A balanced meal

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”  But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”  John 4:31-32

[Today’s text, John 4:27-38, is found within the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, which you can read by clicking here.]

I am a grazer.  Thanksgiving aside, I’m not normally one for heaping food portions, preferring instead to “supplement” meals by nibbling on this and that throughout the day.  It keeps the engines running at a steady hum.

Yet I’ve noticed that, when deeply engrossed in something and making headway – whether reading or writing, upkeep or yard work, cardio or lifting – food is the last thing on my mind.  In fact, it’s an unwanted distraction.  It breaks focus when I need focus.

It seems counter-intuitive that when applying ourselves the most, our interest in food is at its lowest.  But then we realize there is more to us than our bodies, that our whole-person nourishment is not limited to “four basics,” neatly stacked into a tidy pyramid.  In fact, our spirits are strengthened by creating and accomplishing, learning and understanding, giving and serving, worship and praise.  Our innermost cravings are satisfied not by meat or grain, but by truth, obedience and the healthy fruit they produce.

Jesus understood this; his disciples did not. 

So he told them.  “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”  That’s what energized Jesus!  The deepest hunger within him was only satisfied by doing his Father’s will; finishing his Father’s work was the sole quenching of his soul’s thirst.

Even as he spoke, the Samaritan town-folks made their way toward him like “fields ... ripe for harvest.”  And of that, there was much, for John writes, “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him.”

Jesus did as his Father willed.  And by that measure, he was satisfied, his spirit was full.

But his was not the only soul to feast that day!  Jesus harvested new believers as his Father provided them, but who planted that crop?  It was the woman at the well ... the one who’d had five husbands and was living with someone else at the time ... the one who shared openly the only testimony she had: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.  Could this be the Christ?”  It was she who did the sowing … or what Jesus called “the hard work.”

And in doing so, she, too, had done the will of the Father.  She, too, was well fed and satisfied.  It must have been, for her, a Thanksgiving meal.