Dionysus on a Bike

John 7:37-39 – 5/27/2026

Jesus’s teaching that we read in today’s lectionary is associated with the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Jesus’s listeners are celebrants at this festival, with this speech occurring on the final, climatic day. Though Jesus’s gift of the Holy Spirit come at another time, on another Jewish Festival day, here Jesus’s teachings prepare for that gift from Christ. The association of the future gift of the Spirit with Sukkot and “living” water are not accidental, each imbuing the other with deeper richness and signification because of that association.

Sukkot is one of three pilgrimage feasts where observant Jews were expected to celebrate at the temple in Jerusalem. Primarily a harvest festival celebrating God’s gracious gift of bountiful produce from the land, Sukkot’s celebrations include agricultural motifs, a focus on hospitality and welcoming the stranger, water as a gift from God allowing the harvest and life itself to happen, and remembrance of the escape from Egypt and the wandering in the wilderness. Because of its association with the harvest and its celebration of God’s bounty, Sukkot is considered the most joyful and pleasurable of the Jewish festivals and Holy Days, all of its themes pointing to celebration of life and what makes life possible.

Of the many rituals and prayers that occur during the seven days of Sukkot, the culmination of all the joy and celebration, especially in Jesus’s time, was the Simchat Beit HaShoevah water-drawing celebration. Simchat Beit HaShoevah literally means “The celebration of the House of Drawing Water.” Fresh water is drawn outside the walls of the city and ceremonially processed to the Temple with great fanfare. At the Temple, the water is poured on the corner of the alter during the day’s normal sacrifice. The festal ritual is a thanksgiving for God’s gift of water which makes the harvest and life itself possible. From dawn until dusk and all through the night dancing and music and entertainment are accompanied by feasting and Torah study. The celebration was attended by tens of thousands of celebrants each year.

With its focus on the gift of life-giving water and the spectacle of fanfare and celebration, the background of Sukkot makes Jesus’s invitation to those who are thirsty to drink living water all the more evocative. Jesus is identifying himself with the God-given source of all life that quenches thirst and is the occasion for the most happy of celebrations.

Of the many things this means for followers of Jesus, this celebratory invitation to drink from the source of life itself is an indication of just how life- affirming this Gospel is. Any interpretation of Jesus’s good news that is dour, against joy, dance, music, drinking, entertainment, and reveling in the happy pleasure of being alive is contrary to the picture of believers drinking living water on the festival of Sukkot. As I consider my return to the church, I am struck by how diverse its expressions are. That diversity includes those who think that following Jesus is a renunciation of life and a rejection of earthly pleasure and earthy happiness and those who see following Jesus in opposite terms, as the culmination of joy and affirmation of this embodied life, as a gift from God. Those who reject the happiness of this embodied life and despise the body and its pleasures have lost the plot of the Gospel and have failed to see how Jesus continues a tradition of harvest festivals that goes back millennia. Far from rejecting or replacing those traditions, Jesus places himself, God’s own Son, at the heart of those occasions of primal celebration.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.