living water – The Raynville Rambler

*Jesus and the Woman of Samaria,*
*painting by Henryk Siemiradzki*

Today’s Easter song from Sing Praise is “We shall draw water joyfully”. It’s one of those set for cantor and congregation, with the cantor’s line adapted slightly for each of the three acclamations.

These three cantor’s acclamations are based on Isaiah chapter 12, and express firstly confidence in God’s salvation, secondly the thanks due to him for his ‘mighty deeds’ and thirdly a psalm of praise to the Lord as we make his works known. Thanks and praise to God in response to his saving acts are a regular theme in the Hebrew scriptures and in Christian worship.

The chorus is to a tune that fits the words – fast, flowing and joyful as we sing “We shall draw water joyfully, singing joyfully, from the wellspring of salvation”. he chorus could just as easily be said to be based on Jesus’ own sayings about himself offering ‘living water’. The ‘water’ here is metaphorical and represents both something that meets the needs of our physical life (which of course is utterly dependent on H₂O) and also a spiritual refreshment contrasted with the insipid and sometimes dangerous forms of spiritual sustenance that this world offers us.

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is Christopher Idle’s “Exult, creation, round God’s throne”. It’s a contemporary setting of an ancient hymn that is still sung in Latin plainchant in some churches during the Easter Vigil. Here, it is in three metrical verses; John used in his morning prayer video an original fourth verse that is omitted in the book, and used the more common tune Gonfalon Royal.

The three verses in the hymn book call on all creation to exult (that is, rejoice) in the resurrection of Christ, which as I noted yesterday is a cosmic event, not just one for the people and time of Jesus. The hymn addresses firstly the angels of heaven (who, let us remember, are created beings themselves); then the earth in general, as the Lord has won his victory over the powers of darkness here; and thirdly Christians in particular, both living now and gone before us (“exult, all Christians, one in praise with our Jerusalem above!).

The fourth verse is a doxology with water imagery, calling us to exult in God (the father) who is the “well of truth”, Christ (the son) the “fountain-head of grace” and the Holy Spirit, “flowing stream of life”. This water imagery perhaps alludes to the heavenly city in the book of Revelation (and Ezekiel’s earlier vision) where streams of living water flow out of it, as well as some of Jesus’ own sayings about being himself the living water. I affirm a comment I saw on social media this weekend that to believe in the resurrection can never be just a matter of interpretation of historical facts, or a hope for some distant future event, but has to be allowing God to work within in us here and now to become part of his constant changing and reshaping of our world for good – to let his living water flow into and through us.