HOMILY FOR MASS FOR THE 3RD SUNDAY IN LENT YEAR A + OPENING OF THE CATHOLIC INSTITUTE OF SYDNEY ACADEMIC YEAR
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 8 MARCH 2026
It’s the most ordinary of errands. A woman from a hot dusty town makes her way to the well, jar in hand, to draw water. The kind of thing that happens every day and is forgotten by evening. Yet this time it will change her life forever.
All around the world, hundreds of thousands of adult catechumens are getting ready for Baptism on Easter night. They long for their re-birth on the night that Jesus is born again from the dead. They yearn to join Him at the wellspring of eternal life, the baptismal font. As for the Samaritan woman, this encounter with Christ at the well will change them for ever. But what about us already-Catholics, who received from that spring perhaps decades ago?
St Augustine famously wrote in his Confessions that God made us for Himself and that our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.[1] After detailing his long journey to faith, he then wrote:
Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever-ancient, ever-new, too late have I loved You! You were there inside me, but I was looking outside… I fell upon the beautiful things You had made, without discerning their Maker. You were with me, but I was not with You… You called, You shouted, and finally You broke through my deafness. You flashed, You blazed, until You banished my blindness. You lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for You. I tasted You, and now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.[2]
With masterful rhetoric, Augustine spotlights our common craving for more and better and beyond. In our Gospel today (Jn 4:5-42), physical thirst brings the woman to the well. Yet there is a deeper thirst in her that water cannot quench. Like all of us, she comes with needs and wants, joys and sorrows, hopes and anxieties, with thirsts only Jesus can quench.
It’s risky business, meeting with Jesus. For the woman, because it will turn her life upside down. But for Jesus also, since this meeting in broad daylight with a stranger was bound to cause a scandal. As John notes, Jews did not associate with Samaritans at the best of times; this woman was not just a foreigner but an unaccompanied one; she was not just an unaccompanied foreigner, but one who’d had five ‘husbands’ and was living with a sixth. Though Jesus’ disciples are long accustomed to Him scandalising people by keeping bad company,[3] they are shocked that He’d be associating with her. But Jesus thinks it’s worth the risk.
Surprisingly, perhaps, He begins not by asking about her needs but by telling her His. Some might say that’s typical of men! But it’s hardly typical of Jesus. He begins with “Give me a drink.” Sounds simple. But we can’t help thinking of the only other time the Gospels record Him being thirsty: as He hung upon the Cross (Jn 19:28). And for this woman Jesus’ command is the first of many demands Faith will make of her.
Jesus’ thirst tells us something about God. Strictly speaking, God has no needs, no wants: He is immutable, impassible, all-perfect. Yet He also longs for communion with us. St Catherine of Siena described Him as pazzo d’amore, mad or drunk with love for us: first, with the very idea of us, even before creation; then, with the reality of us, after He made us, and despite all our failings.[4] The whole of salvation history is thus a love story told by the Father, a love song sung as the Son, one that calls us into being, sustains us in being, renews us in being.
But salvation is also the story of our response to God’s risky, crazy love. Just as the God-man journeyed to Sychar in Samaria to offer the waters of eternal life to a woman, so too He comes to us, again and again, asking that we recognise our thirst and let Him quench it.
Like the Samaritan woman, like Augustine, we may not always recognise him straight away. She’s hesitant at first, and we can be just as tentative. But like a skilled professor, the Lord draws His student beyond easy assumptions toward deeper understanding. Jesus gently teases and teaches her, pressing her to interrogate not only Him, but herself. The dialogue generates understanding. We notice her names for Him gradually change: from ‘Stranger’ and ‘Jew’, to ‘Sir’ and then ‘Prophet’. Next she calls Him ‘Maybe-Christ’ and finally ‘World-Saviour’. Jesus’ revelation is gradual, bit by bit, giving us enough to drink for now. He gently leads her from doubt, through wonder, to conviction. This is the heart of conversion.
