Third Sunday of Lent – 8 March 2026

Welcome to St Mary’s parishioners and our visitors to the Cathedral, here in Hobart.

As I wrote in the Catholic Standard, the Gospels over these Sunday’s point us towards the Easter Vigil and the journey of the Catechumens towards their baptism. Today we have the Gospel about water, next week the one about light, and the following Sunday will be about Jesus the Life of the World.

Our opening hymn this morning began with a powerful line: “Praise the One who breaks the darkness.”

Perhaps we feel the darkness very keenly at the moment. This week many people looked up into the night sky and saw the extraordinary sight of a blood moon, the moon darkened and glowing red was seen in the heavens. At the same time, the news is filled with worrying reports as war in the Middle East intensifies, with its consequences of destruction, displacement, and death. For many people, the world can feel uncertain, tense, even fearful.

Yet the Word of God we heard speaks quietly but powerfully into this time.

At the centre of the first reading and the Gospel is a very simple human experience: thirst.

In the first reading from the book of Exodus, the people of Israel are in the desert. They are exhausted, frightened and thirsty. Their desperation leads them to complain: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” They are not only thirsty for water—they are thirsty for reassurance, for hope, and for the sense that God has not abandoned them.

In response God instructs Moses to strike the rock, and from that dry stone water flows. Life where there seemed to be none.

The Gospel presents us with another moment of thirst.

Jesus sits at Jacob’s well in the heat of the day and says to a Samaritan woman, “Give me a drink.”

At first it seems like an ordinary conversation about water. But as the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that Jesus is speaking about a much deeper thirst—the thirst that exists in every human heart.

Into this dryness, Jesus says something astonishing:

“Whoever drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again; the water that I shall give will become a spring inside, welling up to eternal life.”

The woman who came to the well carrying her jar was also carrying the weight of her life—her broken relationships, her disappointments, her loneliness. Jesus sees all of this, and he does not condemn her. Instead, he offers her living water.

That is the good news of this morning’s Gospel: Jesus meets her exactly where she is.

This same truth St Paul proclaims at the end of the second reading:

“Christ died for us while we were still sinners.”

God does not wait until we have our lives perfectly in order.
He meets us in the middle of our thirst.

The Samaritan woman discovers this so powerfully that she leaves her water jar behind. The jar that once seemed essential is forgotten, because she has found something greater.

She runs back to the town and says: “Come and see a man who has told me everything I have done.”

And because of her witness, many people come to believe.

Lent is a time when the catechumens respond to a simple but searching question:

What am I truly thirsting for?

We often try to satisfy our thirst with many things—success, possessions, distractions, endless activity—yet they never quite satisfy the heart.

Only Christ can do that.

That is why the Responsorial Psalm today says so clearly:

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

Fr Tony Dean, a Vincentian priest, who taught Old Testament scripture at Catholic Theological College in Melbourne used to say that the most important word is “today”.  

Not yesterday. Not someday in the future. But today.

Today God speaks. Today Christ sits beside the well of our lives. Today he offers living water.

Even in a troubled world.

When we see the red glow of the moon in the night sky, when we hear of war and suffering in the lands where our faith was born, we might feel anxious or uncertain. Yet the Gospel reminds us that God continues to work quietly in the hearts of people everywhere.

In a few moments we will sing the words of the offertory hymn: “I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Come unto me and rest’.” That is exactly what happens at the altar. Christ invites us to come with our weariness, our thirst, our worries about the world, and to receive from him the grace that revives the soul.

And when we receive that living water, something beautiful happens. Like the Samaritan woman, we become witnesses.

Our faith becomes something that others can see—in kindness, in compassion, in hope, in the quiet courage to believe that God is still at work in our world.

And so, friends, this Lent come again to the well.

Bring your thirst—your doubts, your fears, your longing for peace.

For Jesus who meets us there is the One we praised in our opening hymn—the One who breaks the darkness.

When we drink of the living water that he gives, our hearts too become springs of hope for the world.

Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
8 March 2026