Fr. Michael Williams

The first verse of St. John’s gospel states that: “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning’. St John is keen to stress the divinity of God’s Word, and that is why he tells us in the first few verses of his gospel ‘the Word was God’. But then St. John tells us something else: ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. God the Word assumed our human nature and dwelt with us. As we say in the Creed, ‘for us men and for our salvation, He came down from Heaven; [and He] was made man’.

Throughout the rest of his gospel, St John gives concrete expression to this reality of God dwelling in our world. God created the world, but He is also a part of it through the Word becoming flesh. The implications of this are massive. God is not like the watchmaker who makes a watch and is then finished with it. God has entered into our human history. Today’s gospel reading gives us an illustration of this. ‘[Jesus] the Word became flesh’, arrives at the well tired and thirsty. His physical nature is in need of recuperation. And at the well He meets a Samaritan woman, who also needs drink and food to sustain her. They initially relate to one another because they thirsty human beings; they both have a common need; they share a common humanity.

But the conversation which ensues reveals to us that Jesus and the woman are also operating on two different levels. The woman appears only driven by human desires; Jesus is driven by divine desires. The woman is thirsting for a limitless supply of water to save herself the gruelling task of having to keep coming back to the well. But on a deeper level Jesus’ thirst is the thirst of God’s desire for us. It is this thirst of God that led Him to dwell among us. Jesus is thirsting for the woman’s soul, which has wandered away from the path that leads to life. She has become entangled in all sorts of problematic and futile relationships that lead nowhere. Jesus’ thirst for her, and for us, is that we thirst for eternal life. In another gospel Jesus says it in another way, ‘Set your hearts on God’s Kingdom first, and all the other things will be given you as well’.

This thirst of God has for us is most poignantly expressed on the cross when Jesus cries, ‘I am thirsty’. On the cross the Lord’s thirst, or desire, is to bring all people to Himself. And when He brings them to Himself He can them lead them into the eternal life, from whence He came. ‘Eternity is a word that has fallen into disuse. It has become a type of taboo for modern man’ (Cantalamessa). But eternal life is the destination God desires for us. If we don’t reach eternal life, our life will have been an abject failure.

But God is thirsting for us to drink at the well which supplies, ‘the water that wells up to eternal life’. The water Jesus speaks of is a symbol for His life giving Spirit. It is the life giving Spirit that flows through His Body, the Church. Here our spiritual thirst is quenched. Pope John XXIII used to say that the local parish is like the village fountain where our spiritual needs are satisfied. It is here where we receive the water of life from the fountain all holiness. God is still dwelling with us and thirsting for us to choose Him, because He came down from Heaven, so that He could take us to Heaven and to eternal life.