John 7:31-52 Being Living Water

In the second half of John 7, lots of different people are discussing Jesus and prophecy. It's obvious that the authors want the Pharisees to be seen as the ignorant villains of the story itself, but there are some interesting statements that suggest the authors may have been arguing with some of their contemporaries as well.

For instance, one of the points of Jewish messianic prophecy seems focused on the birthplace of a messiah. It's clear that Jesus doesn't fit that prophetic mold, because (according to the authors of John) he wasn't born in Bethlehem. He doesn't fit the prophecies, yet the authors clearly think of him as the messiah. This is a different approach than what the authors of Matthew and Luke seem to take. (The gospel of Mark doesn't have any sort of birth story for Jesus.)

It would seem that the authors of Matthew and Luke invent a story about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, including genealogies that don't even line up, just to have the tale agree with prophecy. The authors of John, however, point out that prophecy is less reliable than what people are able to witness for themselves. The people in the story of John 7 believe what they believe about Jesus because they have seen something, not because circumstances line up with predictions from long-dead forecasters.

The criticism of these believers in the story comes from the Pharisees who say that the crowds don't understand religious law, so they can't possibly know what they're talking about. Yet, the Pharisees were supposed to be among those Jewish authorities who instructed others. Any indictment about the ignorance of the students is a denunciation of the teachers. Maybe these fellows weren't really all that bright after all. Or at least, maybe the authors of John wanted them to seem stubbornly unenlightened and ineffectual. In any case, the authors of John point out that prophecies aren't always to be trusted.

Some theological debates seem to have little value. Dare we even go into the business about there not being a Spirit yet? Trinitarians assert that their god is a three-fold entity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One deity, but three somethings. Personalities? Functions? States of existence? Trinitarians don't agree, and it isn't always clear to them what they're talking about. Many Trinitarian formulas, however, assume that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all in some way eternal. Usually, the challenge is to the Son part of the equation, since they equate the Son with Jesus. Being human, Jesus had an obvious beginning, and eternal things do not have a beginning. The observation of John 7, however, seems to be about the Spirit. The Spirit apparently wasn't around at some point, and thus had a beginning, which means that the Spirit cannot be eternal. If you believe John's accounting, that is. All of this is rather pointless unless you are trying to prop up a Trinitarian belief system, which is based on a whole lot of other problematic assumptions before you even get to the bit about people being eternal. But in case it comes up in conversation, John 7:39 challenges the concept of an eternal Spirit.

I would challenge the existence of an eternal Spirit for the same reason that the gospel of John says that people believed what they believed about Jesus. We know what we know about the world by observation and rational analysis. Science continually improves our ability to observe well, but even in ancient times, there was obviously a sense that witnessing something first hand was a key to belief. The people in the gospel of John's story believe because of their own experience. Even Nicodemus, who is among the Pharisees, defends Jesus because of a personal experience.

We know what we know about the world by observation and rational analysis. This is problematic in and of itself, of course, because we don't always know what we're observing. As we mentioned last week, our brains are lazy. If there is an easy answer available, we often stop looking for more complex answers. Lights in the sky? Must be a UFO. No need to consider any other options. An infected person with a 50% survival rate gets better and goes on living? Must be a miracle. It's cold outside today? Must be global cooling. We aren't all good scientists, and even good scientists make mistakes in their observations sometimes.

In our own personal experience, we might find it easy to believe that there are supernatural forces at work. Anything that we cannot rationally explain in the first few moments we think about it seems extraordinary. We have to rely on people who have done the hard work of figuring some things out through intentional observation and rational analysis. There are actually scientists who have studied things like prayer and miracles, and the conclusions of every investigation to date that has followed strong experimental standards has been that what we experience falls within natural parameters. Some people do recover from really serious illnesses. Sometimes people do experience the things that they pray for. These experiences may seem extraordinary to the individuals experiencing it, but they are not unnatural. If an illness has a 1% recovery rate, it stands to reason that out of every hundred people who become infected, one of them will recover. To that one person, it seems miraculous, but someone has to be that one survivor out of a hundred infected, even though the physician can't tell who's in that one percent until they recover.

