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The Answer to our Thirst
You can fast from food but not from water. In the Gospel Jesus uses water as a symbol to the Samaritan woman for slaking her thirst forever. He proposes to put a flowing fountain of water right inside her. Jesus is talking about the longing each of us has deep within for “the love poured forth from God in Jesus through the Holy Spirit.” That is the way Paul puts it in the second reading. This need of ours is much like our physical thirst except that it is more subtle. We use many other substitutes to fill it like food, work, looks, accomplishment, alcohol, other people, sexual satisfaction, and so on. They do not work. They leave us high and dry, croaking the famous line "Is that all there is?" The thirst for fullness is behind every move we make, even those, St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us, that are born of our misdirected and misguided longings.We are constructed in such a way that without real love, we die. St. Ignatius points to this fact. Our small selves are constructed with a soul that can open wide enough to admit even the very presence of God Himself. And God is able to become whatever size to fit us. The miracle of the Eucharist is the most visible manifestation of God, connecting with us humans in a form and manner that do not frighten us, but unites us with Him. There is beautiful prayer that the priest or the deacon says while putting a drop of water into wine at offertory, “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
It was a mighty thirst for liberation that led Israel out of Egypt, just as it was their thirst that led them to complain that even Egypt would be better than the dry, god forsaken wilderness. And it was their thirst that God would slake, even from a rock. God would be their well of life just as surely as the manna-bread would fall from heaven. Thirst led the Samaritan woman not only to a well, but to Jesus who would refresh her spirit and renew her world. It was the same thirst that drew her through the labyrinth of love affairs. If she could only realize, Jesus said, that he himself was the living water, the fulfillment of every hope.
In Jesus’ time, fresh water sources were scarce in Palestine and the precious rainwater that fell during the winter had to be captured and kept in cisterns for use during the dry part of the year. Since water held in cisterns could get stale and contaminated, people came to call the fresh water of spring-fed sources “living water,” to distinguish it from the relatively “dead” water kept in cisterns. In that setting, it is easy to understand how water, especially “living water,” came to be a powerful metaphor for God's relationship with human beings.
Jesus is the stream of love between God and us. We are invited to drink of the mystery, this outpouring of love, embodied in Jesus, the thirst of God in us. His “I thirst” from the cross is as much the voice of God as it is the stirring of a human heart. It is not Christ’s humanity alone that feels the parching thirst. It is his divinity too. The story of the woman at the well, like our own sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, interprets for us the fundamental nature of our relationship to God. We are nothing without God. God is our drink. God is our sustenance.
Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O