‘I Thirst’
Scriptures:
Psalm 28:1-2; 6-9
John 4:7-15 and19:28-29
Usually, as you can tell, I am an advocate of using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which has been around now since 1990 and which generally has a much clearer English text that helps us get at the meaning of the scriptures more easily. But here’s an instance where I think the NRSV got it wrong. “I am thirsty” just doesn’t have the punch and the power of “I thirst”. “I am thirsty”…..well, sounds like you’re out in the backyard around the pool on one of these warm Las Vegas summer days, and turning to your companion you say, “As long as you’re up…..” “I thirst” – the pain of dehydration racks the whole being. Now we are out on the Sahara (no, not the street a few blocks south of here but the parched desert with nothing but sand for miles and miles). Now water, or at least something liquid, becomes a necessity, essential to keeping us alive.
“I thirst”, along with “Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother”, and “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”, are usually referred to as the middle words from the cross. They are the phrases that show Jesus at his most human, and thus they are the words that most speak to us in our human condition – a tender word to his mother and friend; a cry of despair when it seems all is lost; seeking to meet the body’s need for water. Yes, Christ is now reaching the point where he will enter into his glory with God the Father. But for this moment in time he is almost pathetically human – his flesh ripped apart by the nails, his strength broken by the lashes of the scourging, his will nearly broken as he realizes what he must pass through – so much so that at one point in the garden he prays, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” Nikos Kazantzakis, in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, presents this as the last, great temptation offered to Jesus – not to have to go through with this terrifying experience but to live out his days in peace knowing he had done everything he could to help humanity. You may remember when Martin Scorsese’s film version of this book came out in 1988 the furor that was caused, especially among conservation Christians, by even the suggestion that the Christ might consider this path of avoiding the cross. Yet, I can remember when first reading the book as a seminarian back in the summer of 1961 how empowering it was to think that Christ (even if this was a work of fiction) might have thought that he could in good conscience forswear the cross. What a human thing to do! Nevertheless…nevertheless…Jesus immediately continues in that prayer in the garden: “yet, not my will but yours be done.”
So, Christ must meet his fate. He does not shy away from the pain. And it is real pain. There was an ancient heresy in the early church called patripassionism, which believed so strongly that Jesus was God that, they maintained, it was actually God who suffered on the cross – and thus, there was no real suffering after all. While Jesus may indeed be wholly God, it is also wonderfully, paradoxically true that he is also fully human and knows human suffering. Can we possibly hear these cries of anguish – “I thirst”, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – and not believe that suffering is here taking place?
I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of thirst that would be evoked by this kind of extreme situation. Oh sure, all of us have known the thirst that comes after working outside under a hot sun or doing 30 minutes on the treadmill, but I wonder how many of us have been several days in a desert with no land in sight, or some comparable situation. Not me, at any rate. With this cry – “I thirst” – Jesus identifies himself for all time with the most dreadful sufferings any of us can imagine. Whenever we feel the burden of our sufferings, no matter what they are, we can always know that Jesus Christ experienced the very depth of that burden. That’s why the cross has become such a universal symbol – it reminds us both of the sufferings we inflict on each other along with the hope that our suffering is known.
In our time, the word “thirst” has come to stand for many of our drives and desires. We thirst after power; we thirst for love; we even speak of thirsting after righteousness. Our “thirsts”, in the sense of our desires, are what motivate us – they keep us alive and striving to move on to the next level. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Yet, we are ambivalent about how strong these thirsts might get. Too much of a “thirst for power”, say, can lead to ethical corner-cutting and infringing on the rights of others – just ask Frances Deane or Dario Herrera or Mary Kincaid-Chauncey. In this sense a “thirst” is something that overwhelms us, causing us to act in ways that do not lead to human betterment or even our own welfare in the long run. Too much of a thirst, in the sense of a desire, is ultimately killing. Sometimes when we’re experiencing such a drive, though, we forget this, wanting to believe that if we can fulfill our thirst for power, or love, or even righteousness then we will have achieved a kind of immortality. Death seems an almost inconceivable end to the fulfillment of thirsts.
And yet there is Jesus now experiencing great thirst in our other sense of the word and knowing that death was indeed near. His thirst was physical and painful and had to do with his body’s need. But in another way his thirst was also like the one I just described, for he was thirsting to enter into the joy of his Father. And this, too, is our ultimate thirst – for a right relationship with God, which is what our Lenten journey is all about.
