Human beings, like all animals, are creatures of desire. We desire food and drink, and we have this desire because we need nourishment to stay alive. And again, this makes us akin to other animals. While plants also need nourishment, they lack desire, properly understood, because they lack awareness of their need. Animals not only hunger but deliberately set off to find food.
In this area, what distinguishes us from other animals is that we can use our reason to determine how to satisfy our natural desires. We can even deliberately not eat, enduring hunger pains for some greater goal such as fasting or dieting. We can also use our intelligence to alter the food we get by cooking it, mixing ingredients, and so on, to produce something that tastes good.
We go even further, using meals to symbolize other desires. For example, we desire companionship and community. A decision to eat together is a decision to satisfy that higher desire. What the philosopher Aristotle discovered is that we have a tendency to rank our desires. He explained this at the beginning of his book on ethics.
When we see someone carrying out an action, and we ask him, “What are you doing?”, we expect that the reason he gives will point to a desire that he is attempting to satisfy.
“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”
“To get to work on time.”
Aristotle then points out that we can continue to ask, “Why?” to the answer.
“Why do you want to get to work on time?”
“Because I want to get paid and not laid off.”
“Why do you want money?”
And so on.
These chains of questions will always terminate at the one thing that Aristotle says we seek for its own sake, which is happiness. We don’t normally ask people, “Why do you desire happiness? What good is it?”
We all recognize this is a sufficient answer to any question about someone’s motive. If it makes you happy, go ahead!
Aristotle’s theory is pretty sound, but I also think that it requires some filling out. For example, he did not deal with an interesting phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.
I’m thinking of the prophets. If we were to ask Jeremiah why he was continually criticizing the rulers of Jerusalem, it would be a stretch to show that he did this because he thought somehow it would make him happy. What he desired was something more like proper worship of God. If I could use the words of the Beatitude, he hungered and thirsted for justice.
Alright, with that as background, we look at today’s gospel. We see that, from one perspective, it is all about desire. Both the Samaritan woman and Jesus desire water. Both Jesus and the disciples desire food. And Saint John the Evangelist shows us how these desires point to a higher yearning in the human soul.
Jesus says to the woman, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and you living water.” In other words, if we knew the gift of God, we would desire it.
What is God’s gift?
It is the Holy Spirit. Before the Son of God came into the world, would we even have suspected that it was possible to receive God’s Holy Spirit? I think yes and no.
There are stories from many ancient cultures in which a divine spirit enters a human being, making him or her capable of particular impressive deeds, such as the writing of poetry or the invention of writing itself. We say of the Holy Spirit that He has spoken through the prophets, that in some way, they were conduits of the Holy Spirit.
But what Jesus is promising to the woman at the well is something more profound, a permanent union of ourselves with God. This promise reveals to us that our desires for truth, justice, and beauty are in fact different ways of longing for God. That only God can satisfy, and He intends to do this for us in a way surpassing anything we can imagine.
How are we to respond to this offer from God?
Let’s go back to the gospel reading. When the woman is persuaded that Jesus has something of value to offer, she asks for it outright. And so we, too, should ask. Here, though, we should bear in mind that the gift that Jesus is offering will only be available after His death.
What Jesus does next is surprising: He gently talks the Samaritan woman into an admission of her own serial relationship failures. Is Jesus saying that He will only give the Spirit once she’s fixed all her problems?
No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.
Also bear in mind that the woman still thinks that they are talking about water. Things change, however, when she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. This suddenly prompts her to speak about proper worship of God, a point of sharp dispute between Jews and Samaritans at the time.
Jesus says that God the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and truth. This is where God’s invitation points, that we learn to worship Him properly. What this means in the context of this homily is, once again, that God is the final terminus of desire, God is what we crave in our heart of hearts, whether we are aware of it or not.
And the expression of this desire is literally worship. The word worship is derived from the same root as the word “worth.” Worship is then that activity in which we acknowledge that which has highest value, God Himself.
This is what I said that the prophets like Jeremiah were desiring rather than earthly happiness. And it was, in some sense, the Holy Spirit that both satisfies that desire and inflames it. The reason that Jesus brings up the ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman is to help us see that we can’t obtain satisfaction of this desire for God without correcting our lower desires.
The longing for love that the Samaritan woman manifested in her many marriages was a sign that could have pointed to God but did not. At some level that is why the marriages didn’t work.
Jesus is healing her and recalibrating this desire, and it truly changes the woman. She goes from being someone avoiding the eyes of others to speaking directly and persuasively to them.
As we move toward the middle of Lent, what desires of ours point away from God, and how can we redirect them? Is there a hidden sin that I’m keeping from God and from my own scrutiny out of shame? And if so, how might Jesus’s gentle example move me to re-examine and heal my own past?
As we cooperate with God’s grace in this process of healing, the Holy Spirit will become more of a conscious companion. And what more could we ask for than that?