28After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished,
he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), "I am thirsty." 29A
jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine
on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
“I am thirsty.”
I’m going to come right out
and say it: of all the words Jesus utters from the cross, I find these the most
realistic. That’s not to say, of course, that Jesus didn’t say all the other
things, too, or that the other words from the cross about forgiving his
executioners and pardoning the thief aren’t equally important or true. Scripture
is a reliable source of truth even if the gospel accounts are not direct
eye-witness recordings, and those other final words from Jesus on the cross we’ve
already heard about this Lent are vital for our faith in and understanding of who
Jesus Christ was. It’s just that all of those other words—for example, “Woman, behold your Son,” or, in Luke’s
gospel, “Today, you will be with me in
Paradise”—all sound like things you’d expect a Son of God to say. They all
seem to come from a deeper and more eternal point of view, spoken through the
wisdom and experience of someone who is divine. They ring of godliness.
“I am thirsty”:
well, that sounds like something a Son of Man would say. It sounds
surface-oriented, borne of primal mammalian response. It echoes a need of the body,
not so much of the soul. When Jesus looks at his tormentors and asks his Father
to forgive them, “for they do not know
what they are doing,” that sounds
like a matter of the spirit. It deals with something that has long-term
implications. “I am thirsty,” sounds rather
elemental, right-here-right-now. It is such a simple, humble, earthy request: I
am dying and my mouth is dry. The other words place Jesus, in some way, almost above
the people around him. This one places Jesus underneath them, simply asking for
a drink.
 |
| Crucifixion (Diego Velasquez, 1632) |
So this all seems more
realistic to me, given the realities of a crucifixion. Crucifixion was a death
sentence specifically designed to humiliate the victim and draw out death for
as long as possible. In fact, it’s where we get the word “excruciating.” Scientists
and historians disagree when it comes to the precise way that a crucifixion
actually did someone in. Some say victims bled to death or died as a result of
infection in the blood. Others say that they died from extreme dehydration. Still
others say that they most likely died through asphyxiation, because their
permanently outstretched arms made it difficult to expand their lungs properly
and breathe. Regardless of how it happened, long and humiliating exposure was
the objective, so it is entirely believable—realistic— that, at some point, Jesus,
man on the cross, would feel the need to re-hydrate.
As it so happens, for the
gospel writer John, Jesus’ desire for something to drink—and the subsequent
offer of sour wine—was also a fulfillment of one of the Hebrew Scriptures. John
sees an echo of Jesus request in the words of the 69th Psalm, which was
a prayer for deliverance from enemies, and we, like John’s initial readers, can
use the words to paint the picture Jesus of the cross:
“I
looked for pity, but there was none;
And for
comforters, but I found none.
They gave me poison for food,
and
for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”
Historians tell us that this
vinegar or sour wine that the soldiers offered would likely have been on-hand. It
was a crude, cheap version of wine that had basically already gone bad, and so
it could offer some relief, but not much. They offer it on a sponge extended on
a branch perhaps because no soldier wanted him drinking out of one of their
cups. For those who’ve paid close attention to Jesus’ life, the irony is
overwhelming. Jesus’ first miracle had involved changing water into wine at a wedding
at Cana. He had said then that his hour for glory had not yet come, yet the
wedding guests then had made special mention of the wine’s high quality. The
best wine had been saved for last! Here we find Jesus in his hour of glory,
lifted on the cross, and the wine is almost undrinkable. But Jesus drinks it
anyway, as I assume any human would.
This is more important than
we might initially think. Many of the earliest and thorniest controversies in
the Christian faith actually had to do with the relationship between Jesus’
divine and human natures. We think little of this these days, aware of the teaching
that Jesus was somehow totally human and totally divine at the same time. However, some early believers could only make
sense of Jesus and his life by saying that he was not truly human at all, that
his body was some type of illusion. They looked at the crucifixion and denied
that if God was actually hanging there he would be feeling anything at all. People
with this viewpoint eventually lost their argument, partly because of Jesus’
human desire and ability to drink while he was dying.
