March 8, 2026
To All Who Are Thirsty
Isaiah 55, John 7:37-44
When you were a child, got out of bed and tiptoed down the hall in the dark to tell your parents you were thirsty, what did they tell you? When it was late and they were tired, maybe “get back in bed.” On a better day, maybe they said, “If you’re thirsty, get something to drink.”
That lesson is simple enough. Except that later in life, we discover there is a different kind of thirst that doesn’t go away with a sip of water.
C.S. Lewis said that we humans seem to be creatures born with desires that nothing in this world quite satisfies. And he drew a straightforward conclusion: if I find in myself a desire that no experience in this world can fulfill, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
That unquenchable desire is a clue about what we are, and what we are looking for.
There is another register of this thirst, one that goes even deeper. We are creatures who love. We love people, places, moments — whole seasons of life that form us and become part of us. And we lose them. We lose the people we love most. We lose time. We watch our children grow up and the years recede behind us.
And somewhere underneath all of that loving and losing is a thirst that Ecclesiastes names directly: God has set eternity in the human heart. We were made for permanence. We can conceive of forever. And we cannot hold onto anything.
That ache is not a malfunction. It is the shape of the image of God in us — creatures built for eternity, living inside time. We are thirsty for what we cannot manufacture: the wholeness the Hebrews call shalom, peace that holds, life that lasts, the sense that all will be well with us and the people we love and the world we’re leaving behind. We reach for things that promise to deliver it. They don’t. Not for long. Not all the way down.
Into our thirst, the prophet speaks.
Listen! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you that have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
This is the opening of Isaiah 55. The prophet’s voice is like an amber alert in a crowded mall: urgent, public, addressed to anyone who will stop and listen. The context matters.
The people Isaiah addresses aren’t wandering refugees. Many of them have been in Babylon for decades. They have homes there, jobs, and property. They’ve learned how Babylon works and built a life there. The Babylonian economy has quietly absorbed them, and they have been quietly absorbed by it. Physically, they are comfortable; spiritually, they are dangerously comfortable.
Walter Brueggemann puts it starkly: “whoever feeds, owns.” Eat royal bread and think royal thoughts. The empire that feeds you forms you. And when Isaiah asks, “Why do you spend your money for what is not bread, and your labor for what does not satisfy?” he is not talking to starving people.
He is talking to comfortable people who have forgotten what they’re actually hungry for — people who have been eating Babylon’s food for so long they’ve stopped noticing that their thirst hasn’t gone away.
That’s a question that finds most of us, if we sit with it.
Come. Come to the waters. Without money. Without price. Without credentials. Without having figured anything out first. Without earning your place. Without buying a seat. Come.
This is an invitation to God’s grace, and it isn’t earned. It comes as a gift. That is the whole point.
Yet Isaiah does not leave this as a casual open door. He presses on.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.
The word “while” in that sentence carries weight. It’s not a threat, but it is serious. Genuine invitations don’t stay open indefinitely.
I watched Titanic recently with my oldest kids — all three hours of it. There is a scene soon after the ship has struck the iceberg, before the full danger is understood, when the lifeboats are being loaded. The ship still looks stable. The lights are still on. The staff are urging calm. And some passengers refuse to board: the lifeboats look flimsy compared to the ship. There seems to be plenty of time. They’ll wait and see.
By the time the danger is clear, the situation has changed. The boats are gone. The deck is angled. What had been an open invitation is no longer available.
Isaiah is simply telling the truth: this invitation is serious. God’s grace is offered inside real human lives that keep moving and changing. Seek while you can find. Come while the door is open.
And then Isaiah says something that almost everyone misreads.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
I have heard this quoted throughout my life as a counsel of mystery. Don’t try to understand God. God is inscrutable. Accept what you cannot explain. Sometimes it gets deployed to close down hard questions about suffering — why did this happen, why didn’t God intervene? God’s ways are higher. Don’t ask.
But look at what comes just before it. Verse seven: let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
The context changes the meaning. God’s thoughts being higher than ours is not a statement about divine mystery. It is a statement about divine mercy. God’s capacity to pardon goes further than ours. God forgives more generously than we would allow. God’s ways are higher because God’s grace is wider than our instinct for what’s deserved.