We all have assumptions and beliefs about how the world works. Some call our set of assumptions and beliefs a mental model. We've mentioned mental models before. One major difference between scientific predictions and prophecy is that scientists allow their mental models to be corrected, while people who adhere to prophecy expect reality to conform to their own mental models. Sometimes, scientists change their mental models very reluctantly, but a basic premise of scientific knowledge is that our beliefs have to adjust to new information. A tendency of prophecy is that, when a prediction fails to come true or seems impossible based on new information, any explanation that maintains old assumptions and beliefs is preferable to changing the mental model.

If we are not willing to change our mental models from time to time, we will be stuck in a perspective that doesn't grow. We will be stunted. We won't bring our best possible selves forward. The gospel of John is a story, but the characters in that story reveal some truths about us. When we see a truth right in front of our faces, and we choose to reject that truth in favor of our old familiar beliefs and assumptions, we are like the Pharisees in the story. When we do this, we miss opportunities to create the kind of lives and the kind of world we most want. We miss out on living into a best possible version of ourselves when we don't let reality and truth outweigh our assumptions.

In the story, though, the Jesus character reflects another possibility. "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, 'Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water.'" Incidentally, this isn't a quotation from any known Old Testament scripture, so we don't know what scripture the authors are quoting here. The book of Jeremiah does refer to Yahweh as a fountain of living water, but that's about it. "Living water" refers to clean, flowing water that comes from a spring as opposed to dirty, stagnant water in a cistern. Some people take these words attributed to Jesus as self-referential, as if Jesus is referring to himself exclusively as "living water." The actual words suggest something different.

We've said that to "believe in" someone is to fully trust that person's example as the appropriate way to live. In other words, believing in a person is reflected by emulating what that person does. So, if anyone is not satisfied with a current experience of life, consider another way of engaging in life -- a way that expresses unconditional love for others while clearly defining one's own values. If your mental model isn't allowing you to live into a best possible version of yourself, try on a new mental model built on the premises that all people are worthy of love and that you are beautiful, creative, and capable. If you adopt this new way of seeing yourself, other people, and the world, the effects will flow into the lives of other people around you as well. This isn't a selfish vision, but a vision of transformation.

Old inaccurate assumptions and beliefs cannot contribute to a better world. They will only get in our way. If we want to live into a best possible version of self, we have to base our mental models on truth about ourselves, other people, and the world we all share. This also means that we have to revise our mental models as we get new information. All of this goes back to living more intentionally, considering our values and being purposeful in how we act with integrity to those values. When we do that, we are like refreshing water from a pure spring in the lives of others around us.


A Little Experiment: Assuming. As a way of demonstrating to yourself how many assumptions you make about others, notice a stranger at a meeting or restaurant and make a mental list of all the assumptions you can make about that person. Some of your assumptions may be right. If you're at a conference for accountants, you might assume a person's career pretty accurately. Make your list more detailed than that, though. You probably assume some things about a person's education, family, hobbies, faith, and political affiliation too. Notice how many things you assume about a person you actually know very little about.

A Risky Experiment: Verify. Introduce yourself to that stranger from the previous experiment and see how many of your assumptions were accurate. You might even tell the person that you are working on not making assumptions about people.

If you really want to learn something about yourself, repeat these two experiments with as diverse a group of people as you can for a month.

A Big Experiment: Inquiry. Consider one of your beliefs. If you want to play it safe, use a belief in Bigfoot or something like that. If you are willing to go deep, take a belief in which you've invested a little more emotional energy. Examine the evidence for that belief using the SEARCH formula introduced by Theodore Schick, Jr. & Lewis Vaughn in their book How to Think about Weird Things:Critical Thinking for a New Age:

State the belief clearly.
Examine the Evidence for the belief.
Consider Alternative possibilities.
Rate, according to the Criteria of adequacy, each Hypothesis.