As it turns out, not a single
word from Jesus is insignificant. If Jesus says he’s thirsty, it means
something huge, even if it just means he’s thirsty. Because if he’s thirsty, he
is feeling human pain. He is looking around and feeling the effects of this
torment. He is looking for comforters and finding none. And if he is feeling
human pain, looking and finding little comfort, then he can be truly with us…not
above us or outside of us, but with us, beneath us, in us. That is the miracle
of Christ. That is the gift of Son of God: that he is also a son of men.
Early Church theologian, a
man named Gregory of Nyssa, put it this way:
“God’s…power is not so much displayed in the vastness
of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the
universe or his perpetual oversight of it, as [it is] in his condescension to
our weak nature. We marvel at the way
the sublime entered a state of lowliness and, while actually seen in it, did
not leave the heights.”[1]
It’s important that we listen
to such words, especially when we’re prone to place our wonder at God in
anything other than the cross. It’s important that we listen to Jesus words, even
when he’s just telling us he’s thirsty, because when he does, it means God is
in human lowliness with us.
And that means, for example, when
a cancer patient aches for respite from the chemo and radiation, Jesus aches
for that respite, too. Or that when a protester on the street somewhere in the
Middle East thirsts for her basic civil rights to be honored, then Jesus is
somehow thirsts for human dignity with her, as well. When an abused child
craves the love of a parent who will truly care for them, Jesus craves that
love alongside of them. When famine strikes an African village, and people
hunger for basic necessities, Jesus is present, thirsting and hungering, too.
There was a memorable
editorial in The Lutheran magazine a
few years ago written by David Miller, then its editor-in-chief . In it he
describes a visit to a refugee camp in southern Sudan where people were dying
of starvation and disease because the food convoy had not yet showed up. While
he was there he crawled into a makeshift hospital, which was little more than a
dirt hut with no beds and no medicine—fifteen gaunt people were lying on the
floor in some stage of dying.
“I came upon a woman in her
twenties,” Miller writes, “sitting by a small lump under a fray, dirty cloth. With
one hand she absently fingered a braided string hung around her neck; with the
other she held the cloth close around the ‘lump’—a little girl, shrunken by
hunger and disease. We sat together helpless, looking at the extinction of her
beloved. Then I noticed that she was fingering a cross, crudely fashioned from
a piece of twisted wire. Touching her arm, with my other hand I made the sign
of the cross full and large across my chest. Her eyes widened, and immediately
she pulled at my hands, drawing them to her child. I didn’t know what she was
trying to show me. Then I knew: she wanted me to bless her child—as if for
dying. I placed my hands on the little girl’s head and commended her to the
gentleness of God.
I prayed that in the next
life this precious child would find a mercy that had so badly escaped her in
this life.” Miller continues, “A power had been released in the bunker’s
darkness, and the tears we brushed from our eyes were not only of sorrow, but
of joy, hope, and gratitude. We were transported beyond the dismal present to a
future where everything was shaped—finally—by the mercy of the One whose
pleasure it is to wipe every tear from every eye.”[2]
Miller’s reflection on that
experience illuminates perfectly the power of a God who condescends to human
weakness. The world needs a savior who forgives from the cross…who offers words
of pardon, words of eternal hope and Paradise where, yes, every tear will be
wiped away. But, as we know, we thirst for a savior who himself can thirst like
us, who can somehow be in that tent with that mother in her pain and sorrow as
he can in heaven’s heights. It is a savior who, even as he sips this sour wine—in
fact, the worst around—at this final hour is serving up for us what will turn
out to be his resurrection finest.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
[1]
St. Gregory of Nyssa, “The Address on Religious Instruction,” Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. by
E. Hardy, 300-301 in David Yeago’s typescript, vol. 1, The Faith of the Christian Church.
[2] “Even
Here, Even Now,” David Miller in The
Lutheran, April 2000
