March 22, 2020 “Thirst” – John 19:28, 29

John 19:28-29
“Thirst”
March 22, 2020 – Fourth Sunday in Lent

One of the stupid myths about the coronavirus is that you can cure or avoid it by drinking a lot of water, like a drink every 15 minutes. Some are saying it should be garlic water or salt water or some other version, but it’s all totally bogus disinformation. Those spreading such rumors on-line should be ashamed and may suffer the consequences if they actually believe what they are saying.

Yet water is key to health. Without it we die. Lack of clean water is a huge problem in other parts of our world, and it was a problem long ago in the hot, dry clime where Jesus lived in Palestine. That sour wine offered to Jesus on the Cross was probably posca, a red peasant brew that was part of the rations of Roman soldiers. They would use it to flavor bad tasting or foul smelling water in order to get enough of something drinkable.

I have not had much experience with real, burning thirst. Most of us probably haven’t. We turn a tap or take the lid off a bottle and there is clean, probably cool, fresh water or any number of other beverages, including very fine wines if that is what we want or can afford. So as basically human as was Jesus’ experience of thirst when dying, we may not be connect with it all that well, just as most of us have not, not yet at least, experienced all the other sorts of torment He endured by being crucified.

It is well, then, to consider the fact that Jesus was really and truly thirsty. That was part of the torture, to hang in the sun, with no shade, in the middle of the day, on a bare rocky hill in a climate that is almost always hot and dry to begin with. He likely received nothing to drink all during His trial. That forced climb up the hill, part of it carrying the load of His Cross, sweated out much of His body’s water. His labored breathing hanging there would carried away more moisture with each exhalation. So, yes, as the fully human Son of Man, Jesus was deeply and profoundly thirsty in a way most of us can only imagine.

Until I started to read and think about this fifth word from the Cross, and it is literally a word, just one word that means “I thirst” in Greek, I thought that the humanness of Jesus in His thirst was the whole point. In reporting and emphasizing this graphic detail about Jesus’ suffering John wants to dispel any notion, and there have been plenty, that the Son of God did not really undergo physical agony as He was crucified. No, as I said last week, our Lord entered completely into the terrible reality of human misery.

Moreover, if you back up to what goes just before that word of Thirst to read, “in order to fulfill the scripture,” it makes perfect sense to go looking for verses of the Old Testament to connect here. You do not have to look far. The fourth word we heard last Sunday, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is the first line of Psalm 22. The first Christians quickly figured out that psalm was a prophecy of the crucifixion, down to little details like the soldiers gambling for Jesus’ clothes and His arms being pulled from their sockets by the weight of His own body.

So we turn to Psalm 22 verse 15 and read, “my mouth is dried up like potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” Jesus, dying in so many ways, is also dying of dehydration. That psalm predicted it centuries before.

If that verse from the crucifixion psalm were not enough, there is also Psalm 69 verse 21, which, while talking about being in distress and surrounded by enemies, says “They gave me poison for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” It may be that even that wretched military ration sour wine was forecast for Jesus via the Spirit’s mysterious inspiration of Holy Scripture.

And for a long time I’ve thought that was the whole deal here. As a human being suffering a human death, Jesus was thirsty, like a hospice patient who can no longer take in any fluids and slowly dehydrates. And to show that it was all part of God’s plan for the Cross, His thirst was foreshadowed in words from the Old Testament. It was prophecy and fulfillment to demonstrate that Jesus really was the promised Messiah, the Suffering Servant of Israel whom the psalms and the prophets had described long before.

Yet as I read Richard John Neuhaus’s beautiful book on these seven last words, Death on a Friday Afternoon, he pointed me back just a little further in verse 28 and called my attention to words I had not connected to Jesus’ thirst before. John tells us, “After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said… ‘I thirst.’” I had to ask then, with Neuhaus, what everything being finished had to do with Jesus’ thirst.