The "criteria of adequacy" is a way of saying that an idea (1) can be tested, (2) yields observable predictions, (3) is the simplest explanation [that is, makes the fewest assumptions], and (4) is consistent with other trustworthy observations about the world.

As I said, a big experiment.

John 7:1-31 Rules and Restrictions vs. an Internal Guidance System

The first half of John 7 is a convoluted bit of storytelling. Jesus tells his brothers that he's not going to travel with them to celebrate the Festival of Booths because his "time has not yet come," but then he sneaks off after them and makes public appearances anyway. People in the crowd have mixed opinions of him. Some people think he's pretty amazing. When Jesus asks why people are looking for an opportunity to kill him, others in the crowd say, "You must be crazy! Who's trying to kill you?" Then, just a few lines later, people are asking, "Isn't that the man the officials are trying to kill?" It's hard to tell who couldn't get their story straight, the authors of John or the people of Jerusalem.

The Festival of Booths, or the Feast of Tabernacles, is also called Sukkot. It is a seven-day Jewish Thanksgiving, a time to express gratitude for the fall harvest. Sukkot is one of three annual festivals for which first-century Jews would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so it would be a good time to be seen by a bunch of people, and it would also be a good time to get lost in a crowd. In the middle of the Sukkot, there was a water ceremony, which may inform the second half of John 7.

There are a couple of interesting things to lift out of this piece of the story. First, according to the story, Jesus' brothers had their doubts about Jesus. They had a hard time seeing the same problems and possibilities that he saw. Their suggestion to make a public appearance at Sukkot is interpreted as a bit of goading (which Jesus eventually gives in to, but he apparently doesn't want his brothers to get credit for the idea).

Like Jesus' brothers, when we hear or read something that challenges our way of seeing the world, we often reject it or refute it in our minds without really considering the possibility. As a consequence of my personal path, I wind up reading and listening to a lot of assertions that run counter to my own beliefs and mental models. Some of that is repetitive, and once I've wrestled with a particular issue and arrived at a satisfying conclusion, I don't have to wrestle with it anew every time I encounter that same issue. The temptation, though, is to accept or reject something without thinking about it. This is a more emotional reaction that has more to do with anxiety than conviction.

Other people have reactions to some of my assertions, too. And, like Jesus' brothers, one of the most common challenges we fire at someone with whom we disagree is, "Prove it!" Of course, we also find problems with evidence that proves something we don't want to believe. We can be slippery and tricky when we want to be.

Even though he eventually sneaks off and does what his brothers suggest, he says something interesting in response to their challenge for him to prove himself. "My time has not yet come, but your time is always here." The gospel writer uses the idea that Jesus' time had not yet come as a literary device, kind of like fate or destiny. The twist is that second part -- your time is always here. People were not ready to hear and accept a truth that challenges their way of seeing the world and required more personal responsibility of them. In a sense, Jesus was pointing at people and telling them to change, and that rarely goes over well. Jesus' brothers had nothing to lose by living responsible and intentional lives, though. Just like us. They could have set an example of principled action in their own lives any time without risking much. The time for that is always here. It is always our time.

After lying to his brothers and sneaking off to the festival, Jesus is recognized as a confident teacher of spiritual ideas, but people have varied reactions to his ideas. Some people are impressed with his wisdom. Others want to know his credentials. Some people criticize him based on where he was born and raised. Others don't seem to think that matters. When we don't like what someone has to say, their background and credentials still become easy targets. It takes a lot of work sometimes to challenge concepts and ideas, but attacking the letters (or lack of letters) after someone's name or attacking where a person comes from takes a lot less effort. The Jesus character doesn't respond to these petty attacks, and really, we shouldn't expect anyone else to. Moreover, we aren't obligated to respond to petty attacks either. If someone doesn't like what we have to say, they won't like it more just because we can produce a diploma or pedigree.

