Response to Jesus’ thirst

On this 3^rd Sunday of Lent the passage from the Gospel of John calls us to contemplate Jesus, who like a weary beggar longs for someone to quench his thirst, but who at the same time stirs up in us, as he did in the depths of the Samaritan Woman, a yearning for living water, of which he reveals he is the font and wellspring: “If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (Jn 4.10)

It is not insignificant that this account states that Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan Woman took place at the sixth hour. At this same hour, the same Gospel recounts that dying on the Cross Jesus cried out ‘I thirst’; in response he was offered by a Roman soldier a sponge soaked in vinegar (Jn 19.28f). In recalling these two related instances we may well reflect on the kind of response we make to him, especially during this Lenten season of being called to follow him more closely and faithfully in accordance with our baptism, as suggested by the water.

Few persons have experienced the yearning of Jesus for the loving response from human hearts as deeply and intensely as that frail little woman of love, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It was on 10 September 1928 during her journey by train from Calcutta to Darjeeling for her annual retreat that she was overwhelmed by a sense of the pathos of Jesus’ longing expressed in his cry on the Cross. Jesus’ cry ‘I thirst’ was her ‘call within a call’ – that is, she realized that she was being challenged to leave the comfortable condition of her religious vocation as a Loreto sister, teaching upper class girls, in order to devote herself entirely to Jesus by serving him in the street people of the slums.

To focus the attention of the Missionaries of Charity, the congregation founded by Mother Theresa, there is in every chapel of their communities a large crucifix behind the altar and on the wall beside it the words in capital letters: “I THIRST.” These words, Mother Theresa often insisted, present a constant reminder of why this congregation exists: to quench the thirst of Jesus for souls, for love, for kindness, for compassion, to respond by doing “something beautiful for God.”

Mother Theresa’s response to Jesus’ thirst was no mere sentimental pity for the impoverished condition of others’ misery. Nor was it an individualistic kind of turning to a pietistic ‘Jesus and me’ attitude. It transformed her to become robust in the exacting practice of what care entails, like Jesus’ loving unto the end (cf. Jn 13.1). Only this kind of responsible action flowing from contemplation of his presence in the Eucharistic sacrifice can overturn a callous indifference to the world of suffering, on the one hand, or, on the other, that formalistic kind of attitude in many do-gooders, an attitude that is sneered at in the ironic expression ‘cold as charity.’ The little woman of Calcutta presents a challenging and encouraging example of the vast implications of what it means to be a worshipper in spirit and truth (cf. Jn 4:23f.). She realised that her consecration as a religious deepened the meaning of her baptism, the living waters of which Jesus is the wellspring: her whole life was plunged into his death and resurrection (cf. Rom 6:3ff.). But, furthermore, this realisation of being a consecrated person committed and impelled her with a passionate mission of outreaching love to serve others with unstinting generosity. In this way her life was true worship, a fusion of acknowledging God with the worthwhile divine service of people, whose worth she recognised and respected tenderly as God’s children. She was not a person  given over to ritual, but spent herself entirely in the liturgy of living love.

Jesus’ cry signifies not so much a desire to be glorified or to have his own physical suffering relieved, but it expresses his compassionate concern for the agonies endured by the poorest of the poor, whom he identified as members of his Mystical Body in need of consideration and care. More deeply, this cry from the Cross expresses the Saviour’s longing to draw all humankind up to his level of self-giving (cf. Jn 12.32), at-oning us in the communion of God’s love for the world, than which there is none greater (cf. Jn 3.16f.; 15:13). His real presence continues today in the myriads of people, who exist not only in squalid slums, but also who suffer the modern dis-ease of loneliness in the most affluent high-rise apartments of our conurbations.

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Image above: Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well – Georgia, illuminated manuscript, Jruchi Gospels II, 12^th century.