Jeremiah 17:13, 50:7, John 1:25
The Pharisees came to John in the Jordan River and asked
him, “If you are not the Christ, the Messiah, or Elijah, or the foretold
prophet, why are you baptizing?”
There is so much to unpack in this single question.
To understand the full import of what the Pharisees asked,
we need to return to Israel before the forced exile to Babylon and the
voluntary exile to Egypt, namely the time of Jeremiah the prophet.
During a time of famine, the Word of God came to Jeremiah.
Judah mourns
The cry of Jerusalem
has gone up
The nobles have sent
their little children to the watersprings
They find no water
They return with
their bowls empty
Ashamed and confused
They cover their
heads
The ground is beaten
down, afraid
There is no rain
The plowmen are
ashamed and confused
They cover their
heads
The deer calve but
find no grass
The wild asses snuff
up the air like dragons
Their eyes search to
the end but there is no grass
Oh Lord, our sins
witness against us
We have turned away,
turned back from You many times
For Your own Name’s
sake,
Israel’s Hope and
Pool of Living Water,
Rescuer and Savior in
time of anguish and adversity,
Why are you a
stranger and a wayfarer in the land,
One who stays only
for the night?
Why are you stunned
and confused
Like a champion who
cannot rescue or save?
From
Jeremiah 14:1-9
And again:
Oh YHWH, LORD,
Israel’s Hope and
Pool of Living Water,
All who forsake you
shall be ashamed and confused
Those who revolt from
my words shall be recorded in the earth
Because they have
forsaken YHWH, the LORD,
The wellspring of
living water.
From
Jeremiah 17:7
Following the time when Jeremiah spoke and wrote these
words, Israel’s people were divided and exiled. After their return to their
homeland, they took great care to do whatever they could to avoid another exile
and dispersal of their people. From this context, the Pharisees arose.
The Pharisees took Torah seriously and often literally. They
followed its teachings in matters of belief and behavior. They were careful to
observe religious rites and to perform acts of piety. They eagerly awaited
Messiah, more so after their national humiliation first at the hands of the
Greeks, defeated by the Maccabees, and now, in the time of John, at the hands
of the Romans. They had not been exiled, but they were not the autonomous
theocracy they believed God intended. So they were looking for the one God
would send to rescue and save them, in part from sin, but in larger part from
the Romans. They were the true believers, the true patriots.
One aspect of their belief is the necessity of ritual
washing. Torah teaches that many life events cause uncleanness in the
individual, who has then to wash and remain unclean until nightfall (see
Leviticus, many places). (It can be
noted that these life events often have to do with the death of potential life
or actual death, ultimately connected with sin by way of the Fall.) After the
Babylonian exile, the devout constructed mikveh
for this purpose, sacred individual baths, fed by “living water”—water from
springs. Rainwater from a cistern that flowed by gravity into this mikveh was acceptable, but flowing
rainwater cannot purify. Then as well as today, converts to Judaism must wash
in a mikveh.[1]
The Jordan River, sourced by three smaller rivers all rising
from springs, is living water for the purposes of washing away uncleanness.
Thus it is the perfect spot for John to immerse those who are repenting of
living wrongly.
The Pharisees who came hopefully to ask John his calling had
already been through their daily washing, very likely. They wanted to please
God so that their nation would be free from oppressors. They also wanted a
Messiah who would help turn the nation toward God so that God would free them
from Rome.
The Messiah Who Actually Came
The story is familiar about how Jesus arrived at the Jordan,
John spoke prophetically of the Lamb of God who carries away the sins of the
whole world, and then Jesus enters the purifying water and John baptizes him.
John sees the Spirit of God descend on Jesus and witnesses that “this is the
Son of God.” By the end of John 1, Jesus has identified himself as the same
ladder Jacob saw between earth and heaven, with God’s messengers ascending and
descending on it. In John 3, Jesus tells Nicodemus that the natural birth and
the water bath must be followed and superseded by a spiritual birth. In John 4,
by Jacob’s Well, Jesus offers the Samaritan woman living water, even a well of
water springing up in her to everlasting life. In John 5, Jesus heals a man
waiting by healing waters, but the man does not, in fact, bathe either
literally or figuratively in living water, and he turns Jesus in as a
Sabbath-breaker.
In John 6, Jesus walks over the waters of the Sea of Galilee
to join the fearful disciples in their boat.
