JESUS IS THIRSTY (John: 4:1-42)
Image: Unsplash/Jimmy Chang
Jesus and his disciples are leaving Judea where Jesus had turned water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, and where he made a lot of enemies by cleansing the temple of its money-changers, and where John the Baptist had been baptizing with water. Jesus’ followers were also baptizing with water.
While these events may not have occurred simultaneously in John’s Gospel, we can be sure that Jesus was tired and thirsty when he and his disciples reached Jacob’s well in the land of Samaria on their way to Galilee.
“Will you give me a drink?” Jesus said to the Samaritan woman. She obviously had to be asked and did not anticipate that here was a thirsty man waiting for a helping hand to relieve his thirst. She saw only a Jewish man who would reject, with contempt, a Samaritan woman.
Surprise! Jesus uses his thirst to reveal his weakness and invites this woman at the well to thirst for water to drink so that she will never be thirsty again. As we continue to read Chapter 4 in John’s Gospel we see that many Samaritans in the town believed in Jesus on the strength of the woman’s word of testimony: “He told me everything I ever did.”
Jesus’ thirst at the well eventually transformed the entire town into “thirsty” believers; Jesus really is, “the Savior of the world”.
-Sister Elaine Cole, CSJ