Ex 17, 3-7; Rm 5:1-2, 5-8; Jn 4: 5-42

My dear Confreres, members of the Salesian Family and young people of the Province of Dimapur,

I have been among you since yesterday, taking part in a number of excellent gatherings, which you have prepared for the visit of Don Bosco’s successor to your Province on the occasion of the centenary of Salesian presence in India. I am very happy today to be presiding at this Eucharist and to be thanking the Lord together with you, because He has been so good to us. He has blessed our Congregation, multiplied our works. Vocations have grown miraculously in a way we could not have expected. Currently this is the most flourishing vocational area in the world. The Rector Major’s presence among you is at the same time an appeal for a new effort with renewed spirit and a vigorous apostolic and missionary outlook.

This new stage of the Salesian story in India, and in this region of Assam, will be more flourishing than the first, to the extent that the Salesians, like the first missionaries, are men with an intense passion for God and an intense passion for the young, especially those who are the poorest, most abandoned and in situations of psycho-social risk. This is what Don Bosco summed up in the Congregation’s motto as a spiritual and pastoral programme: “Da mihi animas caetera tolle.” The Word of God, particularly rich in this Lenten liturgical season, today invites us to make the Samaritan woman’s experience our own; in Jesus she finds the water, which is capable of quenching her deep thirst for life, happiness and love. We are invited to become enthusiastic evangelizers, able to proclaim to others the good news that we ourselves have experienced in our encounter with Christ.

Living as Christians, and even more so as religious, means gradually assimilating the experience of Christ summed up over the first two Sundays of Lent: journeying in faithfulness to the Father to achieve the goal of a glorious transfiguration. This journey is possible on one condition: listening to the Word of God, being rooted in it, accepting its demands. This Sunday’s liturgy and that of the two Sundays to follow has the Christian relive, in mystery, the major stages along which the catechumens were, and are today, discovering the profound requirements of conversion to Christ: in the signs of water, light and life.

The human being is thirsty for values

At the core of today’s liturgy we have water, a point of meeting and convergence for the two speakers: man and God. Water becomes the symbol that includes and expresses our question as human beings and God’s response. The human being is born for happiness and nothing except God can satisfy it completely and forever. This is why Don Bosco invited his boys to learn how to live in constant joy and never allow their cheerfulness to be stolen from them, and how they were never to delay their complete giving of themselves to God.

In fact, human existence reveals limitless desires: the thirst for love, the search for truth, the thirst for justice, freedom, communion and peace. These are often unfulfilled. The question of achieving them in all their fullness receives but a fragmentary response. Tiny morsels are received which leave the thirst unquenched. From his very depths, the human being is urged towards something more, an absolute, which can slake his thirst definitely. But where can such water be found that can satisfy every desire and end all restlessness?

Which is the water that always quenches thirst?

Jesus gives the answer in his encounter with the Samaritan woman. In the biblical tradition it is God Himself who is the source of living water. To distance oneself from Him and from His law is to experience the worst kind of aridity (cf Jer 2:12-13; 17:13). In the difficult journey to freedom, Israel, burning with thirst, approaches God, asks for His intervention as a right, and argues against what Moses has done. The people lament the past and refuse to face the future, which they denounce as an illusion. They want God, as their Father, to miraculously dissolve all their difficulties. God, however, does not respond to this kind of demand. Nevertheless He gives proof that He is not about to abandon his people: He assures them of the water that will slake their thirst so they will recognize in Him their Saviour and learn to trust in Him.

The rock from which Moses draws water is a sign of Divine Providence following his people and giving them life. Paul explains (cf 1 Cor 10:4) that this rock is Christ, mysteriously at work already in those events. Christ is also the Temple from which, according to the prophetic vision (cf Ez 47; Zech 13:1) water will pour forth, a sign of the Spirit providing fertility and life. Whoever is thirsty can freely approach Him (cf Jn 7:37-39) and will not thirst again; indeed, He will be a source of flowing water forever.

Born of water and the Spirit

The promise of living water became a reality in Jesus’ Pasch; from his lanced side flowed forth “blood and water” (cf Jn 19:34). The person of Jesus becomes the source from which the water of the Spirit flows, that is the love God poured into our hearts on the day of our Baptism. It is this love, which has purified us and given birth to new life even before we were capable of responding. The Father has admitted us to communion with Himself. Through the work of the Spirit we have become one with Christ, a son with the Son, true worshippers of the Father. Christian existence animated by the Spirit is an experience of sonship. It is nothing other than living in love, radiating what we ourselves have received.

The Eucharist is our approach to the source of living water to receive the full outpouring of the Spirit, the ever renewing nourishment of love: “whoever drinks of this water that I give to you… will have a source of water welling up to eternal life.” But the gift received becomes a duty to proclaim and give witness to. Like the Samaritan woman, we need to tell our brothers and sisters what God has accomplished in us so that they, like the woman’s fellow citizens, can confess that Jesus is “the Saviour of the world”. The faith has to become contagious. The baptized, born to new life, radically renewed in heart and in spirit, must give the reason for the life and the hope that is within them. If man’s search and thirst finds in Christ its full quenching, it is necessary to witness that salvation does not reside in ‘things’ which only give rise to new desires and doubts, but in the unique value that we have adhered to: Jesus, Saviour of mankind. There is no other water that nourishes our desert and definitively fulfils our seeking: “you have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (St Augustine).

Spiritual human beings

It is precisely this outpouring of the Spirit into our hearts on the day of our baptism that made us spiritual beings, men and women guided by the Spirit and who have love as the principal energy in life. Love has a prodigious capacity for transforming from within, for filling us with motivation, for overcoming death and rendering us ever more like God, who in His deepest reality is Love itself.

For us Salesians also, love is the center of our spirituality. It could not be otherwise. But our charity is a pastoral and educative charity which seeks the salvation of the young and which makes education the means for their development and maturing until they can achieve fullness in Christ.

Don Bosco’s preventive system itself is summed up in this pastoral and educative love which is a rational love appealing to the values in a person. It is a religious love, which opens to transcendence, making God the center of life, of choices, and the goal of all that one wants to be and do. It is a kindly love, which makes the young feel that they are truly loved and ensures that they respond with the best resources to be found in their heart. But the secret of everything is the encounter with Christ, the only One who can give us the water that will well up to eternal life.

We give thanks for all the wonders of God’s love on our behalf: for the baptism that has justified us and made us holy in His sight; for the Eucharistic banquet that brings us into communion with Christ who was innocent, who died and is risen for us sinners; for the gift of the Spirit who has made us beloved children of God, and put us at the service of the Kingdom and strengthened us in the struggle against personal and social evil. We renew our commitment to make Christ the water for our thirst, so that quenched by Him, we too can become sources whereby the young can quench their thirst.

Don Pascual Chavez V.

Dibrugarh, 27 February 2005