Courtney Friesen

Dear fellow parishioners,

Today’s lectionary reading includes a strikingly mysterious statement:

[Jesus] cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:37–38)

Bible translation is always a challenging task, and here the NRSV makes choices that significantly shape the text’s meaning and effect. In the first place, the term rendered as “heart” (koilia) almost never has that meaning; the New Testament has a common word for this: kardia, as in the English cardiology. One of my brilliant university students recently wrote a paper arguing that a better translation of koilia in John 7:38 is “womb.” In its only other occurrence in this Gospel, Nicodemus expresses dismay at the suggestion that one might “enter a second time into the mother’s womb (koilia) and be born” (3:4). There, similarly, Jesus asserts that an experience of new spiritual life involves “water and Spirit” with language that also combines imagery of childbirth and baptism, womb and water. At the same time, John 7:38 anticipates another surprising flow of water: at the Passion, when Jesus is pierced in the side, it is reported that not merely blood, but also water came forth (19:34). In this latter occurrence of life-giving water, there is once again a maternal resonance. Moments earlier with his Beloved Disciple standing by, Jesus looked at his own mother and said “Woman, here is your son,” establishing a new bond of adoptive kinship within his spiritual family.

A second choice concerns whose “heart” or “womb” is in view in John 7:38. Whereas our translation identifies it as “the believer’s,” the underlying Greek simply has “his.” The ambiguity of the ancient language has an important function, provoking the reader to ponder whence this life-giving resource would derive. Could it really reside within oneself? The question persists throughout the Gospel and only finds resolution at the cross where we learn that the true source of this water—anticipated in both childbirth and baptism—originates from Christ’s divine act of self-giving love.

This leads to a final puzzle in our text. The translation places quotations around “Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water,” marking it off as a scriptural excerpt. But these words do not correspond directly to any known Old Testament verse. Instead, they refer allusively to several, such as in today’s lectionary: “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation” (Isaiah 12:3). At the same time, however, today’s Psalm reminds us that water can also be deadly and destructive, and the poet calls on God to deliver him from downing under its flood (18:6). Thus, in keeping with the Gospel’s metaphorical thematization of childbirth and its presentation of Jesus’ self-giving love on the cross, the experience of divine life is often entered by way of death—death to self, death to the world.

Returning to our translation of John 7:38: while “his womb” may imply a gender-inversion too radical for many Bible readers, the text nevertheless endeavors to unsettle our assumptions and expectations about the source and nature of genuine life in the spirit.

Yours sincerely,

– Courtney