On the Mount of Olives, just next to Jerusalem, Our Lord pauses for a moment to encounter us in our ordinary lives, and in our most vulnerable; he encounters us in our weakness and in our sin.  Christ meets a sinful woman, an adultress.  Christ approaches her with a perfect balance of charity and truth.  He’s not put-off or revolted by her.  Neither does he pretend that everything in her life is hunky-dory.  He is neither judgmental nor permissive.  He is forgiving.  He comes to her with a new and radical approach; something besides condemnation on the one hand, or permissiveness on the other, either of which leads to moral and spiritual death.  Instead, he offers her salvation.  

The prophet Isaiah spoke of God making rivers in the wasteland, and water in the desert for his people to drink.  This woman is thirsty; she thirsts for meaning in her life.  She’s tried to satisfy her thirst, probably in mostly self-destructive ways: to this point, her search has just been a series of distractions, which have left her even more thirsty than before.  This happens to all of us: we all thirst for fulfillment and for meaning in our lives.  What we’re really thirsting for is friendship with God.  But we’re diverted from our path constantly by the distractions of the world.   These could be things inside us—envy, pride, anger, lust—or things outside of us, things the world claims will make us happy: things like self-indulgence, power, money, comfort: these things appear to quench our thirst, but in truth are salt-water: they dehydrate us and rob us of our joy and even our very spiritual life.  But at these moments of temptation, Our Lord draws close to us.  He offers us the gift of Grace and forgiveness, as he offered to this woman, giving us the living water of the Holy Spirit so that our lives might be turned to God and freed from sin.  And this is the great mystery of our salvation.  

Even at this very moment, we find ourselves at the fountain of mercy.  Christ is asking us if we will make the choice to drink from the water that will quench our thirst, or whether we will choose instead to continue drinking from the still, bitter, briny water that the world offers. With God’s grace and with growth in virtue, we can desire less and less to drink from false streams of lesser things, and wish more and more to be nourished by Goodness Himself.  The temptation to turn back to our distractions can be strong.  We still feel pulled toward the saltiness of that water, even though we know it does our thirst no good.  And so God offers his help constantly, but especially during this season of Lent.  He wants us to be better men and women, to be transformed by grace, to leave our sins behind as the adulterous woman did.  And he wants us to be better about the weaknesses of others as well.  It’s a strong temptation we have, to condemn, when we see the faults of others.  But that’s not what God wants from us; that’s what the Scribes and Pharisees did.  In the face of a sinner, he wants us neither to condemn nor to disregard, but to love and forgive.  To transform, to justify, to quench.  May God give us the grace in this Lent to drink deeply from the streams of living water for the purification of our minds and hearts, that we may be forgiven, and that we may ready to love and forgive others as well.