The Last Words of Jesus: “I Thirst”
John 19:16-20
Last week, one of our scriptures was a story from the Exodus. The Hebrews, having escaped slavery in Egypt, were now wandering in the desert, feeling lost and confused and suspicious of their leader Moses. They were thirsty. They demanded that Moses gives them water. Moses cries out in frustration to God, and God tells him to strike his staff on a stone. When he does, water pours out. The people have enough to drink. But Moses calls the place massah and meribah, because the people questioned, “Is God among us, or not?”
When I visited Jordan 11 years ago, our guide Sufiyan took us to the spot, he said, where Moses struck the rock, and out from it water flowed. There it was, an awkward rocky lump sticking up from rock in the Jordanian desert, and water was indeed flowing out from it. A deep rectangular well had been dug a few feet away, into which the water flowed. Sufiyan said that the water had flowed from the rock ever since the day Moses had struck it with a stick. I rather doubted it: a 3200 hundred year flow of water would have worn a deep path in the rock naturally without much human aid. Still, water was coming out of a rock. It was pretty impressive.
I’ve often thought of it as a powerful representation of what Jesus means In John, when he describes Himself as the source of the Living Water. He says, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4: 14-15).
But here, on the cross, Jesus, like the escaped Hebrew slaves who preceded him, finds Himself parched and dry. The One who promises that anyone who trusts in Him shall never be thirsty is Himself thirsty.
Thirst is one of the most powerful and consistent Biblical metaphors of our need for God. Psalm 42 says,
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
? so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,?for the living God.
When shall I come and behold?the face of God?
My tears have been my food?day and night,
while people say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
The psalmist feels spiritually thirsty, desperately in need of God. To say we’re thirsty for God is to say our need for God is more essential even than food. People can often live quite a while without food, weeks even, but you can only live about three days without water. Our need for God is that great, though we often don’t recognize it. Just as we often don’t recognize our need for water. The human body is 50-70 per cent water. It comprises the vast majority of what we are. But we often don’t know or notice that, and don’t need to. Nutritionists say that one cause of weight gain is that people often think they are hungry when really they are thirsty. We eat food when we really need to drink water. And of course, when we’re thirsty, we often to turn to things that are actually bad for us, rather than turning to what we really need: water.
Our need for God is as essential as our need for water, but we make the same mistakes. We are thirsty, and turn to the wrong things to meet our needs, and our souls suffer as a result.
What we need, what we are desperate for, is God. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so our souls long for God, the Living God. We are made in the image of God—God’s essence is our essence—God breathed into us the breath of life personally—our breath is God’s breath. We are spiritually as composed of God’s spirit as we are physically composed of water. We need to be deeply united to God, for our spirit to be bound to God’s spirit. But it’s a need we often misunderstand, or pretend isn’t real, or just run away from.
Jesus, we Christians believe, is the source of God’s living water for which we long, but which we often don’t recognize. Jesus can slake our spiritual thirst—make us one with the God who loves us, who has created us, who has made us in God’s image.
But on the cross we see that He does this at great cost to Himself. Certainly He’s physically thirsty—He’s been tried, tortured, forced to carry His own cross, nailed to it, and is dying a horribly painful death there in the heat of the morning, without anything to quench His desperate thirst. But His thirst is deeper than that. He feels far away from God, abandoned, empty, bereft. But He’s not just anybody dying on that cross. He is the Son of God. His essence is uniquely and completely the essence of God. Last week we talked of His sense of abandonment: today we see Jesus’ experiencing more than just the sense of lost relationship, but the feeling—perhaps the reality—that He has lost that essence of God that makes Him the Son of God. His whole life, Jesus has had a unique relationship with God. Now it is gone. It is that fact that He feels that the essence of the God He loves drained out from Him that will kill him on the cross, as surely as if all the water was drained out of our own bodies.
And because He experienced this drying up of the fountain of God’s life in His Spirit, you and I need never have the same experience. You and I have access to that fountain of living water. Often, of course, we don’t feel that’s true. Often we’ll cry out, “I thirst!” because we feel like we’re lost in the desert, without water anywhere. But the water is there for us. I love a footnote to the story of Moses finding water in a rock that I discovered in my old RSV Bible several years ago: “There is often water to be found directly beneath the thin rocky covering of the Sinai desert.” Finding water in the Sinai desert is actually not a miracle. It just takes some work. And likewise, God’s Living Water is always there for us, if we’re willing to break some rocks to find it.
But for Jesus, at that time, the Living Water of the Living God was far from Him. Jesus suffered the deepest spiritual thirst so that we would never be thirsty.
He was separated from the Living Water, so that you and I wouldn’t have to be.