Priest Ioan Istrati
Midday, unbearable heat, the Son of God, exhausted of the journey and a woman gone unexpectedly at high noon to take out water.
Maybe because of shame or for another reason, she did not go in the morning like all the Samaritan women to the spring but at high noon, when the earth is like an oven.
On one side, God, the One Who thoroughly knows the souls, having the soul of the Samaritan woman in His hand, watching with His piercing loving eyes the thousands of generations of suffering, abandonment and hope who were before that woman and all her apostolic future of sacrifice, joy and testimony.
When Christ wants to give the divine grace, to open the springs of the being to the pouring of light, when He sees the infinite desire of the man towards what`s uncreated, He demands what He gives. He divinely reverses the roles. The spring of life becomes thirst for the beloved one. The giver of food to the whole universe is hungry for the love of men.
The One Who keeps in His hands safely the whole mankind desires to bend His head in the heart of the man who is a God bearing being. The spring of the eternal joy cries at the tomb of Lazarus. The hypostatic wisdom of Trinity asks questions about the events from Jerusalem. The eternal bread of all ages demands bread to eat from His creature.
This inversion of values comes from His endless humbleness which paradoxically unites the earth with the skies, the created with the uncreated, the man with God. Christ understands the human pains, not watching them from afar, from the condescension of an overruling sky, but feeling them and crying for the loss of the men whom He loved. In His Incarnation, Christ crushes His heart and enters the abyss of pain of mankind, He experiences in His love the abandonment of the man by God or better said the abandonment of the God by man: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
More than this: Christ not only feels the pains of the world, but He finds Himself in every poor, in every wretched man, in every suffering man of this world expanding divinely His healing being in all the oppressed of this earth:
`Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Each tear shed on earth flows through the eyes of Christ, falls on the cheeks of God and turns into a spring of light and comfort for those who are burdened by the yoke of this death.
