A Jewish Thanksgiving
For the Lord’s Day:  the 20^th of November 2005 

Leviticus 23: 39-43 & John 7: 37-43

Introduction:  The Jewish Church had quite an order of religious holidays, even as we do.  According to the chart in our Geneva Study Bible, there were seven major Holidays and between them, there were twenty-one days of celebration.  The Jewish feast of Tabernacles, with which we are concerned today, lasted eight days in fact.  So why should we be exhausted with a mere four day weekend?  Just as the early Israelites traveled to Jerusalem, so do many of our families travel home for the holidaze!  Only we do it in shorter bursts so as not to disrupt the holiday economy as it were!  Yet, here we are, with the Turkey bones barely bare and the media reminds us of a greater holiday coming soon to a Mall near you!

Yes, it is beginning to look a lot like the favorite holiday of retail store owners - Christmas and I believe that many decorations went up long before Thanksgiving!  Once upon a time, there really was a full month between the two holidays!  Now, it seems like mere days.  I shudder to think how much of the work for the second half of the Second Nine Weeks I will be able to accomplish at school?  Ah, yes the merchant’s favorite saint will dominate the Children’s hour promising toys and presents galore.

However, it is important to remember that as a Christian Church, our Advent story is different from that told by and to the world.  Ours is the older, ours is the better story - about Jesus Christ.  And today, we will note how the Son of God appeared in the midst of the Jewish holiday season and pointed the purpose of that celebration towards Himself.  The Jewish Thanksgiving is still celebrated.  It is called the Feast of Booths or Festival of Tabernacles.  In ancient Israel, the people were to go out of their comfortable houses and live in flimsy shelters made of tree branches.

Development:  This act was to remind everyone that Israel had once been homeless wanderers in the desert.  They were to be reminded that God’s Covenant people owe their riches, their lives and everything to God alone!  This feast, instituted by Moses, was celebrated in Solomon’s Temple and it was associated with the triumphant coming of the Lord’s Messiah.  We know too that this was a harvest thanksgiving as well.  It followed the grape harvest in late August and early September.  As a festival of thanksgiving - it was at one level for the bounty of the harvest but at another deeper level it was a thanksgiving for the natural order given by God that made all of life possible.

The prophet Zechariah looked forward to the day when this Jewish Thanksgiving would be held all over the world.  (Zechariah 14: 16)    “And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.”

This Jewish Festival was celebrated in a series of impressive ceremonies.  Each of the seven days, the people came with branches of Pal or willow.  And during the ceremony the Priest would take a golden pitcher, walk down the steps from the Temple to the Pool of Siloam.  When he returned through the Water Gate, the people would recite from Isaiah (12: 3) “Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”

The water was then carried up to the Temple to be poured out as an offering to God.  While this was being done, Psalms 113 to 118 were sung accompanied by the playing of flutes.  Then when the choir came to the words: 

 ⁰¹                             “Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
                                       For His mercy endures forever.”
²⁵                             “Save now, I pray, O Lord;
                                       O Lord, I pray, send now prosperity.”
²⁹                              “Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! 
                                         For His mercy endures forever.”

The people would shout and wave their branches toward the altar.  The water would then be poured through a silver funnel into the ground.  This whole festival was a vivid giving of thanks for God’s giving the gift of water to the earth which allowed the crops and new wine to grow and be harvested.  It was also an act of prayer for continued rain into the New Year.  Because, unless the rains came again, the new agricultural year could not begin, so the High Priest prayed to God for rain to come again.  Now, by Jesus’ day, another prayer had been added.  Since the gift of rain was regarded as the outward sign of the gift of the Holy Spirit, so the High Priest would beseech God to once more pour out His Spirit upon Israel.

At this point in the ceremony, we believe that Jesus stood up and took the minds of the people from the common thanksgiving to a more important event - the coming into the world of God’s only Son.  Right in the midst of the Jewish celebration - God in Christ came unto His own to call attention to the fulfillment of these Old Covenant prayers.  Just at the moment that the Jews were praying for the revelation of the Spirit - there was the Holy One of Israel in their midst.  And now that He had center stage at His own festival He gave the great invitation “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.  He who believes in Me, as the Scriptures has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

The only ones who can ignore the invitation are those who deliberately shut their eyes and ears against it.  And well do we know that in this busy holiday season, many hearts, minds and souls will be shut up tighter than any thing you can imagine.

