John 7:37-39
What feast are we talking about in this gospel? Well, if you go back a bit you will see that this is the feast of Tabernacles, or the feast of Booths, or as it is named in Hebrew, Sukkot. It’s one of seven feasts of the Jewish religion. It goes back to the book of Numbers. It’s a seven day long celebration, commemorating the time the Israelites wandered in the dessert and finally entered the promised land where the story has it that it was then God stopped providing Manna and water from a rock because they now had their own land and abundant crops left over from the previous inhabitants that had been driven out.
The feast started with the building of symbolic dwellings. In the cities sticks would be erected on flat roofs and the observant Jew would spend some time each day in the makeshift structure, remembering how there was a time when the people were homeless. On the seventh day the priests in the temple would fill an ornate jug with water and march in procession into the temple and around the main altar upon which they would pour the water as a sacrifice to God. Then the men in the crowd would raise a piece of fruit or a sheaf of grain in the air and call out “Praise God” three times. So the seventh day, the last day of the celebration, was a day when water itself was honored.
We don’t have much of a water problem in our part of the country. In fact there are times when it seems we have too much. A few years ago a cousin of mine who farmed in Montana had to make a daily round trip of about sixty miles to obtain enough water to keep his livestock alive; Montana was having one of the worst droughts it had ever experienced. Anybody who has anything to do with plants understands the relationship between water and life. And Jesus’ audience were even more sensitive, because Israel is semi-arid in its climate and famine from crop failure was always a possibility.
Now let’s examine the statement that Jesus makes: “ Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.. As scripture says, “Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.” Jesus is quoting Isaiah in that last part, but there are many allusions in the prophetic writings to the life-giving force of water, and to the comparison of what God will do to what water does, which is to bring life. Isn’t it interesting that belief in Jesus does something to us that allows us not only to have a new life, but to communicate that life; we become the source of that living water, which is the Spirit.
John the gospel writer makes the point that there was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. But there are many references to the Spirit of God in the Old testament. In the beginning of Genesis we read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and barren, and darkness covered the abyss while the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” And Jesus quotes Isaiah himself at the beginning of his public ministry, when he reads “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…” Obviously John is not saying that the Spirit didn’t exist until Jesus had gone through his passion, death and resurrection. He does say that something new has happened because of Jesus’ glorification.
The Jews of Jesus' time considered their temple as the place where they met God in a special way. That’s why they only had one temple. That's why they had pilgrimages. That’s why the only place you could have your sins forgiven was to sacrifice something in the temple. The temple was the source of living water -- Ezekiel had that vision in which he saw water flowing from the temple giving life to trees that provided food and medicine. Jesus is now the source of the living water, and it is within the believer that the encounter between God and Man is to take place. The Spirit makes us a new creation -- individually and as part of the Body of Christ, the Church. This transformation, possible because of the sacrifice of Jesus, began on that first Pentecost, continuing in the world and in we believers even today.
The Spirit within us is a down payment on the glory that Saint Paul promises is to come, the glory of transformed existence when there will no longer be any opposition to Christ’s reign, when our lives will no longer be disrupted because our old nature wants to hang on to sin and the gloriously transformed new nature hungers after holiness and godliness. Deep inside everyone is an empty space wanting to be filled up with God; and the waters that wells up within us makes that possible.
