<p>4:34 <i>Jesus said to them: My food is to do the will of Him that sent me and to accomplish His work</i>- See on :32. After the Lord converted the Samaritan woman at the well, He commented to His disciples that such work was His food- &quot;to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work&quot; (Jn. 4:34). But soon afterwards He claimed that &quot;the works which the Father has given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me&quot; (Jn. 5:36). It's tempting to think that the &quot;works&quot; He spoke of were His miracles- but the linkage with Jn. 4:34 suggests that they were also references to the change He achieved within people. These transformed people were His witness- and the Samaritan woman is a classic example. For when He had done the Father's work in her, she rushed off to witness to the world. In Jn. 6:28,29 the Lord seems to consciously steer us away from understanding His &quot;works&quot; as merely the miracles of e.g. feeding and physical healing. In response to the question &quot;What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?&quot; He responds: &quot;This is the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He has sent&quot;.</p><p>The Lord saw His preaching work as a carrying of the cross. He spoke of how His witness to the Samaritan woman was a &lsquo;finishing of the Father&rsquo;s work&rsquo; (Jn. 4:34). The &lsquo;finishing&rsquo; was clearly only accomplished upon the cross, when He cried &ldquo;It is finished&rdquo;, and He &ldquo;fulfilled&rdquo; or s.w. &ldquo;finished&rdquo; the Scriptures (Jn. 19:28). Thus in His life, He lived out the essence of His future cross by witnessing to others. Like Paul, we need to grasp what this means for us in practice. Crucifixion was a public, painful, sacrificial act; and true effort in witness will be the same. And this is exactly why Paul can speak of &ldquo;the preaching of the cross&rdquo;, the preaching which <i>is</i> the cross (Gk.). In His preaching to the woman at the well, the Lord saw Himself as &lsquo;finishing God&rsquo;s work&rsquo; (Jn. 4:32,34). And yet John evidently intends us to connect this incident with the Lord&rsquo;s final cry from the cross which he records: &ldquo;It is finished&quot;. Only on the cross was the work finished; but by pushing aside His own hunger, tiredness and desire for solitude in order to convert that woman, the Lord even then was &lsquo;finishing the Father&rsquo;s work&rsquo;, in that in essence He was living out the spirit of crucifixion. And so with us; the life of ongoing crucifixion demands that we consciously push ourselves in the service of others. The finishing of the Father&rsquo;s work was accomplished in the cross- hence the final cry of triumph, &ldquo;It is finished&quot; (19:30). But this meat was not appreciated by them in His lifetime. The work of sharing in Christ&rsquo;s cross should be our meat and drink, to the eclipsing of the pressing nature of material things. For this was the context in which the Lord spoke; His men were pressing Him to attend to His humanity, whereas His mind was filled, even in tiredness and dehydration, with the living out of the cross unto the end. As He was exhausted and dehydrated by the well, so He was on the cross. He saw that &ldquo;meat&quot; in the conversion of the Samaritan woman. He saw the connection between His cross and the conversion of that woman; thus &ldquo;the meat... the will... God&rsquo;s work&quot; was the cross, and yet it was also the conversion of the woman. The cross is essentially the converter of men and women, and thereby our crucifixion-lives are likewise the power of conversion.</p>