Jesus Therefore, Wearied from His Journey
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
We are told in St. John, “Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well” (John 4:6).
It is hard to suffer alone. Hence it is that the sorrow-stricken heart feels an imperative need to turn to others and crave their sympathy. It feels that if it succeeds in finding one who can enter into and compassionate its griefs, these griefs are no longer unbearable.
And it fears that if such a succor be denied it, it will fall crushed under its burden and be no longer able to resume life’s struggle with courage and energy.
Our Lord himself, in spite of the magnificent fortitude of his soul, was not exempt from feeling this same necessity of looking to others to share his sorrows.
When about to face the agony that was to rack his soul, before his body should feel the tortures of the passion, he too sought comfort, consolation, and support in human affection, understanding, tenderness, and sympathy.
And yet, though our whole nature, by its very constitution, seems to demand this satisfaction, it happens all too frequently in life that it finds itself denied what it so sorely needs.
Our Lord himself, in the great crisis of his career, failed to find what he looked for, and so suffered a cruel disillusionment, or rather allowed himself to suffer a cruel disillusionment, when he discovered in those he loved a complete insensibility to, and a total want of sympathetic understanding with, the pain that was torturing his soul.
This, alas, is too often our experience. We too instinctively look for sympathy in our sorrows and rarely find one who is able to enter into them.
Few there are who have the unselfishness and the imagination needed to see the nature, the reason, and the extent of our suffering. And this must necessarily be so.
Our griefs remain all our own. It is only superficially they resemble those of others. It is one of the reasons why others cannot enter into them.
The circumstances in which our trials occur, the manner in which they affect us, the state in which we ourselves are when the cross is laid upon us, all these conditions tend to make our experience a unique one, entirely peculiar to ourselves. No two suffer precisely in the same way. And therefore it is difficult, apart from considerable imaginative insight, to enter to any great extent into another’s pain.
In order to be capable of sympathizing fully with a fellow creature’s suffering, it would be necessary for us to undergo the very same trial and to be affected by it in the very same manner as the sufferer. This is normally impossible.
Is there then no exception to this rule? And must the suffering human soul be ever denied what it so insistently craves for? God’s love has supplied that which is refused by the egotism of man.
He fashioned to himself a human heart which should throb in sympathy with every human emotion, feeling, and affection.
In Jesus, we have not one who is indifferent to our distress. For in him, we are told by St. Paul to the Hebrews, “We have not a high priest who cannot have compassion on our infirmities, but one tempted in all things like as we are, without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
There is no pain or anguish that can assail the human soul of which he has not tasted the bitterness to the full. There is therefore no human misery that does not call forth his active and his entire sympathy.
“Come to me, all you that labour and are burdened,” he says, “and I will refresh you” (Matt. 11:28).
Our Lord, in his words and by his actions, has multiplied assurances of his perfect understanding of the emotions of our hearts and the feelings by which these hearts are stirred and swayed.
His love for us inspired this revelation. It moved him to make known to us that in his heart we should find an assured refuge in our trials and difficulties.
But this is not the only motive which constrained him to give us to understand that he could realize what we are called on to endure, and that he could indeed feel for us.
His interest in our souls prompted his casting aside of all reserve in his dealings with us, and drew him to a condescension to our human moods and ways that proves, as nothing else could, his divine patience and tenderness where we are concerned.
He has made known to us that there is not a sorrow that can afflict the human heart the sting of which he himself has not felt, and the bitterness of which he has not tasted.
Casting aside the reticence that belongs to all great souls, he has not shrunk from telling us that he has explored the abysses of human pain to their uttermost depths. He did this in order that we should realize that when we cast ourselves sorrow-stricken at his feet, he has a perfect understanding of what we are enduring.
But the purpose of the revelation of his own heart is not fully gained when our griefs are thus assuaged. When we have been consoled by his sympathy, we are meant in our turn to minister consolation to him.
If he can enter into our feelings, we must realize that we can enter into his. If he can share our griefs, we can share his. If our hearts are an open book which contain no secrets for him, so too his heart will unfold to our gaze, if our gaze is purified by love, every emotion and passion by which that divine heart was stirred.
He knows that just as there can be no greater comfort for us in our sorrows than the thought that he has endured the like and understands, so too there is no more potent means of setting up a oneness and fellowship between ourselves and Jesus than the entering into and sharing the moods that stirred his soul in contact with the hard experiences of life on earth.