Years ago, before it became listed as a Fall Holiday, Thanksgiving was celebrated by Thank You cards for what other people had done for them.  The popular cult also had it that the first Thanksgiving was to the Indians who had shown the Pilgrims how to grow food and survive in this New World.  Very many in the Jewish crowd probably saw no further than the ritual rain dance by which they hoped to appease and appeal to the spiritual power behind the rain clouds.  Very few today would take notice of Christ’s claim to the holiday of Thanksgiving.  They are like another stiff necked people who would endear rein- of another kind to pull Santa’s sled, instead of the Lord of the Universe who would be born of a virgin in an animal’s pen.  Remember, there is no other way to come to Jesus except we thirst, as Jesus well notes in this passage.  We must know that this is how salvation really works.  It does not happen because we will it to happen.

It happens in just the same way that we satisfy our need for life giving water.  Do you actively plan on drinking water, or do you just get thirsty?  Ask anyone on a diet that has been required to drink specific quantities whether they thirst or not?  There is one diet that requires the consumption of several gallons of water a day!  You know, it is very difficult to will ourselves to drink specified amounts of water when we do not feel the urge to do so!  In the same way, Jesus tells us, if you feel within your deepest heart that you need Him, then come - “come to me,” He says.

The next words are a promise added to the invitation. “and drink”.  Here He declares that He is not a dry and empty cistern, but an inexhaustible fountain.  He is the fulfillment of Isaiah 44:3 “For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring.”

Here is the promise of what is to be fulfilled through the coming of Christ.  But, there is a qualification.  We must go back to the words of Jesus again for this phrase:  “He who believes in Me”!  Then who can believe?  Regularly we are compelled to take in some quantity of water in order to survive.  But we drink only to be thirsty again.  Manmade religion is little better than this - again and again people come to be filled, only to be disappointed.  Jesus here points out that we must be brought to Him to realize our need.  We must be ready to accept Him on His terms and assent that He is all that He claims to be in the New Testament.

Application:  Here is one greater than any holiday if we will accept Him through faith.  Then there is the implication of the text that as we drink of Him - we are filled and when His Spirit comes into us - there overflows from within the waters of life - giving us more desire for knowledge of Him.  The first fruits of the Spiritual gift lead on to a further increase.  And what God starts within a believer’s life, He will continue and finish.

The reaction in the Jerusalem crowd is mixed, even as it is today.  Some said openly “Truly this is the Prophet.”  Others claimed “this is the Christ.” There is a lot of dissension even today.  Many would have us believe that Christ was only one amongst many prophets like Mohammed, Buddha or Confucius.  They did not dislike His teachings, they even approve of the teacher.  Yet, they do not understand nor relish what He really says.  Perhaps in time they will grow into a deeper understanding - even as the disciples themselves grew the more they came to know about Him?  Immediately some guess who He really is, “this is the Christ,” the long expected Deliverer.  How can that be others question - Christ comes not from Galilee.  And so Jesus must go on and demonstrate ever so more forcibly the real nature of Who and What He really is.

Another holiday and He will be raised up on the cross for all the world to see that He truly was the King of the Jews.  But even the events of the Passover will not convince everyone.  We still live in a divided world and season in and season out, what ever holiday points to our Lord Jesus Christ, very many will take little notice and think none too deeply about whom the Holidays would show a waiting world.

This season of this year, some two thousand years after the Jewish Thanksgiving reported by the Apostle John - may the Holy Spirit interrupt our own holiday and show us to whom these special seasons point to!  That we and all of those we love may learn that Christ is Lord indeed and if we will believe in Him will be filled for all time.  “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.  He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” 

May that invitation and promise be ours today and always.  Amen.

Rushsylvania United Presbyterian Church (USA)  21 Nov 73 - Logan County Mission (PCA)  23 Nov 84
Christ Covenant Reformed  (PCA)     20 Nov 88
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PREACHING RESOURCES

 Barclay, William.  Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John.  [Not for Theology]
Keener, Craig S.  The IVP Bible Background Commentary:  New Testament.
Knight, George A.F.  Leviticus.
Noordtzij, A.  Leviticus.
Parker, T.H.L.   Calvin's Commentaries:_The Gospel According to St John.
The Holy Bible:  New King James Version.

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