John 7:37-39
June 4, 2017 + Pentecost
I.
Jesus has been teaching in the Temple during the Jewish Festival of Booths or Tabernacles, called in Hebrew, Succoth. Originally a harvest festival, the holiday evolved into a remembrance of the Israelites’ time in the wilderness. One of the features of this celebration is when they carry water in a golden pitcher up from the Pool of Siloam to the Temple. This represents the water provided by God to the Israelites from a rock. They did this every evening with boisterous singing and dancing.
On the last day of this festival Jesus reflects on the water that is such a prevalent part of the ceremony. The text says “he cried out,” which he would have had to do just to be heard over the commotion. “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,” he shouts. “And let the one who believes in me drink!”
In other words, he says “Hey, everybody, I have the real ‘water’ if you are spiritually ‘thirsty’! If you want to live, trust in me!” He is not talking about literal water, or even the ceremonial water of the festival. He means that he is the One who gives miraculous real life, and we receive it by following, trusting, and obeying him. The ‘water’ is his teaching; it is also himself.
Then he adds, by way of biblical authority, “As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water!’” So on the one hand, he says that he is the source of the real water of life. And on the other hand, he says that this same water also flows within each one who trust in him. The logical inference here is that Jesus is himself within each person. We do not trust in him as if he were someone out there separate from us; to trust in him is to trust in something/someone inside you.
This is not new or even unique to this gospel. We see numerous times in the other gospels when Jesus heals someone and refuses to accept the full credit. He repeatedly reminds people that it is their faith, something already within them that he unlocked, something they had inside them all along but didn't realize it, that heals them. In Luke, Jesus even proclaims that “the Kingdom of God is within” — or among — us, now. It is not something that has to be imported from elsewhere.
In other words, Jesus is not simply announcing a new set of written rules and regulations for people to follow. He is not even giving us a remembered example to adhere to. He is fulfilling several passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that talk about how God will write the law, the Word, within people. It will not be something external that is subject to textual analysis and interpretation; it will be something we know intuitively, instinctively within. The will of God will be identical with us. We will finally realize God’s Image at the core of our being. Obeying God’s will becomes second nature to us; it is something we will automatically and naturally follow. Following God’s will is a matter of allowing ourselves to be who we truly and most deeply are.
Paul talks about this in terms of realizing the mind of Christ within us. Even the dynamics of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper have to do with Christ within us as we literally eat and swallow and ingest and digest the bread and wine representing his body and blood. Finding Christ within is the point.
II.
But where within? When Jesus says, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water!” the Greek word used is not “heart.” More precisely it is “guts,” “belly,” or even more anatomically, “stomach.” We still talk about our guts as that visceral, grounded, basic, physical part of us. If we “go with our gut” we are guided by our intuitive, instinctual nature; as distinct from our intellectual or emotional sides. Jesus says that the Spirit flows here, deep within us, from the place where we are material, grounded, and real.
This is somewhat challenging for a person like me, who tends to overthink everything to the pint of paralysis, and for whom my body is mainly a container in which I carry my brain around. I would have preferred him to say that the living water of the Spirit flows, or radiates, or emanates from the mind. But the thing about Jesus is that he almost never says what I want him to say. And here he indicates that we know, experience, and follow the Spirit by means of our gut, the last place I would expect. “Trust your gut,” he says. “That’s how to trust me and the Spirit. That’s where the Spirit is going to flow from.”
He doesn’t mean “stomach” as the organ of consumption; this is deeper than that. Our gut represents our basic physicality, it is where and how we are connected to the Earth, and to matter. It is where we are grounded in the real, as opposed to the flightiness and ephemerality of our fleeting thoughts, or the roiling turbulence of our emotions. Those elements are always changing; but the body? Our bodies change too, but at a much slower rate, generally. We think and feel many different things in the course of just a couple of minutes. But bodies usually do not change that fast.
Perhaps the Lord is remembering that this ceremonial water of the festival represents water that God gives them flowing from a wall of rock. It is not just from the Earth, but from the most solid, heavy, dense, and stable part of the Earth: stone. The Spirit is not primarily blowing in the rarefied stratosphere of our minds, but it flows from our physical, material, grounded self.
