The Word That Means Both

The cloth is heavy white cotton with a drawn thread border, and it was Ivy's grandmother's, and it is the only thing in the flat that came from that house.

The stain is about the size of a coaster, four inches in from the long edge.

Beetroot. A serving spoon, somebody's elbow, a lot of laughing about it at the time. Ivy was thirty when it happened and she is thirty four now, and in those four years she has treated that stain with dish soap, with salt, with white vinegar, with a bar of yellow laundry soap her aunt swore by, with two different sprays off the supermarket shelf, and once, on the advice of a woman at work, with lemon juice and a whole August afternoon of sunlight on the back step.

It went from purple to a soft brownish pink, and then it stopped.

Four years. Exactly that color. She can find it with her eyes shut.

So this is what she does, and she has never once said out loud that she does it. When she lays the table, she works out where the stain will fall, and she puts the fruit bowl there. If there is no fruit bowl she uses the bread board. If there is nothing to put down she folds that section under, which pulls the whole setting out of square, and nobody has ever noticed, and she notices every single time.

The stain is not the thing. Obviously the stain is not the thing.

The thing is that Ivy has an interior version of it, and she has treated that one with roughly the same number of products. Two years of counseling, which genuinely helped and which she would recommend to anyone. A stretch of getting up at half five to read. A confession she has made four separate times to three different people, in slightly different words, hoping one of the tellings would take. A period of fasting she does not talk about because it embarrasses her now.

Purple to brownish pink. Then it stopped.

And what she has arrived at, quietly, and it does not feel dramatic to her at all, is that this is simply what she is like. Some things wash out. Some things go faint and then stay. She has stopped expecting to be clean, the way you stop expecting a chipped mug to be whole, and she has organized her life around putting the fruit bowl in the right place.

If any of that sounds like your own kitchen, put the bottle down. There is a whole other category of thing that has never once been offered to you, and I want to show you a word first, and then a river.

A washing and a crossing are not the same event

Start with what washing actually was, because Scripture is not shy about it and the pattern is the point.

The instructions for Israel are full of water. Wash your clothes, wash your body, be unclean until the evening, wash again. Whole chapters of Leviticus are given to it, and Numbers 19 sets aside a specific water for a specific defilement. It is not presented as a failure of the system. It is maintenance, and maintenance is a thing you do again.

That is the shape you have been living in. Wash, wait, and the week turns over, and wash again.

You were never meant to stay in that rhythm, and the prophets said so long before anyone was arguing about it. Ezekiel writes down a promise of water that is poured onto a person rather than scrubbed by them, and it is His Spirit who keeps that promise from reading as one more product under one more sink.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.Ezekiel 36:25-26

Read whose arms are moving in that sentence. Every verb belongs to God. Ivy has been the one holding the cloth for four years, and the promise is of somebody else doing the pouring while she stands still.

Now I want to show you something in the Hebrew, and I want to be careful with it, because careful is what it deserves.

O LORD, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters.Jeremiah 17:13

The word translated hope in that verse is miqveh. And miqveh is also the word used back in the first chapter of Genesis for a gathering together of waters, when God gathers the seas and names them.

Same letters. Two senses that sit side by side in the language: a gathering of waters, and hope.

Now hear the careful part, because it matters more than the pretty part. That is wordplay, and I am calling it wordplay. It is not a doctrine and it is not a hidden teaching. Nobody should build anything load bearing on it, and I am not going to. Hebrew carries plenty of words with more than one sense, readers have noticed this one for a long time because it is striking, and whether Jeremiah intended the echo is not something the text tells us.

What the verse teaches is not in any doubt at all, and it does not need the wordplay to stand up: God Himself is the hope of Israel, and God Himself is the fountain of living waters. That is the plain reading, and that is the whole point.

But if you have run out of hope that anything gets this out of you, it costs nothing to notice that in the language the prophet wrote in, the word for hope and the word for a gathering of waters look the same, sitting in a verse where God is the water. Hold it lightly. It is a lovely thing to notice, and it is not a thing to lean your weight on.

Here is what you can lean your weight on, and it is written plainly: you have a hope that is a Person and not an outcome. Jeremiah 17:13 names God the fountain of living waters with no wordplay required, and the Spirit who put that name in a prophet's mouth is the one saying it over your sink tonight.

Then the river, and the reason it was that river.

John stood in the Jordan. Not a pool, not a courtyard basin. The Jordan, which is the water Israel walked through to get out of the wilderness and into the land, the one crossing every child in that country grew up hearing about. Whatever else the people wading out to him understood, they understood geography. That water was where you went from one side to the other.

And when the crowd in Jerusalem asked what to do, the answer they got was not a technique.

Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.Acts 2:38

A washing addresses a condition. A crossing changes an address. That is the difference the whole of this rests on, and it is why the fruit bowl was never going to work: you have been maintaining a life on one bank while the offer on the table was a different bank altogether. Notice that Peter's sentence hands you the Holy Spirit in the same breath as the water, which means neither half of it was ever yours to arrange.