Water Shortage

Elpidio Pezzella
3 days ago
3 min read

For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Jeremiah 2:13 NKJV

With the arrival of the hot season in various parts of the country, we have to deal with a water crisis. At the time of Jeremiah, they had probably had a particularly dry season, and the cisterns that held the water reserves were now dry or at best contained slime, like the one in Prince Malkiah's palace where he would later be lowered (38:6). The prophet uses this image to represent the spiritual condition of the people: “The nobles among them send their young men to search for water; they go to the cisterns, but they find no water and return with their vessels empty” (14:3). In front of the many cisterns in use in the country, dug out and with walls waterproofed with plaster, or carved out of natural cavities, the situation is dramatic, not so much because of the lack of rain, but because they are cracked and therefore unable to hold rainwater. The first and grave mistake made was to abandon faith in the true God, “the source of life” (Psalm 36:10), the source of living water, where we can draw from when needed. The turning away from the Lord is followed by the attempt to create water resources independently, generating this comparison between the divine source of living water and a cracked cistern that retains only moisture and mud.

It is sad to see that even today humanity loves slime more than fresh water. We are faced with a reckless, almost insane choice, but it is one that many continue to make. The construction of cisterns is a denial of daily providence, similar to keeping manna in the desert beyond what is necessary or to building the Tower of Babel. The love of the past has slowly faded away (v. 2). Faith in God has its irrationality; it goes beyond the bounds of human logic, which would consider it a prudent choice to provide cisterns to cope with drought, especially since it did not rain for long periods in Israel. In God's eyes, this is an act of betrayal against Him. The purpose of a cistern is to collect and store water. The level is bound to drop simply through natural evaporation if no more water is constantly poured in. However, the tragedy denounced by Jeremiah is that the cisterns that were built have cracked. This is certainly not an act of condemnation against waterworks. We live in times when every little bit of security is crumbling. Millions of cisterns have cracked due to financial, medical, or military drought. In these conditions, any attempt at survival is futile. The illusion of possessing water will soon prove futile when the people, rather than returning and invoking their God, take the road to Egypt “to drink the waters of Shihor” (v. 18) or other rivers.

The words of the prophet invite us to abandon a stale religiosity, apparently solid and capacious, but full of cracks and tragically muddy, if not arid and dry. He urges us to prefer a fresh and living faith, animated by the Spirit. Where are we keeping our spirituality, in the works of men or in the temple of the Spirit? I would like to be wrong, but I fear that we are giving greater importance to external containers than to our own souls. Etty (Ester) Hillesum (a Dutch Jew killed in Auschwitz at the age of only 29) wrote in her diary: “There is a very deep spring within me. And in that spring is God.” Even if we are far from any hypothetical concentration camp, but in the midst of an existential desert, we should recognize that God is in each of us like a very deep spring, hidden from external view. Unfortunately, for various reasons, we pile rubble and sand on top of that source, and the water struggles to flow, compressed under doubts, anxieties, fears, and various torments that gradually weaken the spirit. May the Spirit transport you to the city of Sychar in Samaria, where Jesus, sitting on the parapet of Jacob's well, and as to the woman who came to draw water, addresses these words to you: “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13-14).