As a diabetic, I always feel thirsty. My throat is dry. My skin is dry and brittle. It is irritatingly itchy. I always feel want scratching it. Wounds inflicted take a long time to heal, leaving spotty scars. In fact, I haven't gone swimming for more than a decade! The thirst is only physical and there will be an end to it.
But how am I to put in words yet another kind of thirst, which words fail to convey? Am I too demanding, asking too much from life, always feeling itchy and restless? Have I been too much a perfectionist, suffocating everybody around me? Then St. Augustine's famous line came to my mind:
Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
Thou movest us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You. (Confessions 1.1)
Jesus promised to give us living water when he engaged in a revealing dialogue with a Samaritan woman.
but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (John 4:14). He meant the Holy Spirit.
Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, "If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink.
He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'"
Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:37-39). Consequently, the crowd was divided. Some thought that Jesus was a prophet, others the Christ. There were always some who remained skeptical through and through. All of them knew that Jesus came from Galilee but they argued that the Scripture had foretold that Christ had to be born in Bethlehem (John 7:40-43). So, they would not accept Jesus as their Christ. (From this, we may conclude that not many people in the 1st century knew that Jesus was born in Bethlehem as Matthew and Luke had reported in the Nativity narratives in their gospels.) Later, when Nicodemus asked the Pharisees to be open-minded and scrutinize objectively what Jesus had done, they retorted that
Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee (John 7:52). Jonah, son of Amittai, came from Gath-hepher which was in Galilee (2 Kings 14:25). Moreover, it was very near Nazareth! (Oxford Bible Atlas, 3rd ed., OUP 1984, pages 62 & 86) Once more, too much prejudice had blocked the minds of the Pharisees from seeing the truth. Some biblical scholars would forgive them by interpreting their 'no prophet' as 'not the eschatological prophet' of v.40 above (Jerome Biblical Commentary New Jersey:Prentice-Hall, 1968, 63:106).
My God, I am tired. Give me living water so that I may not thirst, that I may take a good rest and continue my quest. Amen.
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