I THIRST

 

MEDITATION on the FIFTH WORD from the CROSS (Jn. 19:28)

 

WI THIRSTW

“I

 thirst.” Surely Christ said things more controversial than this. Things like, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” or “Before Abraham was I AM,” or “I forgive you all your sins.” And yet, it is precisely verses like the one we have here, in which Jesus says such seemingly benign things like “I thirst,” that have caused so many to stumble and fall on the sword of their own self-perceived wisdom.

We Christians have a strange God. He is not the god of the philosophers, some cold, distant deity, enthroned in the highest heaven, untouched by the sweat and the stink of this old world. Nor is he the god of the mystics, some ineffable, impersonal force that dwells in the deepest recesses of the human heart. Instead, our God comes to us from without, in the proclamation of the crucified Christ, in whom God is so fully present, so deep in the flesh, that His skin smokes.

            The problem with us sinners is that we don’t want such a God: a God born in a lowly manger, who hungers, who suffers, who bleeds, and who dies. “Aren’t all of these things beneath God’s dignity?” we ask. After all, can God really die, or even thirst for that matter? And, if we absolutely insist on speaking this way, aren’t we in danger of sounding like that lunatic apostle who said such intemperate and outrageous things like: “God purchased the church with His own blood” (Acts 20:28) and “They crucified the Lord of glory” (I Cor. 2:8) and “In Jesus Christ the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9)?

There was a bishop in the fifth century by the name of Nestorius who argued that, in order to keep God “pure” and “undefiled,” we must keep Him as far away from human things as possible: things like having a mother, or sleeping, or being thirsty. For Nestorius, Jesus Christ is both God and man, but His divinity and humanity never really commune with one another, but are rather like two boards stuck together with glue—neatly and conveniently segregated. And so, when Nestorius would come across verses of scripture in which Jesus said things like “I thirst,” he would get all hot and bothered, and quickly assure, both himself and his hearers, that it was not the “God part” of Jesus, but only the “human part” of Him that “thirsted.”

“That is all very interesting,” you say, “but what, exactly, does all of this theological claptrap have to do with me?”  Just this: the problem for us sinners is that we need the God we don’t want; the God who, unlike Nestorius’, doesn’t merely have a body He slips in and out of to accomplish the dirty work of saving sinners, only to remove it again like a pair of muddy boots upon re-entering the gates of heaven; instead we need a God who has so deeply entered into human flesh that He will never come out of it again. As my professor Steven Paulson likes to say, we don’t need a skinny, monastic god, whose feet barely touch the ground; what we need is a big, fat God who is so entrenched in human flesh that the earth creaks and groans under the force of His footfall.

“But why,” you ask, “do I need this gargantuan God who thirsts and dies in the body?” For precisely this reason: there will come a day when death arrives at your doorstep, and returns you to the earth from which you came. And on that day, when you lay there stinking and rotten in your grave, you will need to hear the voice of the only God who for you was born in the body, who for you suffered and bled, who for you was made to hunger and thirst, and who for you, out of the depths of hell, was made to rise again. It is this crucified God, Jesus Christ—and no other—who has made you the unthwartable promise: “Because I live, you shall live also” (Jn. 14:19).

As deeply as Christ has entered into human flesh, so you now drink of that living water He alone has given—and thirst no more. AmenW