Light is shed upon our path by the words of Jesus. Guidance is given to our steps by his actions. But intimacy and union with him is offered if we will to study and sympathize with the feelings that traversed his holy soul.
For, all perfect as they are, they are nonetheless profoundly human.
Who of us has not felt deeply moved at the bereavement of our friends when sickness and death invaded their homes?
The heart of Jesus was filled with a similar pity and grief when his eyes fell upon the tear-stained countenance of the widow bereft of her only son. His whole being was shaken with an anguish. The gospel tells us he groaned in spirit and troubled himself in presence of the affliction which had visited the household of his dear friends Martha and Mary.
Many of us must have at times felt pain and astonishment at the obstinacy of the perverse who refuse to obey the Church, and at the incredulity of those who refuse to listen to her teaching, so luminous and so soul-satisfying in itself.
So Jesus too was filled with pained wonder and surprise at the hostility with which his divine instruction was received by his own countrymen. “And he wondered,” we are told in the gospel, “because of their unbelief” (Mark 6:6).
Every good Christian must feel a movement of indignation at the irreverence of which thoughtless and careless Christians are sometimes guilty in our churches in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
Such an indignation, accompanied by a holy anger, flamed up in the heart of Our Lord as, on entering the temple, his Father’s house, he beheld the impious conduct of the traffickers who had turned the holy place into a public market.
Many another incident could be cited from the life story of Jesus to show that he was susceptible to all the human emotions which we can experience, except alone the inclination to sin.
All these feelings and passions that stirred his soul were governed and controlled by reason and directed to the honor and glory of his heavenly Father.
They were all holy. Holiness for us consists in reducing these same passions to order, curbing their activities when these tend to rebel against the course of divine providence, and finally in making them subserve and minister to the ideal of a Christian life.
Every Christian is bound to tend towards perfection. To all without exception were addressed the words of Our Lord, “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).
And yet the majority of Christians, in spite of this unequivocal injunction of Jesus, choose to think that perfection is an impossible ideal.
This is because most of the attempts that are made take paths that lead nowhere and finally disappear into wastelands.
There is no one, at least among good Christians, upon whose soul the invitation of Jesus has not made at some time or another in life a profound impression and created a yearning to lead a higher and a better life.
There are few among such that have not tried to satisfy that yearning, and yet most of these attempts come to nothing but disappointment and disillusionment. This is because men do not follow the unique road that leads to perfection of life and peace of heart.
Jesus is the way. He has told us in St. John, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Our sanctity has to be worked out in our human nature. It is our human activities that have to be sanctified.
These activities flow from our passions and habits, and these will issue in acts that are God-finding if the passions and habits are assimilated to those of our divine Lord.
The comparison that has been instituted between the feelings that swayed the heart of Jesus and those that stir at times our own has shown the possibility of entering through our own feelings into his, of sympathizing with him in his various moods and afflictions, and even of sharing his ideals.
We can sanctify ourselves surely by studying the movements of his sacred heart with a view to causing our own to beat in unison with his, by exploring his inmost dispositions in order to conform ours to them, and by analyzing the motives of his life on earth in order to make these life motives our own.
The shortest road to sanctity is to seek out the moving principle of Our Lord’s life and adopt it as our own.
What was that consuming passion that burnt in the soul of Jesus and gave direction to all his activities, and that constituted the practical purpose of his life?
It is true that it was the glory of God that he pursued without relaxation or intermission. “That will I do,” we are told in St. John, “that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13).
But nevertheless that glory was to be secured in one way only, and that was by the salvation of souls.
Hence it may be said with truth that zeal for the salvation of souls was the sacred fire of passion that consumed the sacred heart of Jesus and allowed him no repose during the years he passed on earth.
He understands, as nobody except God understands, the value of every soul that issues from the creative hands of the Almighty.
He himself, their author, realizes to the full the beauty of that perfect being, a spiritual substance that demands the exercise of the omnipotence of God for its existence.
He, the artist that fashioned that spirit after the exemplar of an idea in the divine mind, loves this perfect work of his own hands.
Each soul is valuable in his eyes. Not a single one is an object of indifference to him.
