<blockquote>On the last day of the biggest festival, Jesus stood up in the middle of everyone and shouted out loud "If any of you feel thirsty, come and drink from me - whoever believes in me will have rivers of living waters flowing out from them, just like the scripture says!"</blockquote>
I don't normally think of Jesus as being like one of those evangelists, you know, the ones that stand on the street corner and tell us all how we're going to die. Yet it seems like that's just what he was doing here, making a scene, getting the 'wrong kind of attention'.

We can only understand what Jesus is saying by looking a bit deeper at the background of what is going on. It's sometime in September/October, and this biggest festival is Sukkot, the feast of booths - one of the ancient festivals recorded in the Torah, one that YHWH instructed Moses to tell the Israelites to celebrate every year. The <em>sukkot</em> are booths, temporary structures that have roofs made of branches, to remind the Jews that their ancestors lived in tents for 40 years as God brought them to the land he promised them. It's a celebration of the way God fulfilled his promises to the Jews, the late harvest celebration after all the  crops have been brought in, a time of great joy and celebration. It's also a time of looking forward to the time when the promise of God for a messiah will be fulfilled, when the promises of the prophets will come to fulfilment, prayers of "hosanna". It's easy to forget that hosanna is not a prayer of praise to God like 'hallelujah', it's the prayer "God save us".

One of the central rituals of the week-long festival was the priests going down from the temple to the pool of Siloam, filling up big jugs with water and then carrying them back up the hill to the temple, along the pilgrimage road into Jerusalem, accompanied by many people singing and dancing. The  water would be poured out inside the temple as a thanksgiving offering to God, it would run down the steps, running over the massive courtyard. If like me you live in a temperate climate, it's easy to forget how precious water is when you live in a hot dry climate like the near east, whether Jerusalem or the wilderness where the Jews remembered their ancestors wanderings. Twice the Torah records the Israelites complaining to Moses of being so thirsty they would die - they weren't exaggerating, water is essential to life. Twice God provided water for them, and as they celebrate their crops for the past year, he continues to provide water. But there's a sense of being thirsty for more - thirsty for the coming messiah, thirsty for justice,thirsty for peace, thirsty for God's reign.

So as the water is being poured out and flowing down the steps, as the Jews prepare to sing, dance and play music to celebrate the blessing of God, Jesus stands up and shouts out about rivers of water coming out of those who believe in him, the Holy Spirit.

This isn't the first time John records Jesus talking about living water flowing out of people - in chapter 4 he describes Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman. John explains that Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans, and a good Jewish man would have kept away from any woman outside his immediate family. More than this, the woman he talks to is an outcast in her own community because they though she was immoral. As she's doing her daily chore of collecting water, Jesus talks to her about water springing up inside, of never being thirsty. She's been looking for life in all the wrong places, but now she finds life that will never run out.

But Jesus is doing something different here - this is not the water of daily chores, it's a break from normality, a decadent celebration of God's blessing and an expression of wanting more. But tomorrow it will be all over and normality will return. It looks to me like Jesus doesn't offer water that will never run out here. He doesn't want them to be stuck in a religious festival for the whole year, they are supposed to go back to normality after this celebration. He doesn't want them to be filled with the high of the worship all year - if anything he wants them to still be thirsty for more of God's action. Yet if they believe in him, "rivers of living water will flow from within them" - they will become a place where the thirst of others can be quenched