Do You Trust Jesus?
In this week’s Gospel Reading, Jesus invites the woman at the well into a relationship of trust. He is a Jew—the sort of person she expects to look down on her because she is a Samaritan. What’s more, he knows about her past. She has been through marital struggles: five husbands and now living with a man who isn’t her husband. And again, she must be regarded very poorly by her townspeople: she, a woman, comes to draw water from the well alone, at midday! (In the ancient Near East, women usually went to the well in groups, in the cool of the morning or toward evening.)
This mysterious Jew,
however, doesn’t make fun of her lonely midday errand, nor does he mock her for
her tumultuous past: he invites her into a conversation that unfolds into him
offering to give her living water so she will thirst no more.
Jesus does not come
into our lives to condemn us (Jn 3:17), rather He comes to offer us a true
friendship (Jn 15:15) and new life (Jn 10:10). He comes to enter into a
relationship with us. This relationship must begin with trust. Often, we are
like the woman at the well, carrying within our hearts a history of sins of
which we are ashamed, a past of many disappointments and wrongs done to us, a
bitterness of things that didn’t work out, and a fear of the uncertainty of
what lies ahead of us. The result is that we build walls and defenses to
protect our hearts from being broken again; we make our own plans, so we
don’t get disappointed again.
To trust in Jesus
means to break down these walls—to let go of our past, and to surrender our
future.
Jesus, our God, is
fully aware of what we have done in the past. He knows what sins we have
committed. He knows what mistakes we have made. He knows, too, how those we
might have expected to love us failed or at least did not love us as we
expected to be loved. When he comes to us, he knows these things and responds
to them with divine mercy.
It was with divine
mercy that Jesus spoke to that woman at the well, that he called St Matthew
from collecting taxes (Mt 9:9-13), that he forgave the prostitute at Simon’s
house (Lk 7:36-50), that he called St Peter, who himself acknowledged that he
was a very sinful man (Lk 5:8). With the same divine mercy, he calls you and
me. We must, first and foremost, trust that if we have truly repented of our
sins, then Jesus has forgiven them, and he loves us despite our past.
Trusting in Jesus also
means surrendering to his will for our future. The problem is that we often
want certainty and total control of what is to happen to us, and this leads us
to the error of self-reliance and murmuring, like the Israelites in the
desert: they had only recently been saved from slavery in Egypt when they began
to murmur because they saw no water. In their human limitedness, they could
think of no way out. Their murmuring is even more surprising considering they
had so far witnessed not one, but three miracles: the parting of the Red Sea
(Ex 14:1-31), the sweetening of the bitter waters at Marah (Ex 15:22-25)
and the raining down of bread from heaven (Ex 16:1-36). And that’s not
counting the series of wonders that had led to their leaving Egypt in the first
place! These signs should have been enough to ground them in a deep trust in
God, that he could provide water for them in the desert.
They, however, tended
to struggle with trust. Don’t we all?
Don’t we,
all-too-often, when confronted by our own deserts of misunderstandings,
insufficient resources, family problems, illness, bad grades, embarrassments,
and the like, lose our patience and trust, and begin to grumble and murmur?
The good news is, as
we see in the First Reading, God gives the Israelites yet another reason to
trust Him: He provides them with water from the rock! God does not tire of
coming after us even when we tend to go away from him and to distrust him.
Jesus could have used the usual route any other Jew would have taken to avoid
Samaria, but he specifically and intentionally passed through Samaria so that
he could meet the woman at the well, and tell her that He was the Messiah
she was waiting for to set her heart at rest.
We can trust Jesus. We
can surrender our past to his mercy, knowing that He has forgiven us, and will
heal all our wounds. We can surrender our future, our plans, our dreams, and
our worries to Him, because He knows what is best for us, cares for us (1 Pt
5:7) and can accomplish far more for us than we could ever dream or imagine
(Eph 3:20). He can love us like we are meant to be loved. We can hope in Him,
and we know that this “hope does not disappoint us” (Rom 5:5).
As a signature on the
Image of the Divine Mercy, Jesus asked St Faustina to write “Jesus, I trust
in You.” It is a curious statement, but one that bears absolute
significance, knowing that Our Lord’s message to us through those apparitions
was that his mercy infinitely overcomes all our sins, our misery, our troubles,
and embraces us, providing all we need on our earthly pilgrimage.
Jesus invites us daily
to give him a drink (see Jn 4:7) of our trust in Him. This Lent is a
good time to trustingly go to Confession and allow Jesus to wash us of our past
offences, and to deepen our prayer life so as to know Jesus better and entrust
our lives to His will more fully.
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