Next Sunday we will take up the sixth word of the Cross, when Jesus actually says, “It is finished,” recognizing as I mentioned last week, that the word implies a completion, an accomplishment. But for now we need to think about how Jesus’ parched lips and dry throat and tongue glued to the inside of His mouth connects with everything He was accomplishing through that awful death.

We do not have to think too long or ponder much to realize that the Bible as a whole, and Jesus in particular, is always talking about water, about drinking, about cups of water or wine being poured and drained. It makes total sense that people who lived in that arid climate I’ve already noted would fill their writings with images of water and wine and thirst being slaked as cups are filled with those beverages. We read together today the 23^rd psalm and heard “you lead me beside still waters,” and “my cup overflows.”

We ought then to remember all that and hear the irony in the fact that the One who turned 180 gallons of water into wine and who promised the woman at the well a living water which would keep her from ever being thirsty was now thirsty Himself. He stood in the middle of the temple during the Festival of Succoth as water was being poured down in memory of God’s provision for Israel and cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” Yet there He is now on the Cross, Himself thirsty, Himself longing for something to drink. How can that be?

Not every liquid was good to drink back then. That image of a filled cup of wine to refresh and quench thirst could also be a reminder of less desirable beverages, like vinegar, like that sour wine Roman soldiers carried in their packs. The psalms and Isaiah and Jeremiah all talk about a cup or bowl of God’s wrath, a vessel of wine which would make people or nations stagger and fall down. Having a cup to drink is not always a pleasant thing.

Jesus told His disciples that He had an unpleasant cup to drink. In Matthew 20, that was His response to James and John when they came asking for the best seats next to Him in the kingdom, “Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?” In Matthew, Mark and Luke, in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples heard Jesus pray, asking the Father, “if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want, but what you want.” And then here in John, chapter 18 verse 11, when Peter tried to fight with those arresting Jesus, He told Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

What Jesus thirsted for on the Cross was not just some physical liquid to soothe His burning throat. Crying out, “I thirst,” Jesus was saying that He was thirsty to do as all the Gospels say He meant to do, to finish drinking that “cup” the Father had for Him, the cup of wrath which He accepted on behalf of all of us to save us from our sins. Jesus was thirsty for it to be completed, to have done everything needed for our salvation.

As I wrote on my blog, Neuhaus tells how he went to the Bronx in New York, to the chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa. Over the door to the chapel are the words, “I THIRST, I QUENCH.” The same words are over that society’s chapels around the world. Mother Teresa said, “We want to satiate the thirst of Jesus on the cross for the love of souls.”

I said last week that it is crucial, no pun intended, to remember that Jesus, though He is God, is also truly human. His cracked, dry mouth as He hung on the Cross is one sign of that. Yet that desperate thirst which prompted this almost pitiful fifth dying word goes beyond the merely physical, the merely human. It was the holy, divine thirst to help you and me and everyone in this world.

Some of you may have some smaller sense of this saving thirst of Jesus. If you are a person who loves to help others, if you are member of a helping profession, a doctor, a nurse, a first responder, a counselor, then you may be very thirsty right now. You see the suffering around you and you want with all your heart to get out and help, to treat patients, or to just to hold a weak, limp hand. You want to take somebody food or drive them to the doctor or fix their computer so they can stay in touch. Yet all that desire to help is frustrated and restricted by the need to protect them and protect yourself from infection. So you are thirsty to help but have few ways to do so.

Fortunately for us, Jesus was both thirsty to help and able to do so. His thirst and His death was just what was needed to accomplish what He promised the woman at the well and all those who heard Him in the temple during that festival. By dying on the Cross and rising from the dead, Jesus became and now is the source of living water which can quench the thirst of anyone who believes in Him.

As that sign in Mother Teresa’s chapels says, “I thirst, I quench.” That’s Jesus thirsting to save us and then doing so by quenching our own thirst in Himself, with His own life poured out as living water for our souls. That’s what Mother Teresa and all the women and men who served with her wanted to share, the precious living water of the love of Jesus Christ for anyone who will come and drink.

