Life, Love, and Living Water.

“With joy you will draw water at the fountain of salvation,” Isaiah says in today’s responsorial psalm. Later, the prophet extends an invitation: “All you who are thirsty, come to the water!” (55:1). Natural water is the source and sustainer of all life. The poet W. H. Auden said, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” Water is basic. But in the water from the fountain of salvation, grace joins nature. Life and love come together for our sake.

This water of salvation is surely for people who feel the sting of Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel. Anyone who has lived through divorce knows how sin-hardened hearts rupture a relationship that God intended for good. Yet even then, the water of life and love can come together. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is at a well when he meets a woman who has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband. Was she responsible for ending those marriages? Had she endured the sadness of being widowed five times, or suffered at each husband’s hands and left for safety’s sake? Whatever pain her marriages and their endings caused, Jesus offers salvation, offers himself: “If you knew the gift of God . . . you would have asked him and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

When we are broken by sin, exhausted by suffering, run ragged by busyness, Jesus is the water of salvation—the life and love of God come together to refresh us, renew us, and restore our joy.

Mark Strobel. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Mark Strobel is the dean of Gethsemane Episcopal Cathedral, Fargo, North Dakota, and is a Benedictine oblate of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota.