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October 15, 2006
Jesus, The Fount of Living Waters
Psalm 24 / Zechariah 14: 6-9, 16-21/John 7: 14, 37-39
October 15th, 2006
Richard Dawkins, renowned professor of zoology at Oxford has just published a book that will hit our bookstores on Wednesday. Its title: The God Delusion. The review of this book I read in The Economist states that Dawkins wrote it partly as a result of 9/11. The day that will live in infamy witnessed essentially a religious act. The hatred of some radical people, whose religion boiled down to a core of hatred for the West erupted in violence so awful that I suspect even the most devout believer was shocked into the possible effects of religion—even ours, even Christianity. Dawkins uses this fact as the launching pad for a ferocious attack on religion, all religion, and on its basic premise that there is a God.
Often the thought comes to me that Jesus had in mind to eliminate what we usually think of as “religion.” I see the images the New Testament gives of Jesus in encounters with people of other religions—with the Samaritan woman, with the Syro-Phoenecian woman, with Roman army officers who probably participated in some of the popular mystery cults. How un-argumentative He was. There was no animosity, no proving I’m right and you’re wrong. To the Samaritan woman He said, “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” Just that.
The fundamental need in the human breast easily gets confused. It is easily distracted in religious controversy, where we defend our little points of view on ultimate things with a tenacity that considers immodesty a virtue and humility a vice. Jesus set out to get humanity back on track. This is what I believe was going on in the passage from the Gospel of John that we just read together.
Jesus stood near or in the Temple in Jerusalem, maybe near the Kidron Valley through which runs a brook during the rainy season, and said, “If any one thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
Jesus would sometimes use the place where he was standing or sitting as an illustration of a great truth. When He told His disciples, “On this rock I will build my church,” He was in a cave overlooking the source of the Jordan River. In this cave there is a massive rock comprising much of the floor. I can see Jesus touching this rock as He spoke of building the Church on a rock.
Now He stood near the Brook Kidron as the winter rains began and the stream was flowing. He said with the sound of running water in the background, “If any one thirsts let him come to me and drink.” Thirst is the most basic human instinct—water our basic need. We are made up two-thirds of water; everyone is. Our physical thirst is an analogy of an even deeper thirst.
Once before we read that Jesus stood with a Samaritan woman at a famous well. She drew some water for Him to drink and He offered her a drink of water that would leave her never thirsty again. “Give me a drink of that water,” she asked. This was Jesus’ way, to teach great truths from the ordinary circumstances of life. How close the sacred depths of life are to ordinary aspects of life.
But more was going on than the present flow of water in the Kidron Valley as Jesus spoke there. Five hundred years before the prophet Zechariah had spoken of a momentous day to come: “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, all year long.”
When did Zechariah have in mind that this would happen? He didn’t know. The Prophets never knew when fulfillment would come. Perhaps he stood by this same seasonal stream in Jerusalem that produced periodically water that was needed all the time. The living water he foretold would not be seasonal; it would flow all the time, in summer as in winter. Perhaps he thought of King David’s words in the 46th Psalm: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.” The prophet Isaiah too wrote two hundred years after David: “Look upon Zion, the city of our appointed feasts . . . there the Lord in majesty will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams . . . the people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.”
Forgiveness would come out of Jerusalem, the city of our appointed feasts—the last of which was this Feast of Booths, the Feast of Ingathering, as the waters flowed in the Kidron Valley. How the Old Testament scriptures pointed to this moment when Jesus spoke in Jerusalem at this great Feast of Ingathering of peoples as well as of the harvest bounty.
The prophet Zechariah said that the nations would come to Jerusalem as though they were all Jews, to keep the Feast of Booths. Indeed, they had to. If they would not come God would punish them. Our Constitution’s first amendment states that Congress cannot make any laws having to do with the establishment of religion. But when the living waters flow from Jerusalem it will be obvious what is the real source of satisfaction of this inner thirst we all have. I wonder if this will be seen as “religion.”
It would not be a voluntary ingathering. It will be an odd requirement—to come where life’s deepest needs are not. It would be compulsory. But every thoughtful parent compels her children to do what is really important (vegetables, bath – time for bed, for school, for church and Sunday School), so the God who created heaven and earth would compel all nations to focus on those spiritual Facts that eclipse every religious opinion—the Fact of our thirst and the fact of where this thirst is satisfied. In God. In the living God—whom we know in Jesus Christ.
No longer will there be thousands of different humanly contrived ways of thinking of God shredding the human race, with violence erupting in this and that sector as a means of forcing this or that religion’s point of view on others.
The prophet Isaiah wrote of a day when “Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, who the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.”
I read these various scriptures from the Old Testament and I remember the promise God made to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” How and when? John’s Gospel tells us, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
I read the Apostle Paul’s summary exclamation in Romans 11, after demonstrating the culpability of the world before God, Jew and Gentile, “God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may have mercy on all. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
How does this message get out to the world? Is it not through the Word of God? Isaiah the prophet wrote, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.”
Can it be that the reason why our Jewish friends dance and sing and clap their hands as they carry around the Torah scroll in their sanctuaries because this is the Word of God that brings good tidings, that publishes peace, that publishes salvation—not just to Israel but to Egypt and Assyria and to America and Iraq and China and the uttermost parts of the earth where Jesus told His disciples to spread the Gospel? How beautiful are the feet of those who spread the good tidings, and how beautiful is the Word they proclaim—a word celebrated with rejoicing today—Sinchat Torah!
Jesus told His disciples to go into all the world with this Good News. But if we go into the world with this Gospel without letting its effect on us take place we merely further the problem of religion. Ideas about God are of no use unapplied, without life being transformed by this Gospel.
George MacDonald reminds us in one of his sermons that the first business of the one who proclaims the Gospel is with his own character and conduct. “A cure in one person who repents and turns is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.” This is the hope of the Gospel—the word of God.
And so we come full circle this morning. We all noticed with the children this morning that today is the Jewish festival that remembers God’s gift of His Word, the Torah. Though this is a Jewish festival it points to the source from which we know of God’s love for the whole world. Indeed, the great Jewish festivals all point to God’s satisfaction of our greatest needs: the Feast of Booths, of Ingathering, pointed to the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, that in His seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
Blessed how? By the elimination of the curse of mutual hostility that comes with our national and religious boundaries. Blessed by the forgiveness of our sin that alienates us from ourselves, from one another and from God. The breaking down of the walls of separation between Jew and Gentile, slave and master, male and female. Blessed by the satisfaction of that profound thirst we all have by the gift of living water.
The water that satisfies all of our bodies is made up of H2O. We little understand what Jesus meant when He said, “No one comes to the Father but by me.” He was not endorsing a religion when He said that. He spoke of the living water that satisfies inner thirst. He was stating a fact as true as that water is the greatest need of the human body.
I hope you have come to Jesus in your thirst. Drink of Him. How? You ask. Just do it. Let your mind and heart guide you through the labyrinth of unsatisfying solutions to your heart’s need until you come and drink of Jesus. If you really seek this water you will find it.
We bless you Lord God for giving to us water to drink, and for Jesus, who is the living water. Grant to us to drink of Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at October 15, 2006 09:30 AM