Doing what God wants from us moment by moment, we will find that it satisfies us fully. It gives peace, joy, happiness and, indeed, a foretaste of heaven.

My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work. (John 4:34)

These wonderful words of Jesus can be repeated, in a sense, by every Christian and, if practised, they are capable of leading him or her far ahead on the Holy Journey of life.

Jesus was seated at Jacob’s well in Samaria and was concluding his conversation with the Samaritan woman. The disciples returned from the near-by city where they had been for supplies, and were surprised to find the Master speaking with a woman, though no one asked him why. When the Samaritan woman had left, they urged him to eat. Jesus intuited their thoughts and explained the reason behind his actions by answering: ‘I have food to eat that you do not know about.’

The disciples didn’t understand: they were thinking of material food and they asked one another if someone had brought food to the Master during their absence. So then Jesus said openly:

My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.

We need food every day to keep us alive. Jesus does not deny this. It is food and the natural need we have of it that he is talking about here, but he does so in order to affirm the existence and requirement of another kind of food, of a more important food that he cannot do without.

Jesus came down from heaven in order to do the will of the One who sent him and to complete his work. He had no thoughts or projects of his own, but only those of his Father. His words and actions were those of the Father; he didn’t do his own will but that of the One who had sent him. This was the life of Jesus. In doing so, his hunger was satisfied; in doing so, he was nourished.

Full adherence to the Father’s will was characteristic of his whole life, up to his death on the cross, where he truly concluded the work the Father had entrusted to him.

My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.

Jesus considered doing the will of the Father as his food, because by carrying it out, ‘assimilating it,’ ‘eating it,’ identifying with it, he received Life from it.

And what was the will of the Father, his work, that Jesus had to complete?

It was to give salvation to humankind, to give it the Life that does not die.

Shortly before, Jesus had communicated a seed of this Life to the Samaritan woman through his conversation and love. In fact, the disciples soon saw this Life spring up and spread to others because the Samaritan woman communicated the richness she had discovered and received to other Samaritans: ‘Come and see a man …. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?’ (John 4: 29)

In speaking to the Samaritan woman, Jesus revealed the plan of God who is Father: that all people receive the gift of his life. This is the work that Jesus urgently wanted to complete, to entrust it later to his disciples, to the Church.

My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.

Can we live this sentence of the Gospel which is so typical of Jesus that it reflects in an altogether special way his being, his mission, his zeal?

Yes, of course we can! We too must live out the fact that we are sons and daughters of the Father through the Life that Christ has given us, and must nourish our lives by doing his will.

We can do this by fulfilling what he wants from us moment by moment, completing it in a perfect way, as if we had nothing else to do. In fact, God wants nothing else.

Let’s feed on what God wants from us moment by moment and we will experience that it satisfies us: it gives us peace, joy, happiness and, it’s no exaggeration to say, a foretaste of beatitude.

In this way, we too will cooperate with Jesus, day by day, in completing the work of the Father.
It will be the best way to live Easter.

Next Month: Righteousness will yield peace and bring about quiet trust for ever. (Isa. 32: 17)

 

 

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