John 7:37-39 Commentary

The setting is the end of the Festival of Booths (or Tabernacles). The Festival remembers the way that God provided for the Israelites in their desert wanderings and is when they ask for God to send rain for the year’s crops. The people also looked to the future hope promised in passages like Ezekiel 47, where a river flowing out of the temple in Jerusalem provides all the fish one could catch and where the fruit trees provide their crops year-round, without fail. In other words, a promise of abundance! It is a festival to celebrate providence.

The party atmosphere includes the pilgrims who have come to participate in the festival, singing the Hallel psalms in 113-118 and priests using a call and response for sections in Psalm 118 such as “Give thanks to the Lord” and “O Lord Save us.” On the final day of the ritual practices and sacrifices, everything is amplified. Instead of walking around the altar once, for instance, they walked and danced around it seven times. The priests did so with water collected from the pool of Siloam (the healing waters) and then they poured it out as a water offering.

It’s at this point that we are to understand that Jesus YELLS that he has the fulfillment of the prayers and the offerings made at this festival: he has God’s provision that connects past, present, and future. Jesus describes it as being thirsty and coming to him to quench one’s thirst. First, it’s wild to consider: they’ve just made their offering, hearts turned to God and Jesus blurts out, look at me—turn your hearts here! It’s a bolder self-proclamation than we might initially recognize.

The fallout is not included in our passage this week so that we can stay focused on Pentecost. But, FYI, the way the conversation goes in the verses following 37-39 are much like the verses that came before: people are questioning who Jesus might be and some go so far as to try to arrest him. No matter if he is teaching “normally” (in the synagogue, etc.) or engaging in disruptive teaching and revelations like during the offering ritual, Jesus causes division.

But back to why this passage is in the lectionary for Pentecost. Given where we are in time, post-Jesus’s ascension, we often think of the Spirit as the way we come to the Son (and the Father). Because we are downstream from what Jesus is saying here, we are living its reality. In fact, some theologians love to talk Christocentrically about how the Spirit always points to Jesus Christ.

But here, from God’s perspective, the gospel writer flips the script and shows how Jesus is pointing to the Spirit. Just as Jesus often pointed to the Father through prayer and teaching, here he points to the other member of the Trinity with the promise of provision that captures the meaning of the Festival itself. Jesus may stand at the center, holding past, present and future human-needs-met-by-God-promises-fulfilled together, but he does so as the one God of three persons doing so.

It might be helpful to consider God’s way of sharing God’s self and how, historically, theologians have used passages like this to understand the oneness of the Trinity. From Yahweh in the cloud and fire, to Jesus in the flesh and the Spirit breathed upon, the heart of it all is that the triune God reveals and shares as each person with the purpose of life and provision. The Holy Spirit is continuing the work of the Father and the Son and vice versa.

But this is not just about the Trinity; this is about us. Jesus says that when we drink from him and receive the Holy Spirit, we become part of the living waters that are God’s promised provision in the future. We become the flowing goodness of God, living waters to others, the growing river of our God that culminates in the river flowing from the throne of God with, yet again, crops that do not fail but instead reliably produce year-round. It is the healing waters of the nations, just like Siloam’s healing water used on the altar. The people of God, filled with the Spirit, become the conduit of this river of eternal life.

So come if you are thirsty and take a drink, dance in the river of life with the Spirit, share its refreshing freedom with others, and take all it provides in gratitude that God invites you into its power and peace.

Textual Point

There appears to be too many options to choose from when it comes to what passage of the scriptures Jesus is citing here. Three that are more regularly cited are Isaiah 12.3, Isaiah 58.11 and Zechariah 14.8.

Illustration Idea

In 2009 Kanye West infamously interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Music Video at the MTV Video Music Awards to declare that Beyonce should have won. Not attempting to connect Kanye’s actions too closely to Jesus’s at the Festival, I do want to highlight how out of place Jesus’s words probably felt and sounded in that moment. No wonder he caused the stir—just as Kanye also received a lot of backlash about his actions—and why people continued to pursue getting rid of him. Interestingly, there’s another layer of connection between Kanye and Jesus: both were proclaiming that someone else should be paid attention to.