Comfortable with God
The scene is captivating. Tired from his journey, Jesus sits down next to Jacob’s Well. Soon arrives a woman to draw water. She belongs to a semi-pagan people, despised by the Jews. Jesus spontaneously initiates the dialogue. He does not know how to look down on anyone, only how to look at them with great tenderness. “Woman, give me a drink.”
The woman is surprised. How dare he come in contact with a Samaritan woman? Why does he lower himself to speak with a woman he does not know? Jesus’ words surprise her even more: “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have ask him and he would have given you living water.”
There are many people, in recent years, who have been drifting from God, without even knowing what is really going on inside them. Today God has become for them a “strange being.” Everything connected to him seems to them to be empty and meaningless: an infantile world that is increasingly distant.
I understand them. I know what they may be feeling. I too have been moving away little by little from that “God of my childhood” who used to awaken in me so many fears, discomfort and uneasiness. Probably without Jesus I would never have met a God who for me today is a Mystery of goodness: a friendly and welcoming presence I can put my trust in.
The task of verifying my faith with scientific proofs has never attracted me: I believe it is a mistake to treat the mystery of God as if it were a laboratory project. Religious dogmas have not helped me either to meet God. I have simply let myself be led by a trust in Jesus that has continued growing over the years.
I could not say exactly how my faith sustains me today in the middle of a religious crisis that shakes me too as well as everyone else. I would only say that Jesus has brought me to live with simplicity a faith in God from the depth of my being. If I listen, God is not silent. If I open myself, he is not closed. If I entrust myself, he welcomes me. If I hand myself over, he sustains me. If I go down, he lifts me up.
I think the first and most important experience is to find ourselves feeling at home with God because we perceive him as a “saving presence.” When a person knows what it is to live feeling comfortable with God because he welcomes us as we are, in spite of our mediocrity, our mistakes and selfishness, and prods us to face life peacefully, such a person it will not so easily give up the faith. Many people today are abandoning God without ever having known him. If they knew the experience of God that Jesus spreads, they would be seeking him.
José Antonio Pagola
March 23, 2014
3 Lent (A)
John 4, 5-42