Are you thirsty? Have you found a means to quench your thirst? Is there a longing or a yearning in your heart that you cannot satisfy? We can rightly say that if we are not fully satisfied that we search for something or, perhaps better, that we thirst for somebody.
Today the Israelites grumble against Moses, demanding, “Why did you ever make us leave Egypt? Was it just to have us die here of thirst with our children and our livestock?” (Exodus 17:3). They thirst for water, certainly; but they thrist for something more than the water they demand, even though they do not yet realize it. We are much the same.
Like the woman at the well, the Israelites thirst for the Messiah. With her, they know “that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Christ; when he comes, he will tell us everything” (John 4:25). This woman has many unanswered questions. Her life has not been easy, nor has it been pleasant. For many years she has tried to quench her thirst. She has looked for ways to ease her troubled heart. She looked for ways to suppress her disturbing questions about life. In short, she looked for her happiness in the things of this world, yet never did she find it here.
Many of us look to food, or alcohol, or drugs, or money, or food, or sports, or cars, or clothing, or computers, or books – it could be anything – to satisfy our longings. We at least look to these sorts of things to forget about our questions, but this forgetting is only temporary and so we find ourselves in some sort of viscious circle of forgetfulness and remembrance and we grow more weary because the questions never go away. The more we try to avoid them the more insistent they grow and the more we try to satisfy our longings with things.
The Samaritan woman at the well sought her escape from her suffering and pain in the company and pleasure of men. Jesus pointedly reminds her of the uselessness of her quest for happiness when he says to her, “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband” (John 4:18). In searching for her happiness she wandered farther and farther from the Lord her God, the only true source of happiness, fulfillment, and peace. Now her Lord comes to her, saying, “Give me a drink,” or rather, “Take a drink of me” (John 4:7).
With the Psalmist, the woman can sing, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. My being thirsts for God, the living God. When can I go and see the face of God” (Psalm 42:2-3). Through her searching in vain for something to satisfy her deepest desires the woman came to realize that she sought the Lord himself. She is left with no where else to turn. All that she thought would bring her happiness has failed; she has been lied to and is lost. Now she knows that she was really searching for the Lord all along, but she does not know where or how to find him.
Her situation seems desperate and almost without hope. All of her life has led her to this point, but for what purpose? It has been a life of “emptiness and pain” (Psalm ). Have not each of us felt ourselves in this same predicament before? The singer and songwriter Rich Mullins sings this: “I can’t see how you’re leading me unless you’ve led me here / Where I’m lost enough to let myself be led / And so, you’ve been here all along I guess / It’s just you’re ways and you are just plain hard to get” (Rich Mullins, “Hard to Get”). Her difficult journey has led her here, to the very place where she is broken enough to recognize her need for the Savior. Today the Savior comes to her and says, “All you who are thirsty, come to the water!” (Isaiah 55:1). He calls, too, to us in our brokenness, “All you who are thirsty, come to the water!”
Jesus offers himself to her – and to us as well - as the only lasting satisfaction to her yearnings and as the only one who can tell her everything she has done (cf. John 4:39). As Jesus said to her so he says to each of us today: “whoever drinks the water I shall give will become in him a water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).
But where do we find this water? When Jesus died upon the Cross for our salvation, “one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out” (John 19:34). By gazing upon the pierced side of the Crucified and Risen Lord we will find this living water, and the more we gaze upon him in love the more we, too, we will come to say, “For you my body yearns; for you my soul thirsts, like a land parched, lifeless, and without water” (Psalm 63:2). We will come to realize that without the Lord Jesus we are empty and lost, but that with him all of our thirst will be quenched.
It is precisely at the Cross that we will find this living water and it is here where all of our deepest yearnings and desires and longings will at long last be fulfilled and satisfied. Beneath the shadow of the Cross we will find our happiness, our fulfillment, and our peace. This will only happen at the Cross because it is from the pierced side of the Savior that the Church and all of the Sacraments poured forth. The Fathers of the Church always saw the blood and water which flowed from his side as the symbol of the Sacraments – especially of Baptism and the Eucharist – and of the Church.
There are in our community a number of individuals who, like the Samaritan woman, have searched in vain for happiness until the Lord came to them and said, “Give me a drink; take a drink of me.” They [You] have found in Jesus Christ their happiness, their fulfillment, and their peace, and they [you] wish to share in full communion with us the riches and graces of the Sacraments of the Church, entrusted to the Church by the Savior. All of the joys and sorrows of their [your] lives have led them [you] to this moment and we are happy to welcome these [you] Elect and look forward to the day when they [you] will be one with us.
But before we can welcome them [you] fully into our community, we must first examine their [your] lives and their [your] commitment to Christ and to his Church. We must scrutinize their [your] motives and their [your] faith. We must ask the Lord to protect them [you] from and strengthen them [you] against the power of Satan and his ways. They [You] come to us now, in humility and in faith, to be received into our community. As these Elect and candidates come to us to ask for the Sacraments they say to us, “[We] have seen the Lord!” (John 20:18).
Let us follow their example of complete faith and trust in the Lord Jesus and in his Church. Let us examine and scrutinize our own lives, so that we may cooperate with the grace of God to remove whatever it is that keeps us from following perfectly after him. Let us seek to become like him and so share fully in the glory of his Resurrection.
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