Voices of  Orthodox Women

Horizons Magazine Review

Fellowship with Jesus Christ, Fellowship with One Another: 
Living Water:  A Review of "Water"
the March/ April 2005 edition of Horizons
by
Viola Larson

The March/April issue of Horizons has “water” as its theme. Many of the writers as well as the editors look at problems associated with globalization, corporations and the needs of various people groups to have there own safe water. However, in this new issue of Horizons, Jesus as the giver of living water is barely visible while the issue of how churches or Christians can help with the problems connected to the need for safe water is not addressed with enough care or discernment. 

The theme “water” in a Christian magazine leaves the Christian reader believing they will read articles about Jesus Christ! That is a symbolically rich word. The article, “The Flood Prayer,” is beautiful and relates water to baptism in the church. Gratefully, the story of salvation is found here in the article. And yet, this article along with the article, “From Water to Table,” by Paul Galbreath and Jane Rogers Vann, simply turns the reader’s attention to God as creator and to baptism, not small subjects, but we are not encouraged to marvel at the very person of Jesus Christ. In deed, the article, “Joining Together,” by Janice Sikes Rogers eliminates Jesus from thought or ritual. The unique Son of the Father is surprisingly absent from one of his own symbols. Because this particular issue of Horizons focuses on what we can do as Christians, it is so necessary to first lay a foundation in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus as the foundation is important for two reasons: It is only in our union with him that we are able to truly work the works we are called to, and because of our union with him we receive the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit who guides us, once again turning our attention to Jesus and his words. It is also the Holy Spirit who comforts and gives discernment in the midst of evil. 

 Insight about Jesus’ connection with the symbol of water is powerfully shown in the Gospel of John. Beginning with chapter seven, John focuses on Jesus’ interaction with the symbols of the Feast of Tabernacles. Lesslie Newbigin, in his commentary, The Light has Come: an Exposition of the Fourth Gospel, explains the significance of this festival as it relates to Jesus. He writes:

This was the most popular of the annual festivals and drew vast crowds to Jerusalem. It was originally the celebration of the completion of the harvest, but it had become filled with a strong element of eschatological expectation. It was a foretaste of the age to come, of the final harvest. Its central ceremonies made use of the symbolism of water and light. Each day water was drawn from the pool of Siloam and carried up to the temple in procession, while the words of Isaiah12:3 were sung (With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”) The prophecy of Zechariah 14:8 that “on that day” living waters would flow out from Jerusalem was recalled. And at night the temple courts were brilliantly lit up—recalling the preceding verse (Zech. 14:7) with its promise of unending daylight.¹ 

Jesus uses these ceremonies, the one of light and the one of water to proclaim to the people that he was fulfilling their eschatological expectations. After the feast Jesus states that he is the light of the world in the same temple area where, “during the festival, lamps were lit which illuminated the whole Temple area and even the houses beyond.”² More important to Horizons’ theme of water, John writes that Jesus stood on the last day of this feast and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘from his innermost being will flow rivers of living waters. (John 7:37,38). The people at the festival understand, though many did not believe, that Jesus was claiming to be the Christ who would give them life. And certainly the ability to walk in hard and desert places following Jesus, submitting to his commands, flows from this gift of  rivers of living waters, the Holy Spirit that Jesus gives to those who believe in him. (John 7:39; Titus3: 4-8) Only in our relationship to Jesus, as adopted sons and daughters of his Father can we draw water from the wells of salvation.

Jesus also offered living water to the woman who came to the well at Samaria. To her he said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” (John 4:10) Jesus further told her, “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14) R. V. G. Tasker in his commentary on John, points out that the Samaritan woman is seeking physical water and even when Jesus tells her that his water will cause her to never thirst again she thinks of it as something magical.³ But Jesus exposes her sin and allows her to understand that, “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” With this she sees him as the Christ and eagerly goes to tell those in her city of the Messiah. It is on the basis of her faith in Jesus Christ that she reaches out to others. It is for the sake of Jesus Christ and others that she exposes herself to those who probably shunned her. The Samaritan woman is transformed and called because of Jesus who gives her living water. 

Drawing on the theme of water the editors have provided many articles on the need for safe and cheap drinking water for various people groups and nations. One article, “Living water for the World,” by Steve Young, is notable. It is the story of how a water purifying system was developed and promoted by Christians in the Synod of Living Waters. It has been used effectively in “Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras, Haiti and Belize.” A church related water purifying system that helps the poor and offers the gospel is commendable. Several articles, “Nothing Sacred: the Privatization of Water,” by Molly Graver, “The Water War” by Mariela Ribera and “Water, Water, Everywhere?” deal with the political problems of people who do not have enough access to a source of clean and cheap water. 

