The healing waters

For many, Lent is a time of self-examination, of focusing on our sins, and of enabling us through self-denial to strip away those things in our lives that are not of God.

Yet as we do these things, we must keep firmly in our minds and in our hearts that all of this is ultimately and fundamentally the work of grace.

Today’s readings provide us with a most wonderful metaphor for this grace: that of flowing, healing waters.

Today’s Gospel (John 5:1-16) poignantly depicts our spiritual condition without that grace.

In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk,
of blind, halt, withered,
waiting for the moving of the water.

And in the first reading (from Ezekiel 47:1-12) we have that marvelous image of the great, deepening river that flows from the sanctuary of God and brings life and healing everywhere it goes.

We need that flowing, healing water: water whose truest source is Christ himself.

We need that water - that grace - to flow through us and to scour out the Augean stables of our sinful hearts.

We need that water - that grace - to restore vigor to our drooping spirits, as Christ healed the man in today’s Gospel.

We need that water - that grace - to bring forth new and abundant fruit within our souls: fruit that will last and never grow stale.

We need that water – that grace – to flow through us and touch the lives of everyone we meet with the eternal springtime of God’s truth and love.

To be sure, the basic spadework of self-examination and of self-denial are worthy things to do and are in themselves the work of grace.

Yet we must also take the time to set these tasks aside and to let the flowing, healing waters of God’s wonderful grace simply flow within us, wipe away our selfish resistance to his Truth, and fill us to overflowing with the infinite and everlasting love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.