"My food is..."

Reading John 4:27-38
"My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work."

The story of the woman at the well is a story of thirst and hunger. It is a story of spiritual thirst and hunger that is set against the backdrop of their physical equivalents. We know the feeling of physical hunger, of craving and satisfaction. The feeling of spiritual hunger is not unlike this. In fact the feelings are so similar that we often attempt to satisfy our spiritual hunger with physical things. What this story demonstrates is that while we know instinctively how to satisfy our physical thirst and hunger we do not have an equivalent natural instinct for the satisfaction of our spiritual needs. This is why Jesus said to his disciples, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about" (John 4:32). As he does so many times in his conversations and encounters with people Jesus takes us from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

"My food is to do the will...of someone else..."
"My food is to finish the work...of someone else..."

This is counterintuitive. I naturally think that solving my thirst would involve doing my will and engaging in my work. This is why so many spiritual and religious pursuits leave me feeling empty. I hope that feeding my physical and psychological hunger will somehow feed my spirtual hunger. I repeat over and over again the same paths to fulfillment that lead me to the same dead end. This is where so much of the self-help spirituality leads to.

Jesus is showing his followers that our spiritual hunger is telling us that we have lost touch with the will of God that "sends" us out of our own world and into the world of God and others. The will of God that Jesus wants us to connect with asks us to look on a field that we did not plant, to bring in a harvest that does not belong to us, and to share in the joy with those that we would otherwise have no connection with.

The lonely individual, eaten up with spiritual hunger, is satisfied, not by looking inward, but by looking upward and outward. The value of looking inward is in coming to fully appreciate what the soul hungers for, that is, God and others. Failure to take this inward look means we continue to pursue the illusive goal of self-fulfillment. Only surrender to the will of God and to doing the work of loving God and neighbour leads to the peace that I cannot find anywhere else. In the story, all of this purpose was focused on one cast-off woman. The great harvest never becomes an impersonal enterprise of numbers and statistics and complex strategies. It is a matter of one person reaching out to another person in the name of Jesus. Deep spiritual thirsts are satisfied in these simple actions.