Jesus does try to point out the flaw in a specific criticism: Jews saw no problem with performing circumcisions on the Sabbath, but they apparently were criticizing him for doing other spiritual work on the Sabbath. This conflict is also perhaps exaggerated in the New Testament narratives. The Pharisees certainly developed a complex array of rules and strictures as "hedges" to keep people from skirting too close to breaking the law, but these rules were not the actual religious law. They were like putting a device on a vehicle so that it could only go 35 mph, just to make sure that a driver couldn't speed most of the time. Jesus' way is depicted as taking that device away and being personally responsible for driving the speed limit. So, his logical argument about circumcision on the Sabbath is a bit of a straw man; he's making a point about something that is not really a major issue.

The real issue seems to be much more complex. The authors of John are attacking a legalistic spiritual system, not a specific practice. Where we restrict ourselves within a narrowly defined set of acceptable behaviors, we prevent ourselves from personally responsible growth. For instance, when we decide that if we can't say something nice, we shouldn't say anything at all, we never learn how to speak difficult truths gently. When we restrict ourselves to the rules of polite society because of what other people might think of us, we never learn to be the kind of people that we most want to be. And our anxiety about all the rules we try to follow probably winds up bubbling over in ways that we don't like.

People know the difference between right and wrong. We know what causes harm and we know what creates greater well-being, and we are still learning more and getting sharper in that knowledge. We also forget a lot of that when we feel threatened. In this story, Jesus says, "You know where I'm from," which is kind of like saying, You know what I'm saying makes sense, even if you don't like it. Your deepest, most noble self says more or less the same things to you that my deepest, most noble self says to me. Living according to the values of our deepest, most noble selves is sometimes messier than living by a set of contrived external rules, though. We have to be more thoughtful and more intentional in our lives, and that can seem like hard work.

Our ways of thinking can be lazy sometimes. We don't like to put in the effort to consider other possibilities. Yet, if we want to have more fulfilling experiences of life, if we want to live into our authentic selves, if we want to contribute in some way to a better world, we have to grow beyond the easy restrictions of external rules. We have to develop what some might call an "internal guidance system": clear principles to guide us toward greater well-being in our own lives and in the lives of others.

We've gotten so accustomed to making lazy decisions based on external rules that we often don't pay attention to our deepest values. They seem less important or less attainable somehow, so we stick with safe decisions. Our restrictions aren't the same as the ancient Jewish restrictions, but they serve the same purpose. They usually start with words like must, should, have to, or need to. When we think those words or say them out loud, this is a cue for us to stop and think through what we're doing. It's possible that we've set our guiding principles on a back burner in order to take a lazier route.

Don't get me wrong. Lazy thinking is very useful, and our brains have developed fast and efficient decision making processes for a reason. There are some decisions, however, that we need to engage more thoughtfully, through the lens of our guiding principles. At first, we may not trust that we can make wise decisions without our collection of should's and have to's, but like anything else, we can become more confident with practice.

We begin by recognizing when we are being thoughtless. When we are accepting or rejecting ideas without actually considering them. When we are going along with a set of restrictions or rules that actually don't align with who we most want to be in the world. From that point of recognizing, we can engage our guiding principles more intentionally. More work? Yes. More fulfilling life? Absolutely. But I can't prove it to you. If you want proof, you'll have to test it out in your own life.

A Little Experiment: Noticing. Pay attention to the language of your thoughts and words this week. How many times do you say "should" or "have to" or something similar? How accurate are those statements? Do the things you decide from that space of restriction align with your deepest values and guiding principles?

Another Little Experiment: Listening. As you listen to people this week, consider that their perspective might be valid. This doesn't mean that your perspective is invalid. You might just have different ways of seeing the world. Can you learn something from listening without judging or demanding proof?

One More Little Experiment: Sharing. This is similar to some of our earlier little experiments, but once you've listened without judgment to another perspective, try sharing your perspective. The goal is not to convince the other person that you're right and they're wrong or that your way of seeing the world is better than theirs. The point is just to say what is so for you. Whether they accept or reject your perspective doesn't matter. You're just sharing your point of view.