In John 7, Jesus stands in the Temple and shouts,
All who thirst,
Come to me and drink
All who trust in me
Will have streams of
living water
Within them
(He spoke thus of the
Spirit of God)
John
7:37-39
It would not have escaped the Pharisees in the crowd that
Jesus was echoing the prophet Isaiah:
All who thirst
Come to the
watersprings
Isaiah
55:1
John 9 tells of Jesus healing a blind man by spitting in the
dust, making a mud poultice, and then sending him to wash in the pool fed by
the fountain of Siloam. This washing revisits the whole idea of the mikveh, the purifying bath that prepares
for worship. Indeed, when the man sees Jesus again, he worships him.
By John 10, Jesus has completed a circle and returned to the
spot where John baptized him. In John 13, Jesus washes feet, saying to Peter, “If
I don’t wash you, you hold no part in me….Whoever has bathed is clean, and
needs only to wash the feet. And you are clean.” Jesus himself is the living
water that purifies, and to be part of him requires immersion in that mikveh as well as the specific washing
of whatever is dusty. This becomes more vivid when the Roman soldier pierces
Jesus’s side and blood and water flow out (John 19:34)—blood symbolizing life,
human life, and water symbolizing the living water of spirit, first referenced
in John 1:12-13:
But to as many who
held onto him,
Who committed
themselves to his character and authority,
To them he gave the
strength and freedom
To become children of
God:
Born not of human
blood nor human pleasure nor human will,
But of God’s blood,
God’s pleasure and God’s will.
John identifies Jesus with the purifying and healing water
of the mikveh, and this is not
entirely new information. But the most exciting insight comes out of the
passages in Jeremiah, where the mikveh
bath is a sacred pun for hope, one of the three central Christian virtues.
When Jesus is our cleansing bath, we enter into his being,
we take hold of him and become one with him and one like him. This is our
ground for hope. Hope is not an insubstantial wish for things to improve, but
our hope, who is Jesus, anchors us. We may need daily to have Jesus clean us,
but no one can take away from us that immersion in the water of life, which
Jesus has also placed within us and provided for us. As the apostle says in 1
John 3:2-3:
Beloved, we are now
the children of God
What we will be has
not yet appeared
But we do know that
when God appears
We will be like God
For God will allow us
to see God
As God really is
And all who have this
hope in God
Cleanse themselves
Even as God is clean
Here is a picture of that cleansing, healing bath from the
fiction of George MacDonald. In The
Princess and Curdie, Irene has had a terrifying adventure underground in goblins’
tunnels, and has found her way back to her magical grandmother. Here is the scene:
“You are very tired, my child,” the
lady went on. “Your hands are hurt with the stones, and I have counted nine
bruises on you. Just look what you are like.”
And she held up to her a little
mirror which she had brought from the cabinet. The princess burst into a merry
laugh at the sight. She was so draggled with the stream, and dirty with
creeping through narrow places…The lady laughed too, and lifting her again upon
her knee, took off her cloak and night-gown. Then she carried her to the side
of the room. Irene…[started] a little when she found that she was going to lay
her in the large silver bath; for as she looked into it, again she saw no
bottom, but the stars shining miles away…in a great blue gulf. Her hands closed
involuntarily on the beautiful arms that held her, and that was all.
The lady pressed her once more to
her bosom, saying: “Do not be afraid, my child.”
“No, grandmother,” answered
[Irene], with a little gasp: and the next instant she sank in the clear cool
water.
When she opened her eyes, she saw
nothing but a strange lovely blue over and beneath and all about her. … she
seemed nearly alone. But instead of being afraid, she felt more than
happy—perfectly blissful. And from somewhere came the voice of the lady
singing…
How long she lay in the water she
did not know. It seemed a long time—not from weariness but from pleasure. But
at last she felt the beautiful hands lay hold of her, and through the gurgling
water she was lifted out into the lovely room. …When she stood up on the floor
she felt as if she had been made over again. Every bruise and all weariness
were gone, and her hands were soft and whole as ever.
And here is another lovely picture of the truth of this
living water:
And he showed me a
clean river
Of the water of life
Crystal clear
Proceeding out of the
throne of God and of the Lamb
And on either side of
the river was the Tree of Life
Yielding twelve kinds
of fruit
One each month
And its leaves were
for the healing of the nations
Rev.
21:1-2
The first gathering of water referred to as mikveh is Genesis 1:10, where God
gathers together the waters called Seas. The mikveh bath is a place where drops of water collect together. Many
small drops of water springing from the earth or falling from the sky gather
together in one significant community of water. This occurs because the
separate drops abide together, or in the case of a river, they are continuous
with one another.
Let us take to heart these truths. Jesus washes us clean,
Jesus is the living water which springs up in us, Jesus is the living water in
which we bathe ourselves, Jesus is our hope. As we gather together, we too can
be living water for each other, and our hope bonds us together to be living
water and hope—mikveh—for the healing of whole world.
