First reading: Exodus 17:3-7
Psalm: Ps 95:1-2,6-9
Epistle: Romans 5:1-2,5-8
Gospel: John 4:5-15,19-26,39-42

But the hour is coming, and is now here,
when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth;
and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.

Lord for us Your wounds were suffered.
O, Christ Jesus, have mercy on us!

Grumbling:

Three days after Israel was led out of bondage in Egypt the people began to grumble against Moses, Aaron, and God. This was the beginning of a pattern. Whether it was water, food, or outside threats, the people just complained.

Now God was being obvious. He led the people out of Egypt as a pillar of fire. He sent manna and quail for food, he caused water to flow from the rock. He destroyed their enemies. No matter how He had shown Himself, and His love, it seems that God has been treated as a target of grumbling, complaints, and misunderstanding by His people. He wasn’t often seen as the object of love.

At Jesus:

Here’s at you Jesus. Haven’t you become the object of ridicule, of grumbling.

Looking at Jesus’ life on earth we see Him as a target from the beginning. First from Herod who wanted Him dead. Then the Pharisees and Sadducees, the Scribes as well. They didn’t like what He said or did, and eventually it led to the week we commemorate, that is just around the corner. He will be arrested, tortured, crucified, and killed.

God again — treated as a target of grumbling, complaints, and misunderstanding by His people. Those who should know Him as the object of all love just don’t get it.

At the well:

The Samaritan woman comes to the well. She doesn’t get Jesus either. Why are you talking to me? Why are you asking anything of me? How can you give me anything? We have nothing in common! She wasn’t exactly all in for Jesus. She didn’t get Him, and certainly didn’t understand Him. A different kind of grumbling certainly, but still complaints and misunderstanding.

And it goes on —

The world is like the Samaritan woman, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, the Israelites led out of Egypt. More and more we find grumbling, complaints, and misunderstanding about God. We find it even among the faithful — the very arguments the Samaritan woman set forth: Where is is right and proper to worship.

People who are supposed to get what God is all about fight over the little things. People who don’t get God don’t even want to attempt understanding.

Not what it is about:

We engage in a process of attempting to understand our lives, our world, our relationships. Sometimes, perhaps too often, we fail to grasp what we attempt to understand. When we do, the results of our failure are grumbling, complaints, and resultant misunderstandings. These can be directed at the world in general, fate, other people. Even family, friends, and co-workers, our fellow faithful do not escape. Sometimes God doesn’t even escape.

What Jesus came to tell us is that He is about love. He outright forgives the grumbling, complaints, and misunderstandings. He isn’t about division or theological argument. He only cares about the relationship we are supposed to be establishing with God and each other. God addresses and establishes us in love. He just asks that we see it and do the same.

He asks that we see the love that protected His people on their journey, that didn’t ignore them, but gave them food and water, that provided them with protection. God asks that we see the love that doesn’t call for worship style arguments, but rather for “worship in spirit and truth,” worship from a heart filled with the love and knowledge of God. It is the love that St. Paul speaks of when he reminds us that:

God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

Getting past

Our faith, our Church is not about debates, or some sense of rightness or being better than others. The Church certainly has its practices and rules, but not just to have them. They are helpful guides in our learning to put aside grumbling, complaints, and misunderstanding, so that we find the truth of God. For example, when we abstain during Lent, and most of the year, we learn control over our desires. By learning self control we learn to control our appetites. That control teaches us the means for controlling our grumbling, complaints, and misunderstandings.

In the end

In the end it comes down to our decision, do we revel in a life of grumbling, complaints, and misunderstandings or do we seek the living water that Jesus promised us. It is found only in Him who told us that He provides “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

God has come, seeking us. Jesus fully informed us of His love, and showed us the depth of His love by offering Himself so that we might all have access to the everlasting fulness of love. Do we choose to grumble, complain, misunderstand, or do we open to the spirit of truth which requires that we worship and live in the love Christ taught? Let us spend these days of deep reflection so that we may control what destroys us, and build to the confession of faith that will save us. We will be justified in that faith which only speaks love. Amen.