Getting in touch with our gut involves some specific actions. It is not something we just think about and imagine. We have to be physically still and actually pay attention to our bodies and where we are. I realize that most Presbyterians don’t even know there is such a thing, but the church has always encouraged and cultivated meditative practices that integrate the seemingly opposite physical and the spiritual sides of us. If rivers of living water are to flow from our gut, then we have to focus our attention down there. I mean this literally: we have to sit still and listen to what is going on deep inside of us, physically. We have to be present, grounded, focused, centered, and attentive, letting go of both the chatter of our minds and the waves of our emotions, and just be.
III.
When Jesus says all this, the gospel writer interjects a helpful comment. “Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive.” So what flows from our deepest place, this figurative ‘water’ which gives and expresses life, what we receive from Jesus Christ and perceive in our gut, is the Spirit.
Jesus has been referring to the Spirit here and there going all the way back to the beginning of this gospel. In chapter 2 John sees the Spirit descend on Jesus; in chapter 3 Jesus tells Nicodemus that we have to be born of the Spirit; and in chapter 4 he tells the Samaritan woman that we have to worship God in Spirit and truth. Each time the Spirit is associated with water, as here as well. The Spirit functions like water in enabling and providing for life, both physical and spiritual. Water is the catalyst in biological processes, and the Spirit is the catalyst as well for our own realization of who we truly are in Christ.
The word “spirit” literally means “wind” or “breath,” as you know.
Meditation often has to do with becoming conscious of our own breathing, which is a very physical, bodily act; and yet it is also literally spiritual. I mean, we do feel and sense our gut, our physical nature, when we concentrate on our breathing. So it is not that contradictory for Jesus to say that the Spirit flows like water out of a believer’s gut.
Jesus’ point, like his whole life, message, and ministry, is incarnational. That is, we don’t come into contact with God by our lofty thoughts, our rarefied theories, our delicate and complicated mental constructs. We don’t know God in our achievements and accomplishments; certainly not in our acquisitions and successes. In order to know God we have to get in touch with our most basic and foundational places and processes. It happens in our gut, where air and water and Earth all metabolize in the miracle of life.
We see this in the way that God brings us up is by sending Jesus down to get us. He meets us in the depths, even the bowels, of our true humanity, and that is where we meet him. God does not come to us in the amorphous, transparent form of a disembodied hologram. God is flushed into the world in a real body through a real woman in real time at a real Earth coordinates. In Christ God is made of the same meat we are. And that’s where we’re going to find God, and ourselves.
I have come more and more to see how Jesus teaches that changed people change the world. And that before we can express the Kingdom of God in society, we have to experience it within: in our guts, and in our hearts and minds. In other words, we have to be grounded in creation, in our own created nature, which is literally God-breathed in Genesis 1. We have to realize change as individuals, which happens in community. And as individuals, through community, we are the change God wants to see in the world.
IV.
When Jesus says all this, at the festival in Jerusalem, he knows that no one is going to get it. Not even his disciples. That’s why we are reminded that the Spirit had not yet been given. It is not until after this story reaches its fullness that the whole thing opens up for them, and they are able to see. Much of what Jesus says in the gospels makes little sense apart from his death and resurrection. The story of his passion, his lifting up, is the key that unlocks all of this. Because that is when Christ conveys the real and full truth of his destiny, and our destiny in him. That’s when he reveals the end of the story which gives the whole story meaning and direction.
Without that, focusing on our gut is mere “navel gazing,” a self-centered escape from the world, rather than the ultimate and deepest place of connection with the world. Framed by our awareness of the resurrection, meditation is not a denial of desire, but a transformation of it; it is not a flight from reality, but the gateway into it; it is not a rejection of all social responsibility, but the very awareness of the basic unity on which all social responsibility is based.
Paradoxically, Jesus says we know the Spirit when we are grounded; we attain the highest place, when we go deep; we feel true freedom, when we are most solid; and we feel the greatest and most open love when we are held in the strongest embrace. The gateway to the infinite God is located in our most profound places.
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