The authors of these articles cite several corporations who have been given private rights to provide water systems for various countries and sell the water to the people. Some of these corporations have, evidently, done a very poor job and have charged excessive amounts for water that rightly belongs to the people and their nation. The problem with these articles is not the fact that they point out the dishonesty and sinfulness of some corporations, but that they are advocating that Christian believers buy into other strange ideologies as a corrective to this problem. Some of the ideological groups the editors are suggesting as good places to find resources connect with the very radical on the far, far left. The Polaris Institute is one case in point. They are a covering group for many groups protesting many causes. They not only link to the popular and reasonable Sierra Club but also to a group of Anarchists. Having left Jesus mostly out of the picture they are counting on strange helpers.

One is reminded of the history of Israel’s failure to follow Jehovah. In the second chapter of Jeremiah  we are told, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:13) Not only are we called to come to the fountain God has provided but we are not allowed to build our own cisterns, to create our own way of salvation. All that we build, false idols, false ideology, false theology is broken and will not hold water. The sins that God is pointing out in this chapter of Jeremiah are mainly two: following after false gods and harming the “innocent poor.” The text in this chapter mostly focuses on Israel’s continual idolatry but in verse thirty-four the prophet states, “also on your skirts is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor.”  These two sins, following after false gods and harming the “innocent poor, are not really separate issues with God. One follows from the other. 

A case in point: in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century so many variants of philosophy, ideology and theology were forming, changing and gathering followers that moral and theological confusion was rampant. Most could not have predicted what great totalitarian movements were looming on the horizon, nor could many have understood that their own easy relationship with the prevailing culture would connect them to such evil. Who could know that groups advocating for nature or health or ethnic spirituality would turn evil. But, doctors in Germany who, before the time of Hitler, advocated for the right to die ended up choosing those who would die in gas chambers. And the influx of nature worship, spiritualism and ancient paganism at the beginning of the twentieth century fed into a racism which by the thirties became a racist paganism determined to destroy both the Jewish people and the Church. Social Gospel Preachers in America who advocated for eugenics both in the early twentieth century never dreamed that that crusade would end with the attempted annihilation of a whole race.⁴

When utopia is in the air many who call themselves Christian fail to be Christian.  False deities and ideologies mixed with good intentions can still place innocent blood on worshiper’s clothes. The important point is we also are living in a time when many differing groups and ideologies are competing for attention. Both Communists and Fascists fought against each other in the streets of Berlin before the triumph of Nazism. Both groups were anti-Christ. Today we have groups, some listed on the Polaris Institute web site, fighting against WTO in the streets of Seattle and elsewhere. We cannot know, since they do not have Christ as their center, what shape any of these groups will take in the years to come and discernment is necessary. 

As a final and important reflection, in the last issue of Horizons, Janice Cantron wrote on the coming Presbyterian Women’s Gathering, “Creation, Celebration,” and I critiqued her very bad translation of John 1: 1-4a. The actual correct translation in the New Revised Standard Version is:

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. (Verse 2 is included here.)

Thankfully, in her new article on Creation she translates those verses using the masculine pronouns, thus putting the incarnation back into the text. In her commentary Cantron writes, “John stresses that Jesus, the Christ who came into the world fully and completely as a human being, was also fully and completely God—and always had been.” (39) However, on the back of the new issue of Horizons the editors have allowed the verse to be printed without the pronouns, thus once again eliminating the incarnation from the text. That is, they have once again written, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . All things came into being through [God], and without [God] not one thing came into being. What has come into being in [God] was life, and the life was the light of all people.” (Brackets part of translation.)  The editors have simply eliminated the Greek masculine pronouns for Jesus and added God in their place eliminating the importance of the incarnation to this text. But, the proper way to paraphrase the text would have to be, “All things came into being through Jesus Christ, and without Jesus Christ not one thing came into being. What has come into being in Jesus Christ was life, and the life was the light of all people.”  The editor’s text is blasphemy because it eliminates Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of the Father thus denying the earliest confession of the church, “Jesus is Lord.”

________________________
1.  Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1982) 91.
2. Ibid., 102.
3. R.V.G. Tasker, The Gospel According to John, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, reprint (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press 1995), 76.
4. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, paperback edition, A new preface by author, (no city: Basic Books  2000); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, (New York: Schocken Books 1981); Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenic Movement, (Oxford University Press 2004).