Dear to him in its natural constitution, it becomes an object of an infinitely greater, infinitely more tender love when, redeemed by the merits of his precious blood, it is penetrated through and through with sanctifying grace and palpitates with the very life of God himself.
A soul redeemed and constituted in grace is of inconceivable beauty and glory. All earthly beauty gathered together, intensified and multiplied a million times over, would not produce even a feeble image of that beauty, for it resembles and reflects the splendor of the Godhead itself.
Thus clothed in splendor in its origin, it is appointed for a marvelous destiny, nothing less than that of entering into, participating in, and enjoying to the fullness of its capacity the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.
God in creating the soul gives it the power to attain to all this bliss. But the soul can refuse to fulfill God’s purpose and by deliberate sin frustrate God’s plan.
Beautiful and glorious is the destiny of the soul that continues in grace. Correspondingly hideous and dreadful is the fate that awaits it if it rushes into enmity with God by violation of his holy laws.
Instead of an eternity of happiness, an eternity of death that permits not of dying, of misery that admits not of cessation, and of horror that suffers no mitigation awaits it. “Know thou, and see that it is an evil and a bitter thing for thee, to have left the Lord thy God” (Jer. 2:19).
Our Lord judges every soul, and he understands the awful anguish it endures in the eternal separation from God.
He has a human heart and soul, and hence he can realize the terrible fate that awaits the unrepentant sinner.
He cannot endure to see a single soul lost, if any efforts on his part can save it.
Hence he consecrated his life to the rescue of souls. “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost” (Matt. 18:11).
As sin is an object of infinite hate in God’s sight, so the sinner, as long as there is room left for repentance, is an object of infinite divine mercy.
Our divine Lord, who faithfully reflected in his humanity the divine character, felt towards sinners nothing but surpassing tenderness and pity.
He was called the friend of sinners. His magnanimous nature spared nothing to win them back to the ways of happiness and peace.
He has revealed to one of his servants that so precious in his sight is one human soul that he would willingly once again undergo the pains of his passion if that could overcome the perversity of a rebellious will and win it back to grace.
Sinners were ever uppermost in his thoughts. On the eve of his death, at the solemn moment of the institution of the Blessed Sacrament, when the fruit of the vine was being changed into the substance of his precious blood, at this solemn moment his thoughts dwelt once more on those who had been ever the chief object of his anxiety. “This is my blood of the new testament,” he said, “which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins” (Matt. 26:28).
But if he yearned after those who by their sins destroyed the divine nature in themselves and imperiled their eternal salvation, what must not have been the anguish of his soul and the poignancy of his prayers on behalf of those who not only ruined their own souls but dragged down with them in their destruction the souls of others.
With what sorrow and heaviness of heart he contemplated the careers of these unhappy creatures. His pursuit of one of those souls and his pleading with it furnish one of the most touching passages in the whole story of the gospel, and one which brings into relief as no other the eminently human character of Our Lord Jesus.
He had set his heart on securing the conversion of a woman living in sin. And for that purpose, in order to meet her, had undertaken a long journey from Judea through Samaria. Worn out with fatigue, he sat down on the edge of the stone parapet encircling Jacob’s well.
What pathos there is in contemplating Our Lord forced to rest himself and yielding to fatigue. He was indeed tired, but it is most likely that it was heaviness of heart far more than the toilsomeness of the journey that caused his limbs to give way beneath him with weariness.
His heart was heavy as he reviewed in his mind the woman’s sinful life and considered the great difficulties that the state of her soul would present to the action of divine grace. To render access to him more easy for her, he sent his disciples into the town of Sychar to seek for food, remaining himself all alone.
The woman came at this juncture, and by the force of his words and by the gracious tenderness and delicacy of his address, she was won from her life of sin. She that had been a public scandal became amongst her own people an apostle of Jesus Christ.
There is a triumphant ring about Our Lord’s words as he answers his disciples who on their return pressed him to eat. He said, “I have meat to eat which you know not” (John 4:32).
This means that in the joy of the conversion that he had effected, weariness and hunger were both forgotten. The salvation of souls was in truth the one absorbing passion of his heart, the strong satisfaction of his soul.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
Based on The Voice of a Priest, Sermon Seven, by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp., edited by Bernard J. Kelly, C.S.Sp. (Sheed & Ward, 1946).