When I was an English teacher, I loved teaching about contrast in literature and helping my students to understand what happens when we consider together a pair of two strikingly dissimilar objects, things, or persons. The created juxtaposition often serves a greater literary purpose, and we find such an example in full at the end of today’s reading from Jeremiah.

Speaking through the voice of the prophet, God claims the moniker, “the fountain of living water.” God is a naturally flowing spring whose sustenance is always enough. A cistern, on the other hand, is made by humans. When God’s people choose to ignore the living water springing up before them, they miss the point of God as water. Their best efforts result in broken cisterns, worthless things. The contrast between a naturally flowing spring and shattered vessels that cannot profit their makers is blatant from our twenty-first-century perspective: as one theologian said, it’s like “digging a canal alongside a navigable river.”* The people of Jeremiah’s time could not recognize the gift of God directly in front of them.

Today, Christ springs up all around us. The gifts of God beckon us to take notice, to breathe in the aroma of pine trees on a walk around the lake, to chew slowly the tomatoes and lettuce from the backyard garden. Whether in nature, in people, in scripture, or in silence, God offers life abundant. Too often we overlook this fountain of living water as we seek to make our own way. May we heed Jeremiah’s call and not miss God’s bountiful, evident gift of enough.

*Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture: Isaiah and Jeremiah (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1906), 250.