Do we want to make converts, like Jesus did, like the Samaritan woman did, like Augustine did? Even Christ’s gentle prodding in our story would be too intrusive by today’s standards, too evangelical for our relativist world, too public for an age of privatised faith. Why would He want to change her? Why disabuse her of Samaritan misconceptions about salvation and worship? Why challenge her morally for shacking up with so many men? Why reveal Himself, to her of all people as “Messiah, Christ, Yahweh, I-am, speaking to you!”
Why does Jesus bring her step by step to faith? Because He loves her, madly, as He has from all eternity, as He loved her into being and becoming. And He wants eternal life for her, communion with Him in heaven.
She puts down her water jar and hurries back to the town to tell the people, “This man knew everything about me. I think he might be the Christ.” Faith is like that. Whatever the pressures of our culture, real faith cannot be privatised or stored up like grain. This first Christian missionary shares her newfound faith with her own people. She is the prototype for a new missionary Church that will be sent out to speak to every time and place. And “many Samaritans of that town came to believe in him on the strength of the woman’s testimony.”
Then the cycle begins afresh. Many of those who first believed on her account, then encountered Jesus for themselves, and so came to join her in professing that “He is truly the Saviour of the world.” But first they needed a preacher-teacher. Most of us first heard about Jesus through our families, schools, parishes, chaplaincies, Bibles. We were drawn into intimacy with Him in the Church, especially in the Eucharist. Now it is our task to deepen that faith and share it with others.
Meeting, inquiry, dialogue, conversion: the fourfold pattern of the Samaritan woman’s encounter is the mission, also, of every Catholic institution of learning. Today we mark the beginning of the 2026 Academic Year for the Catholic Institute of Sydney, the archdiocese’s own theological institute. Its core task is precisely to enable men and women to meet Christ in study and prayer; to inquire fearlessly and deeply into the mystery of God; to sustain the dialogue of faith and reason; and to foster the conversion of mind and heart that sends us out to the world to share the Good News. May this new academic year be, for all our students, staff and faculty, a fresh draught from that inexhaustible well that is Christ Jesus! God bless the Catholic Institute of Sydney!
[1] Augustine, Confessions, Book I, ch.1.
[2] Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 27.
[3] E.g. Mt 9:10-13; 11:19; Mk 2:15-17; Lk 5:29-39; 7:34; 15:1-2,11-32; 19:1-10; Jn 8:1-11; cf. Jn 3:17; Rom 5:8.
[4] Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue of Divine Providence, chap. 30. Trans. Suzanne Noffke, OP (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 64.
INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR THE 3RD SUNDAY IN LENT YEAR A +
OPENING OF THE CATHOLIC INSTITUTE OF SYDNEY ACADEMIC YEAR
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 8 MARCH 2026
Welcome to St Mary’s Cathedral for our Solemn Mass of the Third Sunday of Lent.
Since last we gathered the number of countries directly involved in the conflict between Iran, the United States and Israel has risen to fourteen and the death toll keeps rising. We pray for peace in the Holy Land of our Saviour and the neighbouring lands, for the safety of the innocent, and for an end to war and terrorism.
Today we mark the beginning of the 2026 Academic Year for the Catholic Institute of Sydney. I acknowledge concelebrating with me: Bishop Tony Percy, Deputy Chancellor of the Institute; Bishop Danny Meagher; and several other priest members of the faculty of the Institute.
I salute the President of the Institute, Professor Hayden Ramsay; Deputy President Professor Rohan Curnow; along with members of the Senate of the Institute, its faculty members, staff and students.
From the Seminary of the Good Shepherd, I recognise the Rector, Fr Michael De Stoop, Acting Vice Rector Fr Danielle Russo, the faculty and seminarians. From the Redemptoris Mater Seminary I salute: Vice Rector Fr Marlon Henao Perez, along with faculty and seminarians. And from Vianney College in Wagga Wagga: the Rector Fr Bradley Rafter, and Dean of Studies Dr Matthew Tan.
I greet from the Institute’s partner institution, the University of Notre Dame Australia, the Vice Chancellor Professor Francis Campbell; from the Australian Catholic University, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Fr Gerry Gleeson; along with several professors from both institutions.
As we continue our Lenten journey with Christ to His cross and tomb, we ask Him to raise us out of the tombs of our sins to new life with Him.
