John 4, 1-15 + CSDC and CV

Chapter 4

John 4, 1-15 + CSDC and CV

CV 70a Technological development can give rise to the idea that technology is self-sufficient when too much attention is given to the “how” questions, and not enough to the many “why” questions underlying human activity. For this reason technology can appear ambivalent. Produced through human creativity as a tool of personal freedom, technology can be understood as a manifestation of absolute freedom, the freedom that seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things. The process of globalization could replace ideologies with technology [152], allowing the latter to become an ideological power that threatens to confine us within an a priori that holds us back from encountering being and truth. Were that to happen, we would all know, evaluate and make decisions about our life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning that is not of our own making. The “technical” worldview that follows from this vision is now so dominant that truth has come to be seen as coinciding with the possible.

Notes: [152] Cf. Paul VI, Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens, 29: loc. cit., 420.

The social-economic system must be marked by the twofold presence of public and private activity, including private non-profit activity  

CSDC 356. The social-economic system must be marked by the twofold presence of public and private activity, including private non-profit activity. In this way sundry decision-making and activity-planning centres come to take shape. The use of certain categories of goods, collective goods and goods meant for common utilization, cannot be dependent on mechanisms of the market,[743] nor does their use fall under the exclusive competence of the State. The State's task relative to these goods is that of making use of all social and economic initiatives promoted by intermediate bodies that produce public effects. Civil society, organized into its intermediate groups, is capable of contributing to the attainment of the common good by placing itself in a relationship of collaboration and effective complementarities with respect to the State and the market. It thus encourages the development of a fitting economic democracy. In this context, State intervention should be characterized by a genuine solidarity, which as such must never be separated from subsidiarity.

      Notes: [743] Cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 40: AAS 83 (1991), 843.

(Jn 4, 1-15) Iesus invites all to follow him because he is the first to obey God's plan of love  

[1] Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John [2] (although Jesus himself was not baptizing, just his disciples), [3] he left Judea and returned to Galilee. [4] He had to pass through Samaria. [5] So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. [6] Jacob's well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon. [7] A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." [8] His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. [9] The Samaritan woman said to him, "How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?" (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.) [10] Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." [11] (The woman) said to him, "Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep; where then can you get this living water? [12] Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?" [13] Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; [14] but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." [15] The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

CSDC 29. The love that inspires Jesus' ministry among men is the love that he has experienced in his intimate union with the Father. The New Testament allows us to enter deeply into the experience, that Jesus himself lives and communicates, the love of God his Father — “Abba” — and, therefore, it permits us to enter into the very heart of divine life. Jesus announces the liberating mercy of God to those whom he meets on his way, beginning with the poor, the marginalized, the sinners. He invites all to follow him because he is the first to obey God's plan of love, and he does so in a most singular way, as God's envoy in the world. Jesus' self-awareness of being the Son is an expression of this primordial experience. The Son has been given everything, and freely so, by the Father: “All that the Father has is mine” (Jn 16:15). His in turn is the mission of making all men sharers in this gift and in this filial relationship: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15). For Jesus, recognizing the Father's love means modelling his actions on God's gratuitousness and mercy; it is these that generate new life. It means becoming — by his very existence — the example and pattern of this for his disciples. Jesus' followers are called to live like him and, after his Passover of death and resurrection, to live also in him and by him, thanks to the superabundant gift of the Holy Spirit, the Consoler, who internalizes Christ's own style of life in human hearts.

[Initials and Abbreviations.- CSDC: Pontifical Council for Justice And Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church; -  SDC: Social Doctrine of the Church; - CV: Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in truth)]