Bible reading –
“Hey there! All who are thirsty,
come to the water!
Are you penniless?
Come anyway—buy and eat!
Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk.
Buy without money—everything’s free!Isaiah 55:1 (The Msg Bible)
We have seen a quite a bit of video news about water aid. If you were without water how might you react to those words?
Turn and chat with the person next to you.
How can you buy and eat if you are penniless?
And then we read this story about Jesus in John’s Gospel, or account of the life of Jesus.
On the final and climactic day of the Feast, Jesus took his stand. He cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Rivers of living water will brim and spill out of the depths of anyone who believes in me this way, just as the Scripture says.” (He said this in regard to the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were about to receive. The Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified.)
John 7:37-39 (The Msg Bible)
Talk
The Feast of Tabernacles or Booths was and is an annual week long festival in the Jewish calendar. It usually takes place in September of early October, this year it starts on 13th October. The feast was given in thanksgiving for God’s gracious provision for the Israelite nation, both in the past and the present. In many ways it was a Harvest festival.
During the festival the Jews lived in huts or booths to remember how they had lived in tents in the wilderness.
At the beginning of John 7 we see Jesus keeping a low profile. The conflict between himself and the Jewish leaders had intensified and according to John they are looking for an opportunity to kill him. Jesus’ brothers go to the festival and so does Jesus, but in secret. At the festival the gossip about who Jesus is intensifies and then he goes off message. He breaks his low profile he goes to the centre of the festivities, the Temple and starts to teach. The Pharisees are livid and send the Temple police to arrest him, but they cannot find him. And then on the final day of the Festival, the greatest day according to John, Jesus re-appears and makes an extraordinary claim.
Water is an integral part of the Festival. Everyday there was a procession to fetch water from a pool in Jerusalem. The water is processed around the altar in the Temple, the most special place for the Jewish people, and then poured out. On the last and greatest day this was repeated but the water was processed around the altar seven times rather than just once. Then as the city is packed with pilgrims for the festival and the festival reaches a climax an un-educated carpenters son from a useless place such as Nazareth stands up, and shouts at the top of his voice so he can be heard that If anyone is thirsty, let thim come to me and drink.
In Jewish writing water is a rich symbol. God himself is called the ‘spring of living water’. The words of Isaiah 55
“Hey there! All who are thirsty,
come to the water!
Are you penniless?
Come anyway—buy and eat!
Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk.
Buy without money—everything’s free!
And here we have this cheeky, arrogant, upstart claiming to be the spring of living water. He claims to be the fulfillment of what the past 7 days festivities have been all about.
Isaiah 55 makes an invitation to the thirsty to drink from the water. Jesus goes a step further, indeed a giant leap further. He does not offer an invitation to come and drink. He says he can provide the waters.
And to us, who have water every time we turn on the tap., It is just so easy,….It is harvest time,…the fields are bare, the hedgerows are heavy with fruit for jams and pickles, the supermarket shelves are full to bursting with so much choice we can be crippled by it,..the allotment needs work to bring in the harvest and …..
and…….
and …..
a billion people live without clean safe water.
For many of those people there will be no harvest, because they do not have the time, the time to
Can you help bring a harvest to someone else this year?
Can you provide the waters?
The 2011 September Campaign. Our 5-year-anniversary video from charity: water on Vimeo.