On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and exclaimed, “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.’” He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive.” (John 7.37-38)
In 1989, the writer Norman Maclean published his book, A River Runs Through It, a book about life as much as it is a book about rivers. Situated in Montana, where waters seem to flow continually, Maclean tells the story of a Presbyterian minister and his two sons, Paul and Norman, and the two different paths in life that the boys take.
With fly-fishing the motif that anchors the story, Maclean is as much philosopher as he is writer, perhaps a natural consequence of being around rivers, where the flow of water lends itself to deep thoughts about life and about where life takes us. “It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions,” he writes at one point in the story.
The book begins with this powerful imagery, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
Maclean shares much with the Scripture writer, John, who is equally haunted by water, or fascinated, if we should choose a different word that, in the end, means the same thing. Already at the start of John’s book, he tells the story of the giant jugs of water that were turned into a river of wine, the wedding guests besotted by so many spirits.
Later, John tells the story of the woman at the well and the traveling teacher who spends an afternoon talking to her about water, which, a story much like Maclean’s, is really a meditation on life. The Teacher promises the woman “living water,” telling her, “Everyone who 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.”
A short while later in the same gospel, the Galilean Rabbi finds a cripple near the pool of Bethesda, a pool believed to have curative powers, the cripple unable to enter the water because no one will help him. “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me,” he explains to the Rabbi, who, in turn, heals the man with these words, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that when a soldier sees that the Crucified One is dead on the cross, he jabs a lance into his side, “and immediately blood and water flowed out,” a visual reminder of the love for the world that has been poured out by his self-sacrifice on the cross. Even a cursory look at this book makes it clear that water is everywhere, or, as Maclean writes, “A river runs through it.”
Given this fact, we understand better the Rabbi’s response to the Jews who had been interrogating him on the Feast of Booths. In the passage cited today, he tells them, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as scripture says, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’” While scholars seem unable to cite a specific text in the Hebrew scriptures that the Rabbi has selected here, there are enough water references throughout these ancient writings to make clear its meaning.
An obvious example is when Moses strikes the rock in the desert and water flows out, quenching the thirst of the Hebrew slaves who have trekked through the desert, desperate for freedom and now desperate for water, symbolic of our own march through life, in need of Divine Providence as we wander the desert sands of time.
Or, again, there is the example taken from the writings of the Psalmist who prays, “As a deer yearns for running water, so my soul yearns for you, my God.” The prophets also speak of flowing water, Isaiah telling the people, “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue fails for thirst, I the Lord will hear them. I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.”
Amos, another prophet of Israel, commands the people to “let justice roll like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” Here, as in other places in the sacred texts, water is more than an element of earth. It is often a sign of divine presence. The reason is not difficult to discern. Unlike Egypt with its Nile River and Mesopotamia with its Euphrates River, the land of Israel did not have a river of such magnitude that would ensure a continued supply of water for humans and for crops. The Jordan River simply did not provide in the same way.
So, for the people of Judea, the presence and absence of water soon enough became associated with the presence and absence of God, the one who provides rain for his people. When rains poured, the presence of God abounded. When drought persisted, the absence of God was felt. Dependent on rains to avoid famine, the people of Israel rooted much of their theology in a God who has promised to pour rain upon the earth. His spirit was found in the raindrops from the skies.
Rabbi Jesus, keenly aware of this same sentiment, then uses this rich symbolism of living water as a metaphor for “the Holy Spirit that was not yet given” to his followers, pointing to the presence of the Spirit in flowing rivers of living water. Accustomed as we are to the more frequently invoked symbols of fire and wind as connoting the presence of the Spirit, both of which we find in the Pentecost story in Acts, we have here a renewed and refreshing analogy for the Spirit.
Understanding the Spirit as a flowing river inside us, followers of the Beloved Son, the One who was crucified and resurrected, we can more easily envision the driving dynamism that resides within our hearts and the undying duty to release it into the world. If we are filled with the Spirit, as the Rabbi of Galilee was, then we have a roaring river within us that must flow outwardly, providing all who thirst in this world with living water.
And there should be no question, really, of what is in this living water. If it is the Spirit of God, the One whose very nature is to give with an overflowing love, then it is that same love that should break out of the banks of our hearts, uncontainable and unmeasured, freely flowing and flooding the world with love. Anything less less is not worthy of the one who wants to bring the divine presence back into the world in the same way that the Galilean Teacher did.
Sadly though, the opposite is too often the truth. Our world has become a desert devoid of love, a drought-stricken place where love is hoarded inside self-serving minds and boarded up behind selfish hearts. The rivers of love have dried up, a trickling rivulet instead of an overflowing river, people dying from the thirst to be loved, begging us for just a few drops of water to fall from our miserly hearts onto their love-parched souls.
The thirst can be seen in their eyes, if we allow ourselves to look into them: The lonely person nobody visits. The street person nobody sees. The maligned person nobody defends. They are the same little ones that the Teacher of Galilee saw and loved, the unseen and the unloved. Street people that sleep in trash bins. Starving people that eat out of dumpsters. Tattooed and tattered people that sleep on park benches at night.
They are dying every day of thirst, asking the world for just a cup of water. They drink thirstily of the kind word, the gentle touch, the warm smile. In a world with little or no love offered, they are parched, their souls shriveling under the fierce heat of criticism, rejection, and betrayal. If we turn our backs on them, we walk away with these words trailing us, “I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.”
This is not the world that the God of love intended and it is not the world that the Son of God imagined. The God who loves like an overflowing river wants his creatures to love with the same abundant outpouring of generosity. And the Son of God who walked the roads of Galilee giving food and drink to one and all wants us to do the same, feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty.
It is not that the Divine Spirit has dried up, ceased to flow into the world, its riverbed cracked and cratered. The Spirit continues to flood the world, seeking to return the desert to a garden, but it must have receptacles, hearts that are open to its infusion of love. If we put a dam on the flow of the Spirit through our selfishness and our hard-heartedness, then it cannot flow freely.
“Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.” Those words from the Galilean haunt us today, reminding us that we cannot be dried-up streams, not if we want to turn the desert into pools of water, as the Psalmist of old prayed. We must open the spigot of love, allowing the Spirit to spew into the world through the outpouring of our hearts.
Perhaps Reverend Maclean offers us the way when he speaks these words at the end of the book, A River Runs Through It. By this point, he has lost one of his sons, Paul, his rebellious and prodigal son. In the last sermon he preached to his congregation shortly before his own death, the minister spoke of Paul, the one he tried to love. Here is what he said from his pulpit on that Sunday morning:
“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them–we can love completely without complete understanding.”
We could say his words are spoken by a heart that has come to see that the Spirit asks only one thing of us–to let the rivers of living water flow from within us.
–Jeremy Myers
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