This Tired and Thirsty Jesus

 

During the Sahara Desert retreat six years ago, we walked for about seven hours every day for a week. There were three breaks during the course of a day and the toughest part was in the afternoon when the heat was at it's height and we were feeling pretty tired. 

One afternoon we came upon a well out in the middle of nowhere. A well with a pump from which we drank of its abundance, soaking our cheich's (Moraccan headscarf) in it. My scarf was a middle-eastern kufiya, given me by Chris, a parishioner who had served in the Iraq war. 

I remember placing my saturated, dripping kufiya on my head. The cool wetness of it. The sheer relief of it, until it dried out all too quickly. But in the moment it was pure bliss, not only physically, but it seemed that through the physical touch of water God was reaching into the weariness and deepest thirst of my soul. Reaching in, speaking to my inner reality, ministering to it and somehow releasing me.

So, I feel for Jesus in the Gospel of the Samaritan woman. He had walked long hours in the heat. He was tired and thirsty and he "sat straight down" by Jacob's Well. You can almost see him flopping down there.

And it is this tired and thirsty Jesus who meets the woman who comes to draw water. A woman engaged in the weariness and tedium of her humdrum daily chore.

He speaks of His own physical thirst that mirrors His thirst for the soul of the woman. He speaks also to her thirst and to her daily labour of having to come to the well to draw water. The burden, the weight, the tedium. 

Through this physical, material aspect of her life Jesus moves to the interior burden of her sin, the truth of which he addresses in a way that sets her free. Free to receive the interior gift of the water of the Holy Spirit welling up to eternal life.

It's significant that the whole conversation is private. Only the two of them are involved in it. Nobody else gets to hear the details of it, much like the confidential spirit of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is only afterwards that the liberated woman proclaims with great delight her experience of "the man who has told me everything I have ever done." That's all. She doesn't proclaim the details of the sin that He has identified and forgiven. 

This way that Jesus has of speaking the truth is an essential part of our Christian way of being, the way of speaking truth to the other. It is how we are meant to speak - to liberate the other and not to injure. And it is respectful, confidential. 

In our own lives Jesus speaks to the burden, the chore, the tedium of our physical existence. He speaks the truth to the interior burden of our sin and, if we are to be free, if we really want to be free, then we need to listen. 

But here we often stumble because we don't want to admit to or face the fact that we are sinners with sins that prevent us from being really free. Lifestyles and habits enslave us; we become accustomed to the wounds that are often the source of our sin. We wouldn't know how to live without them.

So, we need to choose to listen to Jesus speaking in our heart and soul. We need moments of real silence so that we can hear Him. Hear what He is actually saying, rather than what we think He is saying, or what we want Him to say. And we need to believe that he is actually speaking to us personally. It is on this personal level that we are most intimately connected to Him; nobody else can tell you what He is saying to you. The Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts so that this may take place.

The Gospel of the Woman at the well invites us to sit down beside the tired and thirsty Jesus with whom we can share our own weariness, our deepest inner thirsts and desires and by Him be set free.