A religion that practices infant baptism is a religion that doesn’t have very rigorous membership requirements. No Herculean feats necessary to prove your mettle. No ritual bath in bull’s blood. No gashing yourself with knives or holding your hand over an open flame to attest to your commitment. No proof is necessary beyond your word that you mean to try to be a good Christian. Just a splash of water three times, a few ritual words, and you are good to go!
You don’t even need to possess the faculty of consciousness if you happen to be born into a Catholic family: Mom and Dad do that bit for you till you are ready to claim the faith for your own when you reach the age of reason. The baptismal water runs off your velvety newborn head, and the gift of eternal life is granted by our profligate God. It’s as though Catholics really believe all that stuff about salvation by grace and not by hard work on our part!
In light of this, water is once again seen as a fitting symbol of the grace of God. Three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by the stuff that first mediates the sacramental grace of God to us. Most of the human body is made of it. It’s Adam’s ale, the most common thing in the world—like grace.
Some folks react to that last sentence as though it were a slam on the grace of God. How dare I call it “common”? But that’s only because some folks think that calling something common is the same as calling it “cheap” or “boring” or “unimportant.”
Not so. The most important things in the world are common. Breathing, for instance. You don’t think about it while you exercise the privilege, but let somebody interrupt it for just a few seconds and your appreciation for it shows a marked uptick.
Love is common. People are constantly falling in love. And it is exquisite every time, a little gleam of heaven.
Birth is common. And every birth is a miracle.
Death is common. And every death is a tiny Golgotha in which another human being is joined to the sufferings of the Son of God and his Blessed Mother.
The commonness of water is like those common—and precious— things. Consider: The sheep in the parable are marked by the fact that they gave Jesus something to drink. That doesn’t seem very reward-worthy. It’s not exactly up there with slaying the Hydra or battling an army grown from dragon’s teeth or cleaning the Augean stables. When we go to a restaurant and a waiter gives us our customary glass of ice water, we do not break forth in alleluias. When a man mows the grass and his wife gives him a glass of water, we do not customarily rejoice that salvation has visited that house. Yet Jesus chooses this image as a sign of our worthiness for heaven. What gives?
At this point it is often customary for the imagination to wander to scenes we are sure we recall from the Bible somewhere, like that time Jesus gave a drink of water to the desperately parched Charlton Heston in 1 Wyler 10:42.1 But it turns out that scene is from Ben Hur, not Scripture. In scenes like that, we can certainly see how giving somebody a cup of cold water might be commendable as an act of mercy.
But how often do we have occasion to meet desperately thirsty chain gangs full of innocents, much less have an artesian well nearby when we do? Indeed, if it comes to that, how often, even in Jesus’ day, was the average person confronted with forced marches of parched criminals to whom he could dramatically give drink? Perhaps such things happened with a little more frequency under the Roman boot than in suburban America. But as a rule, it was not common. So this leaves us somewhat at a loss as to how to implement this teaching in our life, as well as with a puzzle about how such a saying would have been understood by Jesus’ disciples. Desperate thirst, while it certainly could occur in a world without indoor plumbing and at the mercy of drought, was not all that normal an occurrence.
This is not, by the way, to say that there’s no problem with the water supply in human habitats the world over, either then or today. As charities such as Global Water attest, there is much to be done to assure that people in the Third World have a source of clean, safe water to drink. Likewise, as initiatives like the Nestlé Boycott attest, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man is still being played out today, only the rich man is now busy profiteering off the thirst of Lazarus by telling his mother, “Don’t feed your boy with that low- tech breast milk! Instead, line our pockets by using this snazzy new formula that you mix with contaminated water! Sure, your kid will be between six and twenty-five times more likely to die of diarrhea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia than a breastfed child, but that’s a small price to pay for making me richer!”
That said, it’s still worth asking how the command to give drink to the thirsty might have been understood by Jesus’ hearers. Charities such as Global Water and corporations such as Nestlé did not exist when Jesus spoke. Those who heard him were not thinking about the problem of dysentery in Sudanese water supplies a thousand miles from their village in Galilee. So while we do well to consider such matters and do our part to help ensure that an African mother is not bamboozled into killing her child by corporate hucksters eager to make a buck, we also need to consider what this passage may have meant to those who first read it.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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