God Plans A Surprise Party Series

Saturday of the Fourth Week in Lent 2024

So what words were those that convinced a number of Christ’s listeners that He was (and is) the prophet foretold by Moses and so many other of the early prophets? Our lectionary is not very helpful there, so we go right to chapter 7 of St. John’s Gospel and look a couple of verses earlier: Jesus declared: “On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’”

What festival is this? It is one of the great Jewish feasts on which Moses had commanded every Hebrew follower of the Law must go up to the Temple to pray. It’s a harvest festival, Succoth, in which all the Jews lived in branched huts as many did during the forty years in the desert prior to entering the Holy Land. It was the happiest feast of the year when they celebrated the water coming from the Rock, and the leadership of God in a pillar of fire and cloud. “Two distinctive features of this week-long ceremony in September-October have made an impression on the text. Water was brought daily from the pool of Siloam to the temple, where it was poured over the altar as prayers were recited for the all-important winter rain. And the lights in the women’s court flamed so brightly that the city was lit up by them.”

So Jesus is telling all that He is about to fulfill the prophecy of Ezekiel that we heard earlier this week, when in the fulfillment age water would come from the Temple and flow out into the desert, eventually flowing into the Dead Sea and making it fruitful and clean. But He pushes the promise even further. Jesus Himself is a spring of living water, and those who come to Him in faith will themselves become rivers of living water. Of course, since Jesus had proved His credentials by a number of recent miracles, His listeners were being quite logical in concluding that Jesus Himself was not just a prophet, but THE prophet foreseen by His predecessors like Moses and Ezekiel.

This kind of behavior, we see, came at once to the attention of the chief priests and Pharisees, who held themselves to be the divinely-appointed religious inquisitors for the Jewish faith. Jesus was making outrageous claims. Some of them had already been in discussions about how to rid the nation of this Jesus character, and some kind of execution was more and more the method of choice. This makes today’s psalm, which asks for God’s intervention to stop violence from being done on the righteous, most appropriate. And Jeremiah’s words also ring true. Jesus knew, because He was in both natures close to the Father, what was in human hearts, and how jealousy could provoke leaders to murderous intent. He could read the signs of the times. And His prayer to God, the Father, the righteous judge would seem in just days or weeks to be in vain, because He would be turned over to the Romans for execution, after grim torture. But we need to keep our attention on Christ, as always, because the following Sunday, God had planned what could only be termed a “surprise party.”