In the story of the Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at Jacob’s well, which Jim read for us this morning, Jesus uses a powerful metaphor to help her understand the meaning of salvation, when he says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Of course, the Samaritan woman, like so many whom Jesus meets, but especially the disciples, is rather thick-headed and wants to take him literally about the nature of this water. Then, she “gets it”, at least to some extent, and wants what it is Jesus is offering: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” It’s not quite right on – the promise of eternal life doesn’t mean that we will never be thirsty again in this life – but at least she has a glimmer of what it would mean to be immersed in “living water” – a foretaste of what baptism signifies.
But now if the Samaritan woman happened to be one of those at the foot of the cross, she must have been much perplexed. This cruel death seems to mock the promise of “living waters”. The anguished cry, “I thirst”, would seem to deny the very waters he had promised to us. Jesus is estranged from the promise he himself had given (I’m almost tempted to say “left high and dry”, but that would be an awful pun). Yet, the paradox is that in the midst of his estrangement Jesus was now becoming ready to enter into that glorious relationship with God which is what is meant by “living water”.
Wait a moment. There’s a strange development in the story. Someone hears this anguished cry and prepares to respond. It was common practice during crucifixions to have a bowl of vinegar or a sour wine ready to offer the condemned some relief during their ordeal. Is this an unusual act of humaneness in the midst of this most inhumane of all executions? Or is it, as others have suggested, a cruel irony, since the administration of this vinegar only served to help keep the crucified one alive longer so that he could suffer more? Arthur Gossip takes the first point of view when he says that this giving of the vinegar is one of three incidents on Calvary which keeps the shame of humanity from being complete – the other two being the presence of his faithful friends who felt and wept for his pain and the caring for his body by two of the Sanhedrin. So, as Gossip puts it, “…someone, hearing Christ cry, ‘I thirst’, ran, ‘at once’, so Matthew has it, and putting a sponge full of vinegar or sour wine upon a reed, held it to our Lord’s parched and dying lips.
However, the gospel of John relates that Christ cried, “I thirst”, “in order to fulfill the scripture”. As this gospel writer sees it, this is another piece of evidence that here in fact was the Messiah of Israel, the one promised and prophesied in the Hebrew scriptures. But the problem with this is that the verse of scripture which this cry fulfills comes from the 69th Psalm – a voice that is crying out in dread terror: “They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” (vs. 21) The Psalmist in frustration is lashing out at his enemies who, when he was thirsty, put vinegar into his drink so that he would become even thirstier. Indeed, this 69th Psalm is labeled a “Prayer for Deliverance from Persecution”. Offering vinegar or sour wine, therefore, is one more instance of sadistic cruelty, not a comfort. The gospel of Luke sees what is happening here in this way – that it was motivated by mockery and cruelty rather than kindness. Luke reports: “The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’” (23:36-37)
Most human motives are mixed, and we will never really know whether the giver of vinegar was motivated solely by kindness or solely by cruelty. Our motives are often mixed, as well. Put yourself there in that place, on that hill, hearing the anguished cry, wondering what if anything you could do. We look at our dying Savior, and we feel sorrow, wishing there was some little thing we could do to help. But if we’re really honest, in our heart of hearts, we are glad that it is he hanging there and not me. People in wartime on the battlefield know this emotion intensely, and it leads to the trauma many have experienced when they come home from a war. Seeing a buddy right next to you shot and killed leads to devastating grief, but there is also that irrepressible sense of relief that it was the other guy and not me. To acknowledge this feeling can lead to such guilt that most often we try to repress it – thus leading to post-war-trauma-syndrome. The solace we want to offer to Jesus when he cries out “I thirst” is offered in part at least because he is the one being crucified on our behalf.
What can we do when confronted with this cry from the cross, “I thirst”? We can acknowledge that we are part of the entire human experience that has put this sinless man in this place, that made it necessary for God to become human in order to atone for who we are, in order that we then might become more fully human. Hear the cry – the full cry, for what Jesus is really saying is, “I thirst for this dry world which has not yet accepted the living waters that I have offered to them.” And then be ready to accept those living waters as we, like Jesus, enter into the glory of our God.
Amen.
Next week as we begin to prepare for Holy Week, we hear the heart-wrenching cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
March 26, 2006