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For: Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Kilgore, TX Hymns: LSB 489, 497, 500, 605, 769, 503
On: The Day of Pentecost (LSB 3-year A), 2020 May 31
Text: Jn 7:37-39; Title/Theme: “Coming and Drinking”
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
“You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.” That saying reportedly “may be the single oldest distinctly English” saying still in use today, for it goes back at least to a twelfth‑century book of homilies, or “sermons”. As you probably know, when used of people, the saying’s basic idea is that, although you can show people something that will be of benefit to them, you cannot force them to accept it; like horses, people will do as they want to do. (writingexplained.org.) That saying about horses’ coming and drinking was on my mind as I studied today’s Gospel Reading, in which we hear the Lord Jesus invite both those people who thirst to come to Him and those people who believe in Him to drink of Him. If, as I think appears to be the case, the two statements are somewhat parallel and woven together—the statement about the one who believes drinking in some sense restates the statement about the one who might be thirsty coming—then Jesus does not envision someone, like a horse in the old saying, coming but not drinking. Rather, Jesus envisions the one who might thirst and believes both coming and drinking. So, this morning as we consider this Gospel Reading for the New Testament’s Day of Pentecost, let us consider the Gospel Reading under the theme “Coming and Drinking”.
When Jesus on the last, great day of the Old Testament’s Feast of Tabernacles, having stood up, cried out as the Divinely‑inspired St. John records Him doing, Jesus was echoing an invitation God had first extended through the prophet Isaiah, saying, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). And, later to St. John would be revealed Jesus’s similarly saying, “To the thirsty I [Myself] will give from the spring of the water of life without payment” (Revelation 21:6) and still later St. John himself would similarly say, “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Revelation 22:17). As Jesus said in the Gospel Reading, Scripture as a whole said that out of His heart would flow rivers of living water, and, in the Gospel Reading St. John tells us that Jesus’s statement is about the Spirit, an identification of the Spirit with water that can also be made in other prophecy through Isaiah (for example, Isaiah 44:3). But, what seemed to be “new” as Jesus spoke the words in the Gospel Reading was His being the source of the rivers of living water that are the Holy Spirit.
In Jesus’s day people may well have tried to obtain the Holy Spirit from sources other than Jesus (Luther, ad loc John 7:37, AE 23:269-270), just as we know that back then people tried to access God the Father without going through Jesus, the Son. People today are no different, either by fallen nature or in what their fallen nature leads them to do. How often have you heard other people say—and maybe even you yourself have also said—“I am spiritual but not religious”? We ourselves do not have to have made that statement, however, in order to have sinfully moved away from the Church, to not confess the Christian or any faith, and to try to experience, on our own terms, a god of our own definition. (Confer Barna.) Whether or not we all sin in precisely that manner, we all sin, for we are all sinful by nature, and on account of both our sinful nature and our actual sins we all deserve temporal and eternal death, unless we favorably answer Jesus’s enabling invitation for us, with repentance and faith, both to come to Him and to drink of Him.
Just verses before today’s Gospel Reading, the Jewish leaders were seeking to arrest Jesus, but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come (John 7:30; confer 7:32). But, Jesus’s time did come, and, when His time came, then, out of God’s great love for the world, Jesus went to the cross with the sins of the world. There on the cross Jesus died for us, in our place, the death that we deserved. Certainly part of the mystery of the incarnation and of our redemption is that the Son of God—by Whom all things were made, and from Whose heart would flow rivers of living water—in the man Jesus thirsted for lack of water (John 19:28), and yet, moments later, after He had given up His Spirit (John 19:30), when His side was pierced with a spear, presumably to confirm or ensure His death by stabbing His heart, at once there came out blood and water (John 19:33-34). Truly Jesus is, for all who thirst and believe, and so for all who come to Him and drink, the source of life mediated by the Holy Spirit, working faith that receives the forgiveness of sins through the Spirit-empowered Office of the Holy Ministry (John 20:21-23).
Both today’s Old Testament Reading, telling of the Spirit’s being put on the elders of Israel who then prophesied (Numbers 11:24-30), and today’s Second Reading, telling of the Holy Spirit’s filling the Twelve who then told the mighty works of God (Acts 2:1-21), attest to the close connection between a special gift of the Holy Spirit and the work of those in the Office of the Holy Ministry. Unless you are seeking and receiving that Office, which certainly is a noble calling, you should not look for or expect such a special gift of the Holy Spirit. Rather, through the reading and preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments—Holy Baptism, individual Holy Absolution, and the Sacrament of the Altar—the Holy Spirit is Himself given to you, creating faith when and where He pleases in those who hear the Gospel (Augsburg Confession V:2), faith that is baptized, absolved, and eats and drinks the bread and wine that are Christ’s Body and Blood, and so, through those same means, that faith receives the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
Through St. Peter’s preaching on the first New-Testament Pentecost Day, the Holy Spirit moved about three-thousand souls to repent and be baptized and so to be added to the Church (Acts 2:37-41). We do not always, if ever, see such obvious work of the Holy Spirit! Yet, we trust the Holy Spirit to so work in the lives of others—teaching them to know the Son and so also the Father—and we trust the Holy Spirit to work in our own lives—remembering not our sins or transgressions, as we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 25:1-15; antiphon: v.4), but, according to His steadfast love, remembering us, for the sake of His goodness, making us to know His ways and teaching us His paths, leading us in His truth and what is right, love and faithfulness.
The old saying goes that “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.” Online I read that warming and even flavoring water are ways to try to get horses to drink the water to which you might lead them (lighthoof.com), but, in the case of coming to Jesus and drinking of Him, no such human ways are necessary or even effective. God’s Word working through the means of Grace simply is resistible! As in the case of those who originally heard Jesus speak the words of today’s Gospel Reading, so people hearing His gracious invitation today are divided (John 7:43): they either thirst and believe, or they do not. We thank and praise God that Jesus has extended His gracious invitation to us and that we have been so enabled to respond favorably. We pray, as we did in today’s Collect, that, by the Holy Spirit, we might have a right understanding in all things and evermore rejoice in His holy consolation.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +