Lent 3A - Broken Cisterns or Living Water?

While I was working yesterday, I commented on the image of the En Gedi oasis as presented by Ray Vander Laan in the That The World May Know video curriculum. As I was trying to remember the image, I stumbled upon his website: www.followtherabbi.com.

While working with the concept of "Living Water," he is drawn to Jeremiah 2:13, which contrasts Living Water with stagnant water from cisterns.

“My people have committed two sins. They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2.13)

The children of Israel were drinking from dirty water of their own making.

They had forsaken the poor, the stranger, and the alien. They had mistaken religious ceremony for religious practice (Jeremiah. 7). They had carved out of the rock a worldview that drank solely from the culture and not from the spring of revelation. Their own cisterns had left them thirsty once again.

W. Ray Beaver (Sunday Blogging) points out that the word "quarrel" used in the Exodus lesson is a legal term, and that the Israelites are:

...in essence bringing a legal charge against Moses, for having brought them out into the wilderness where there is no water, but it is also a charge against the Lord, for having brought this about.

If we are to see this text as a charge, not only against Moses, but also against God, is there a sense in which we see the second half of Psalm 95 as an answer to the charge? Could we also consider Jeremiah 2 to be a response to these charges. In Jeremiah 2, God brings charges against the people, reminding them that they once followed Him through the desert and through the wilderness, but have now left Him for other gods who aren't gods at all. It is these false gods that are the "broken cisterns" mentioned in Jeremiah 2.

Have we exchanged "Springs of Living Water" for broken cisterns of dirty, foul-smelling water? Have we exchanged life for death?

When the woman at the well is offered living water, she leaves her water jar behind as she rushes to tell others. Why would we do anything less?

Grace and Peace,

PastorJon