Today, many of us know little or nothing about what a well is and how important it is to the people of a village. A few years ago, I was surprised to hear about women arrived at the well on community land at 4:30 a.m. to draw water for their families. Some walked for hours, carrying on their heads jugs filled with water, a resource so precious and essential to their lives and those of their families. It was then, for the first time, that I truly realized the precious gift of “living water”!
This Sunday’s Gospel (Jn 4:7) presents us Jesus. He is tired from traveling and overwhelmed by the heat of the day. He arrives in a village in Samaria and sits down by a well while his disciples go to find something to eat. Despite the unusual time for drawing water—the hottest time of the day—a woman comes along with her jug. Jesus says to her,
“Give me a drink.”
It is not surprising that Jesus greets this woman by “asking her for a drink” since he is thirsty. But the evangelist John invites us to go beyond this first impression to discover another meaning in Jesus’ words to her.
When Jesus says, “Give me a drink,” he is also addressing us, and we must listen to him with our hearts… Jesus wants to tell us something even deeper. To each and every one of us, he says, “I thirst for you”… I would say that this is “a declaration of love.” He asks us to listen to him:
“If you only knew how much I thirst for you, how much I want to meet you, live with you, weave my life into yours. If you only knew how much I love you and want to make you happy…” God wants to sit at the well of our being and drink love from it… This is what we need to discover with new eyes. This is where the great adventure of our encounter with God begins: the realization that God thirsts for us so much! Do we believe it?
But Jesus goes even further with a second statement:
“If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
By expressing his thirst, Jesus invites us to express ours, to feel it in order to seek the source of living water. What am I really thirsty for in my life? As with the Samaritan woman, Jesus comes to us in our thirst, in all the aspects of our lives where we need him most. He knows these aspects of our being even before we say a word. He knows our thirst and He longs to quench it. He came to take away our sin, those places of dryness in our existence, and to quench our thirst with the gushing water that makes us blossom with life… eternal life!
“If you knew the gift of God…” Jesus has a gift for us, a priceless gift, a gift beyond anything we could ever dream of…
Like those women who come early to draw the water that brings life to their whole family, this week, let’s get up, go to Jesus, express our thirst to Him, and let ourselves be filled by His love!
Sr Louise Madore, Fdls
Province du Canada