There’s a somewhat mournful but beautiful Advent hymn, “O How Shall I Receive Thee.” It’s written by the same German author who wrote “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” and has much the same tone and even the same meter as that passion hymn. I am moved by the beginning of the third verse which is these two lines:

Love caused thine incarnation, love brought thee down to me;
Thy thirst for my salvation procured my liberty.

You and I are saved because Jesus thirsted on the Cross, not just the true human thirst which allowed Him to identify with us as He died, but the truly divine thirst of love to rescue us from sin and death and to quench our thirst with the Water of Life. We can understand that thirst a little in our own desire to help or even save those we love as well as even strangers around us. Which may give us a clue about how to wrestle with what is happening in the world right now.

I never, ever want to be understood as saying that God causes our suffering. If there is any judgment being visited upon us right now by a pandemic, it did not come directly and maliciously from the hand of God. God does not deliberately inflict suffering on anyone, but He does let both us and our world endure the consequences of both natural disaster and disease and our own human sinfulness. The spreading disease is a natural outcome of laws of nature which God designed and put in place. The extent of suffering it has caused and will cause is, at least in part, the outcome of sinful human choices to withhold information and resources, to disobey guidelines for containment, and to put short-term personal profit above the long-term good of everyone.

Yet whatever the causes, the suffering is happening. And, as crazy as it sounds, that suffering is an opportunity for everyone right now. First, if you are suffering, whether from illness, or loss of job and money, or just from being cooped up in your home, then God is giving you now the opportunity to grow closer and nearer to your Savior who suffered, who thirsted for you.

I’m quite aware of computer networks at the moment. The only way you will see and hear this message is over the vast network we call the Internet. And that network operates partly by the fact that all the different devices connected to it are always talking to each other. Your computer or tablet or phone is in a tiny dialogue with the network and other devices even when you are not checking your e-mail or looking at cute cat pictures. Signals are constantly being sent back and forth just to say, “I’m here, we’re still connected.”

Suffering can be used by God as a signal between ourselves and Him, between ourselves and the Savior who suffered for us. If you are sick or hurting or scared or alone, then God is talking to you whether you know it or not. Your own pain and trouble is a ping back to you from the Cross saying you are connected to it. Jesus is there bouncing back the signal that He knows how you feel, that He has felt it too, and that He is with you. And in and through those trials He is saving you. His thirst is just one little clue to help you remember that.

And if, even in your own suffering, you are thirsty to help someone right now, going a little crazy stuck at home partly because you desperately want to be out there doing something for someone, that’s a good sign. It is a signal that you are, in fact, connected with and participating in that thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. You too are thirsting, like Jesus, for those around you to know the love and salvation of God.

The sad thing, of course, is that it’s hard to know how to slake that thirst to help others at this time. There is so little one can do without the face-to-face contacts which are so much a part of the problem at the moment. God bless two VCC church members who have offered to shop or run an errand for someone in need, but even those interactions are risky. I ask you all to help and show love as safely and carefully as possible, both for yourself and for those you are trying to help.

What we can do in complete safety, and with complete hope and confidence, is pray. It may be that the thing to learn to thirst for now is the presence of God, to discover how to draw nearer to Him and to train ourselves in the patience it takes to spend longer in prayer. Jesus thirsted for the completion of His mission on the Cross, but He was not impatient about it. He knew the timing of His suffering and the end of it was in God’s hands. That is where we all find ourselves in these times. Let us learn to wait patiently there, thirsting with Jesus for the cup we must drink at present to be drained to the full. Let all which our Lord asks of us be finished and complete.

So let’s not complain if the cup in our hands right now is sour wine and bitter to the taste. Let us accept and drink it as true medicine for our souls. Yet let us remember that the true and lasting Cup for which we thirst is what Psalm 116 calls, “the cup of salvation.” Jesus thirsted to drink His cup of death for us so that we could drink that Cup of eternal life with Him. With that gracious Cup of lovingkindness, may He draw near and quench your thirst today.

Amen.