NOTES for Joh 4:27-42

By saying that doing the Father's will becomes His food, Jesus thereby reveals the meaning of what should properly be called spiritual life. For us today, spiritual life is reduced to certain states, experiences, and in general to what is usually called experience. Yet the Savior never defines His relationship with the Father in this way. Instead He says that His food, His life, is doing the Father's will.

Of course, if the matter were only doing one thing or another at the Father's direction, we would have the right to ask how this can sustain a person. We ourselves often understand doing God's will as something very much like that. We strictly observe all the norms and rules that, whether in reality or only in our imagination, have been prescribed to us by God, and we are often surprised that we do not become stronger from it but, on the contrary, only lose strength from such a life.

But even if we always and exclusively did exactly what God wants from us, limiting ourselves only to doing as such, we would reach approximately the same result. For the will of God is not a command from above. A command is only its outermost side. Its shell. And inside, in the depth, is He Himself. His life. His presence. His strength. To do His will means not only to do what He commands, but also to share in this life, this presence, this strength.

But for that to become possible, God's will must not be perceived by us only as an instruction that has come from somewhere outside. It must become an inner imperative for us. Something that defines our life from within and directs our actions. And it can become an inner imperative for us only when our life begins to be wholly and completely defined by that inner divine presence which the Bible calls the breath of life.

Jesus can give us even more: He promises those who follow Him and share His life the same source of life that is in His own heart. This source, which completely defines the Savior's whole life, is the food of which He speaks to the disciples. And the Father's will becomes for Him what flows from this source. He carries this will in His heart. And He is ready to share all this with each of us, with those who are ready to receive it.

What do the Savior's words about worshiping "in spirit and truth" mean? His words are often understood as a kind of return to antiquity, to that ancient time when there was not yet either the Tabernacle or the Temple, when there were many altars, including altars to the One God, and each person chose his own place of worship. They could be understood that way if Jesus had said that there was no difference between "this mountain" and Jerusalem. The mountain in question is Mount Gerizim, where in the Gospel era there were the ruins of a temple once built by the Samaritans.

But He said nothing of the kind. On the contrary, He said quite clearly that "salvation is from the Jews," so no return backward is in view. And if that is so, then all that remains is to move forward. But where?

From the meaning of everything the Savior said during His earthly ministry, it becomes clear: into the Kingdom, of which He Himself said that it had "drawn near." Worship anywhere "in spirit and truth" is possible only in the Kingdom. The Kingdom is entirely permeated by this "spirit," the breath of God that fills it and allows everyone who enters it to share in the fullness of life and in the fullness of communion with God. Here, faithfulness to God and to Christ, what the Synodal translation calls "truth," is truly enough to receive this fullness of communion with God.

But outside the Kingdom everything remains as before: the Temple, the altar, the sacrifices, "salvation is from the Jews." And then each person chooses for himself how he will live from then on: in the old way or in the new.

John the evangelist's account of the real meeting and conversation of the Lord Jesus Christ with the Samaritan woman near Sychar also turns out for the reader to be a parable full of deep meaning, in which, as in a drop of water, some important things related to any person's meeting with Christ can be seen.

In folklore, "living water" usually means a kind of magical remedy that prolongs or restores life. The Gospel, however, speaks to us about something entirely different. The point is that the quality of water in wells and springs can vary greatly, and in the everyday speech of the ancient Near East there were different terms for water more or less fit to drink. The purest and best of it was called living water. This concept is closer not to folkloric living water, but to what we call life-giving moisture. At hot noon, when all respectable women (not women married five times) had long since stocked up on water, such water was, of course, greatly desired by the Samaritan woman.

But for us, the point is still not this. We cannot fail to notice that in the Bible there is a long-standing tradition of comparing pure water with faith and personal communion (or, if you like, "personal acquaintance") with God. The Lord speaks to the Samaritan woman about water that will become in a person a spring flowing into eternal life. The apostle James writes in the General Epistle that bitter and sweet water cannot flow from one spring, comparing the flow of water with the flow of truth. At the end of Revelation the evangelist John quotes the Lord's words: "To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment." This image was known already to the prophets: Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel all use it.

Therefore Christ's words about living water can be applied to the gift of faith that He gives us. The water of Christ's teaching is called living by Him, that is, clean and unclouded - unlike water from other sources, not dangerous for a person's spiritual health. On the contrary, this water becomes a source of life in the person himself. Only Christ can give it to us, and if we were able to understand this (if we knew the gift of God), we would ask for this water as the most important thing.

And, of course, we cannot help thinking that in the barren desert that human spiritual life becomes without this gift of God, Christ's word is truly like a drink of clean cold water on a hot day.

The chain of themes through which the Lord persistently leads the Samaritan woman has been and remains for many an image of how a person seeks the most important thing in life, and at the same time of how God seeks the human soul. The Lord takes the first step by asking for a drink, thereby prompting the woman to take a responding step that requires some effort from her: out of mercy toward a weary traveler she has to step over the religious ban on communication with Jews. The following steps also require ever greater openness from the woman and trust in the Man at the well. She has to admit to Him that everything in her life is very complicated, but after trusting Jesus she asks Him about what seems to her the most basic question in life: where to worship, how to believe? Then she opens to Him her deepest hope: even if life is not coming together and religious disagreements have reached a dead end, there is One who, when He comes, will be able to set everything in order, explain everything, and answer the most hidden questions and desires: the Messiah.

As a result she is the first, even before the disciples, to learn of Christ's coming into the world. She turns out to be the most suitable person for this, because the desire to know Him overcame in her both distrust and shame and despair.