The Jewish people celebrate three major festivals described in the Torah: Sukkot (Tabernacles) in the autumn, Pesach (Passover) in the spring, and Shavuot (Pentecost) in the summer. (Chanukah in the winter didn’t even make the top five in Jesus’s day.) The other three gospel writers, of course, tell us about Passover, and Luke in Acts tells us about Pentecost, but John is the only one to tell us about Tabernacles.
John anticipated this back in Chapter 1 when he said the Word “tabernacled” among us. Now John takes (almost) 2 chapters to describe Jesus’s visit to this festival. The festival was a bit like a week-long Sabbath, or the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was a time when time flowed differently.
You know how Christians have “Christmas people” and “Easter people” with their favorite holidays? The Judeans had “Tabernacles people.” The closest equivalent may be if we combined elements of Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. Like Thanksgiving, Tabernacles celebrated harvest with big gatherings and feasts. Like American Christmas, Tabernacles lit up the night, with ceremonies of torch-lighting– even torch-juggling! — at the Temple in place of our strings of colored lights.
A giant candelabra would give so much light that “there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated.” (Mishnah Sukkah 5:3) The torchlight, music, and dancing would last all night until dawn. The visual effect was the same for both the ancient Jewish and modern Christian festivals: all would see that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it (see John 1:5).
On top of the mass celebration and light, Tabernacles had something none of our modern festivals have: a water-pouring ceremony to go along with the torch-lighting. Water was carried from the Pool of Siloam through the “Water Gate” into the Temple courtyard. Shofars would sound a long blast, then nine staccato blasts, then another long blast, as the priest ascended to pour the water into a limestone basin west of the altar, which poured out through a thin “nose” into a stream of flowing, “living” water. (Mishnah Sukkah 4:9)
At the end of this holiday week, Jesus suddenly stood up in the Temple and shouted to the gathered crowd. Most people probably didn’t even know he was there. He had stayed in Galilee for the first half of the week-long ceremony, arrived in secret (7:10), then taught in the Temple during the second half. People were still arguing with him about the Third Sign (the man healed on the Sabbath, 7:23) and Jesus’s lack of Rabbinical schooling (7:15). “Do not judge by appearances,” Jesus said (7:24). Then, suddenly, he appeared in the Temple, and everyone heard him say:
“IF ANYONE IS THIRSTY, LET HIM COME TO ME, AND LET HIM DRINK. WHOEVER HAS FAITH IN ME, JUST AS SCRIPTURE HAS SAID, ‘OUT OF HIS INNER PARTS STREAMS OF LIVING WATER WILL FLOW.” (7:37-38 DBH)
When he said this those who knew the Hebrew Scriptures would also hear one of the prime “Tabernacles verses,” Isaiah 12:3: “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” That promise in Isaiah is extended to all people who come to the Temple on Mount Zion. (That is also the Christmas Eve reading in last year’s Isaiah Advent Calendar.)
Other prophets resonate with this proclamation. The end chapters of Ezekiel tell of a restored Temple where water flows from beneath the threshold of its door, turning the brackish water of the Dead Sea into water fresh and clean: “everything will live where the river goes.” (Ezekiel 47:9)
Jesus is saying all this at once, and more. John says he speaks of the Spirit, given after the Son’s ascension (7:39), the gift of the Father (Matthew 7:11) – the Trinity is the waterspring, and the Temple is no longer the place where heaven meets earth. As Jesus predicted in John 4, a day will come when true worship will take place on neither Mount Gerizim nor Mount Zion. That true worship will happen at the end of John’s Gospel, when Thomas, so-called “doubting Thomas,” falls at Jesus’s feet and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) There, Thomas saw God’s glory and found God’s dwelling place.
At the end of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus shouts that this is “as Scripture has said,” but no quote from the Hebrew Scriptures is quite exact to Jesus’s words here. He is giving us new scripture, new wine, and new wineskins, fulfilling and overflowing out of the old. At the festival of water and light, Jesus ties up “the entire matrix of scriptural expectations”* of overflowing abundance, of light in the darkness and water in the desert, in one image, one gift from heaven, leaving one choice for the hearer to make.
*QUOTE: Beale and Carson, ed., Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, p. 454.
IMAGE: World of Color wanderingindisney.com
