Fons Amoris (Fount of Love): Homily for the Third Sunday in Lent

Lord, you are truly the Savior of the world;
give me living water, that I may never thirst again.

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; these words of the Gospel acclamation are the prayer that should be on our lips when confronted with the admonition in the responsorial psalm on this third Sunday of Lent:

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

My dear brothers and sisters, the purpose of the fasts and abstinences of Lent are so that we can unite our hearts of stone, with the tender heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who united his nature with our hearts of stone, so that we may receive this living water that he pours out for us unceasingly.

But what is this living water? To appreciate this, we are going to need to digress a little.

Every priest is obliged to say the prayer “Cleanse my heart and my lips, O God, that I might worthily proclaim your holy Gospel” before proclaiming the Gospel. In the context of today’s lectionary, I reflected that the same prayer may also usefully formulated as “Pierce my heart and my lips O God, that I might worthily proclaim your holy Gospel.”

In this context think of Moses saying to God: “I am of uncircumcised lips” (Exodus 6:12, 30) and the Prophet Isaiah’s similar complaint that he is a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips (Is 6:5), and God’s constant plea that we circumcise our hearts (Deu 10:16; Jer 4:4 ; Rom 2: 29). To circumcise, as you well know, is to trim away flesh with the circumcising blade. In other words, it involves piercing the flesh.

With this context we are better equipped to appreciate this reference in psalm 105(41) to the living water that pours from the heart of Our Lord

He pierced the rock to give them water;

it gushed forth in the desert like a river.

Christ had a body like ours, and it is a fact of nature that when life leaves our bodies, the body becomes hard, like rock. It stands to reason, therefore, that the heart of Our Lord, the same heart that you and I share, would have been hard as rock when the centurion Longinos, pierced His side with the lance, and thrust the spear so deep that it pierced this now rock like heart and blood and water flowed out (Jn 19: 34).

It is this piercing of our heart and our lips that we attempt through our Lenten sacrifices and penitence; so that we may be vulnerable, like Our Lord who allowed his side to be pierced.  Just like Him, through the weariness of fasting we seek to offer our sides so that our hearts may be pierced and in this way be properly circumcised.

We are now in a position, dear brothers and sisters, to ask the question, what is this living water that Our Lord offers us?

St. Caesarius of Arles (470 – 543) points out that:

If he had not been struck, so that water and blood flowed from his side, the whole world would have perished through suffering thirst for the word of God.

This is the thirst that Our Lord promises to extinguish when He speaks with the Samaritan woman:

              whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; 
the water I shall give will become in him
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Once the word of God is in our hearts, it begins its work of circumcision, for as St. Paul teaches us in his letter to the Hebrews (4:12):

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

But this river, that pours out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, does more than just circumcise our hearts. In the epistle this Sunday, St. Paul teaches that:

the love of God has been poured out into our hearts 
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

It was love that poured out of the heart of Our Lord, His love for us, and this river of love, continues to course and flow over all the earth, as it did at the start of creation (Gen 2: 6), through the Holy Spirit that washes over us at baptism.

This Lent, through our fasts and abstinence, through our prayers animated by these fasts, let us draw close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was pierced for love of us, so that we may never thirst for love again, and instead be springs of living giving water to others!

Lord, you are truly the Savior of the world;
give me living water, that I may never thirst again.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful on 7 March 2025 at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa.)

(Image reference: The Entombment, Peter Paul Rubens, ca. 1612, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.)