God, perhaps even through the Sacrament of Penance. Allow this Lent to be a time to give us a righteous anger…a zeal and enthusiasm for all that is right and just. Allow this Lent to also be a time to restrain the anger that leads to hatred and resentment. We might make this prayer our own:

Almighty Father,
help me feel calm when I become angry.  
When pressure and conflict make me feel surrounded,  
remind me that I am surrounded by your presence.  
When you are with me, I have no need to lash out in anger.  
Please remove my anger towards other people  
and replace it with trust in your care.  
May confidence in your love replace any anger about my circumstances.
When I feel angry due to unmet expectations,  
remind me that satisfaction can be found only in you.  
May your love, grace, and power, be with me always.
Amen.

3rd Sunday of Lent (A), Mass with 1st Scrutiny of the Elect

At the Well, All Is Well

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio         

Those who have their missals, will have noticed that the readings are different. This is because today and the next two Sundays, we shall be conducting a rite called the “Scrutinies” by which the Church leads her Elect, in our case, Gabriele Nieves, toward the Sacraments of Initiation at Easter—Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Eucharist. The readings of these Masses are from the “A Cycle” which focus on water, light, and life which are so allied to these sacraments.

Today’s theme is water. From the book of Exodus, we hear of Moses who strikes the rock from which water flowed to quench the thirst of the people in the desert. St. Paul reminds us that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

Then, in the Gospel, we come to the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. This was a radical encounter in three ways: 1) Jews and Samaritans would have nothing to do with one another. Jews considered Samaritans racially inferior and heretics. 2) a Jewish man would never speak to a woman in public, and 3) the woman was a public sinner, an outcast. She was there for water at noon, a time no one else would be there since people went for water in early morning. She wanted to avoid the people’s scrutiny and gossip. An outcast would never engage in conversation.

At first, she and Jesus speak on different levels. She is focused on the water in the well. Jesus speaks about the living waters of grace. Jesus is saying to her, “The water I can give you is as necessary for you as the water in the well. My water is life giving. This water will bring you true happiness.”

As we see the conversation has its twists and turns and doesn’t go in the direction the Lord intends so Jesus takes a different course to “get” to the woman. He touches on the most painful issue of her life—her irregular marital situation—once with five husbands and now with a man not her husband! (And you thought this only happened in Hollywood!)

This recognition of her pain and turmoil touches her heart and opens her mind to the mystery of God. She comes to believe and is quick to share her discovery with the town’s people. We can only imagine their reaction!

The Church sees in the woman’s encounter with Jesus a message for the Elect: Her encounter at the well was both life giving and life-changing as are the waters of Baptism! What a tremendous gift the Elect will receive at Easter! It is a new life to be lived, a gift to be shared, a faith to be proclaimed.

What message does this encounter hold for those of us who are already baptized? For us, Lent is a time to renew our appreciation of that moment when we received the gift of living water at Baptism.

So often, we can be like that woman at the well in that we can look for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places. We can be tempted to absorb our definitions of happiness from the world, seeking material comforts and physical pleasure. Creature comforts are nice, but they fail to fulfill our deepest human needs, they fail to quench our thirst. As we grow spiritually, we learn that true happiness can’t be tied to the present moment. This was the mistaken notion of Samaritan woman. Our Lord directed her elsewhere and so He does with us.

When we take that divine direction (and Lent can be the vehicle) like the Samaritan women, we too will proclaim Christ, we too will be evangelizers.