Brothers and sisters in Christ—
Today we heard the Lord’s promise to the Samaritan woman of “living water.” That living water of which the Lord speaks is the Life of God. In the beginning, God made all of creation to share His Life, so that the lowest elements in the creation up to the highest elements, all share the same life, the same energy, which flows from God. Thus, the use of the material creation, would be a communion with what is spiritual, while spiritual blessing and grace would be living, present and available in material things.
Through sin, death entered into creation, and it ceased to be a complete manifestation of God’s Life and a means to communion with Him. Therefore, Christ entered the world in order to restore creation, not by the violent means of a sudden and catastrophic reformation, but by planting the seeds of the renewed creation in the midst of the ruins of the old. Thus, Christ established the sacraments to be sources of Divine Life.
Are we to believe, then, that by partaking of material things and performing outward, corporal actions, we share the Life of God? Yes. We believe, for example, that by immersion in water, we come to share in the identity of Christ, and that by partaking in His Body and Blood under the corporal appearance of bread and wine, we are built up and sustained in that identity.
What is the point of sharing the identity of Christ? In this way, we fulfill our natural aspiration to healing and perfection. Each and every one of us, in the deepest level of his or her personality, wants to be God. If this were not so, our ancestors would not have succumbed to temptation and committed the first sin. We have a deep desire to be God, a desire, which is built into us by God Himself. Far from this being an evil desire, it is the fulfillment of our nature as God made us. Our ancestors erred in that they tried to be God apart from God. Nevertheless, God invites us to become God by grace, not by nature as He is, but by sharing His Life with Him.
Being God means being powerful and abundant, this is why the promise that the Lord makes to the Samaritan woman is so fetching. He tells the woman that she can have within her a fountain of living water springing up to life everlasting. This echoes what He said elsewhere in the Gospel of John: “As the Father has Life in Himself, so He has given to the Son to have Life in Himself.” We share the identity of the Son, and so, in Christ, we have become God by grace. The power and abundance that are at our disposal are immense—in fact, infinite. We need only read the words of the Gospel of St. John in order to understand the magnitude of the power that is given to anyone who becomes God by grace.
The work, which Christ has begun in us by His Mysteries, by making us sharers in His identity, has to be completed by us, as we allow God to work through us. The perfection of God is already within us, as it was sewn into us by participation in the life-giving sacraments, but it has to be uncovered. We uncover that perfection through our daily life, following Christ.
We may be tempted to think of the meeting described in the Gospel today as a chance meeting. But in truth that meeting was planned by God for the salvation of the world from all eternity. In the same way that God planned that meeting from all eternity, so too He has planned the circumstances and events of our lives. There is no happenstance when it comes to the worship of the true God. Everything is foreseen in the plan of God. What happens to us and for us is the manifestation of His great loving kindness. Therefore, that which happens to us is the best that can happen, according to the plan of God. This is what the Holy Apostle Paul tells us, when he says: “All things work together to the good of those who love God.” It stands to reason that as all things work together for God, so all things work together for those who have become God by grace. We should cast away any notion that we are victims of chance, and begin to see, really see, the benevolent work of the One Who loves us. One of the pervasive contemporary spiritual diseases among believers in Christ is the belief in misfortune. None of the events that come to us from the hand of God is misfortune (such is only a superstition). Rather, we create our misfortunes by our inadequate responses to the things that God sends us. Are the sufferings and death of the Lord Jesus a misfortune? Certainly not!
Our God and we have the same goal—that we become God by grace. God ordains all things, so that they work together for the accomplishment of that goal. Only we can foil His desire, and ours as well, by failing to accept with love and docility the things that He sends us.
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