All You Who Are Thirsty, Come
by Connor Searle
Come and listen, come to the water’s edge
All you who know and fear the Lord.
Come and listen, come to the water’s edge
All you who are thirsty, come.
Let me tell you what He has done for me,
He has done for you,
He has done for us. (1)
Jesus sits down by a well where a Samaritan woman has come to draw water and asks her for a drink. The woman is taken back a bit: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” she asks, and a conversation ensues. Jesus, cunningly cryptic as usual, tells her of living water, far better than what she’s drinking now. Taking his statement literally, the samaritan woman asks Jesus to give it to her so she won’t have to come to this well to draw water anymore. Though seeming to change the subject, Jesus obliges: he uncovers her sin.
The Samaritan woman thought Jesus was talking about physical water, the kind that would quench her physical thirst. With no husband or children, no one to draw water for her, she was thirsty and exhausted. Jesus looked at her, however, and saw a deeper need. He
saw a bedraggled, beat up, dry, thirsty soul that needed to drink deeply of the waters of life.
Oh sinner, are you still lapping at the dirty puddle water of your sin, or are you drinking deeply from the well that will not run dry?
The Samaritan woman goes on her way, leaving her water jar behind to tell anyone that will listen of the new water she has found, water that soothes a parched soul, and gives new life to one’s bones. In the meantime, the disciples return with some food, imploring the master to eat. “I have food you don’t know about.” Jesus says. The disciples, like the Samaritan woman, mistake Jesus to be talking about literal food. “Who brought him something to eat?” they wonder among themselves. Perhaps with bit of a chuckle, Jesus tells them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.”
Oh saint, are you eating at the Lord’s table? Oh sent-one, can you see that the fields are white for harvest?
All of us have parched souls that thirst for God, and all of us have hungry souls that long to do good. Let us rest, then, in the mercy of God, drinking deeply of his presence and word, clinging to his cross by faith and forsaking the “broken cisterns” we have hewn for ourselves, “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13). Let us also go out into the world to do the work of God, to “proclaim good news to the poor” and “set at liberty those who are oppressed” (luke 4:18). Finally, let us also recognize the necessity of both. Just as we must both eat and drink if we are to live, so also we must have both absolution, and repentance; sabbath, and mission, if our souls would live.
This Lenten season, may our fast be as Isaiah says,
“Is
not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
If
you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.
And the
LORD
will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters do not fail” (Is. 58).
(1) David Crowder, “Come and Listen”
Image of “Christ and the Samaritan woman” by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1311).