Think about what that means. There are places in most of our lives where we have quietly decided that mercy probably doesn’t reach. Something we’ve done or left undone, some corner of ourselves we’ve kept in the dark. Or someone we love whose choices we can barely watch, and we wonder if they’ve put themselves beyond reach. We draw the line somewhere. We set the limit. And then Isaiah says: God’s thoughts are not your thoughts. Return to the Lord. Mercy goes further than you imagine.
There is a Danish short story called Babette’s Feast, and it is perfect for Lent. A French chef named Babette, who has lost everything in the revolution, winds up as a servant in the home of two pious sisters in a small, austere religious community on the coast of Denmark. The community has grown quarrelsome over the years — old grievances, old wounds, things nobody talks about anymore. When Babette wins a lottery, she spends every franc on an extraordinary dinner for the group: twelve courses, the finest wines, food none of them have ever tasted.
Most of the guests have pledged not to enjoy it. They are suspicious of such extravagance. But by the end of the meal something has shifted. Quarrels have dissolved. Old wounds have closed. And a general — the only person at the table who fully recognizes what they are eating and drinking — stands up to speak.
He says: “Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.”
That is Isaiah 55. We tremble before our own choices and shudder at the choices of others. Yet the prophet says: God’s thoughts are higher than that. Grace goes further. Further than you’re measuring. Further than you would extend it to yourself.
The invitation is free and it is urgent. God’s mercy is more generous than we dare believe.
How does an invitation this large, this free — how does it take root in an actual life?
Isaiah gives us an image, and it is deliberately unhurried.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Rain and snow. They fall and disappear into the soil. Nothing happens for a long time. Months later, the field is green.
This past week, daffodils and Lenten roses showed up in our yard. I’d planted the daffodils one October and honestly forgotten about them. Caitlin planted the Lenten rose last year, and we were hoping it would return. This week, while anxious and busy about many things, there they were. The plants had been doing their slow, invisible work all along.
This is how the word of God works. Through years of worship, reading scripture, prayer — through practices that feel small and ordinary and sometimes, honestly, like they aren’t accomplishing much. And then one day a thought blooms, a change bursts into view. A compassion you didn’t feel before. A thirst for justice you did not know you possessed. A capacity for forgiveness beyond what you imagined. A patience in suffering that could only be God-given. A joy that surprised you in a winter of grief.
The preacher doesn’t manufacture the harvest, and neither does the hearer. We show up and do the work. We give the Word time and soil, light and air. And in its own season, by the Spirit, the word yields fruit.
In the gospel of John, it is the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles — Sukkot — one of Israel’s great pilgrimage festivals. For seven days, priests have been performing the water-drawing ceremony: each morning drawing water from the Pool of Siloam and pouring it on the altar, recalling the water from the rock in the wilderness, anticipating the outpouring of God’s Spirit in the age to come. Seven days of water. The ceremony is at its height. The city is full of pilgrims.
On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood up in the crowd and cried out:
Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.
He didn’t whisper. The Greek word is ekraxen — a shout that carries across a crowded public space. In the middle of the crowd, in the middle of the ceremony, in the middle of the city, Jesus shouted. He waited until thirst and water were on everyone’s mind, and he raised his voice.
He cries out in public because his offer is not a private spiritual transaction. The living water Jesus offers quenches not only personal thirst but the deep thirst of our common life — for peace, for justice, for the wholeness we cannot manufacture, purchase, or win.
You remember what water meant after Helene. When you found a good source — a working well, a distribution point, a spring; ours was in the parking lot of Newbridge Baptist Church — the instinct was immediate: tell people. Go there. That’s where the water is. And people shared. But every human source eventually runs low. The trucks empty out. The bottles disappear. Even the best spring has limits.
Jesus shouts because his supply does not run out. He is the embodiment of what Isaiah promised — the word that goes out and does not return empty, now standing in the crowd in human flesh, crying out. The invitation has taken a voice. And he is pointing to himself.
The crowd’s response is divided. Some say prophet. Some say Messiah. Some say he can’t be telling the truth. At least they are taking him seriously, because you cannot stay neutral about a claim like this.
The invitation is still there. It is without price, and it is priceless. God’s mercy is still higher and wider than we dare believe. The thirst you carry into every room — the desire that nothing in this world can finally satisfy, the ache for permanence that no human love can quite reach — is not a problem to be solved.
It is a clue. And it is the very thing that qualifies you to come.
Bring your thirst. That’s all. Just come.
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina