Jeremiah's image of broken cisterns set against a fountain of living water is not merely an ancient religious complaint — it is a precise psychological diagnosis of how human beings construct substitute sources of meaning that cannot hold life. Today's readings, taken together, describe the architecture of a mind that has sealed itself against its own deeper capacity for understanding. These reflections explore that architecture from within, as a problem each of us carries, not as a moral failure belonging to someone else.

First reading

Jeremiah 2:1-3,7-8,12-13

Moreover the word of the LORD came to me, saying, Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; I remember you, the kindness of your youth, the love of your espousals, when you went after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.

Israel was holiness unto the LORD, and the firstfruits of his increase: all that devour him shall offend; evil shall come upon them, saith the LORD.

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when you entered, you defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

The priests said not, Where is the LORD? and they that handle the law knew me not: the pastors also transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit.

Be astonished, O you heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be you very desolate, saith the LORD.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

Gospel

Matthew 13:10-17

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speak you unto them in parables?

He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing you shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see, and shall not perceive:

For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which you see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which you hear, and have not heard them.

— Interpretation —

The readings appointed for today set before us two passages that illuminate one another with extraordinary precision, if we are willing to look at them from the standpoint of inner meaning. Jeremiah speaks of a people who have committed “two evils” — they have forsaken the fountain of living waters, and they have hewn out for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. And in Matthew, Christ explains to his disciples why he speaks in parables: because there are those who, seeing, see not, and hearing, hear not.

Let us pause on the phrase “two evils.” Not one evil, but two. This distinction matters. The first evil is the forsaking of the fountain. The second is the construction of a replacement. And I would suggest that the second evil is, in a certain way, worse than the first — because it creates the illusion that one still has water. A man who knows he is thirsty may seek water. But a man who has built himself a cistern and stands beside it, believing it full, will die of thirst without ever understanding why.

Now what is this fountain of living waters? We must be very careful here not to reduce this to a pious abstraction — “God,” we say, and nod, and feel we have understood. But the phrase “living waters” means something exact. Living water is water that flows. It comes from a source beyond itself. It is not stagnant, not stored, not the product of human engineering. It arrives. And in the language of inner meaning, this refers to a quality of understanding, of perception, of consciousness itself, that cannot be manufactured by the ordinary thinking mind. It is given. It flows into a man when certain conditions are met within him — conditions of openness, of genuine questioning, of what we might call inner poverty.

The broken cisterns, then, are the constructions of the ordinary mind — the formulations, the fixed opinions, the mechanical interpretations of life that we mistake for understanding. A cistern is something a man builds. He hews it out with effort. He shapes it according to his own design. And the tragedy Jeremiah describes is not that the cisterns are badly made — it is that they are cisterns. Even a perfect cistern can only hold what has already been poured into it. It cannot generate life. It cannot flow.

And this is precisely the condition Christ addresses in Matthew. “This people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.” Notice — they have closed their eyes. It is not that God has blinded them. They have done this themselves. And how? By filling themselves with their own constructions of meaning — their own cisterns — until there is no room left for anything living to enter.

This is why Christ speaks in parables. A parable is a form of speech that cannot be captured by a cistern. It overflows every fixed interpretation. You cannot hew out a container for it, because the moment you believe you have contained its meaning, the living water has already moved elsewhere. The parable is itself a kind of fountain — it keeps giving, it keeps meaning more than you thought, provided you remain open to it. But the moment you close around a single literal reading, you have built a cistern, and the water drains away through the cracks, and you are left holding an empty form.

“Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” This strange saying becomes clear in this light. The man who hath is the man who has kept himself open — who has not closed his eyes, who has not sealed his understanding into a fixed container. And because he remains open, more flows in. Living water multiplies in those who do not try to store it. But the man who hath not — who has closed himself around his own constructions — finds that even what he once had drains away. The cistern cracks. The knowledge he thought he possessed becomes meaningless repetition, dead formula, husk without grain.

Jeremiah adds one further detail that deserves our attention: “The priests said not, Where is the LORD? and they that handle the law knew me not.” Those who were entrusted with the very words of truth — the custodians of the teaching — were the ones who had lost contact with its living source. They handled the law. They possessed the outer form. But they did not know. They had become, one might say, the most elaborate cisterns of all — beautifully hewn, impressively constructed, and utterly empty.

The question these readings put to each of us is not whether we believe the right things. It is whether we are still drinking from something living — or standing guard over something dry.

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

Scripture: King James Version