During the hours when Jesus hung on the cross leading up to his death, he uttered seven “words” (actually short sentences, as recorded across the four gospels), and these words continue to be meaningful and insightful to us today if we’re willing to spend some time in quiet with them. For they are not only remembrances of that day and of Jesus’ suffering and death, but also serve as reminders of how we are to live in our own moments of suffering. As we enter Holy Week, I offer seven short reflections on these words and ask you to consider what they might mean to you, today.
Five: “I thirst.” John 19:28-29
Jesus, on the cross for many hours now, is losing bodily fluids like a wrung-out sponge. He is growing weak, his body emaciated and dehydrated from sweating, crying, even breathing. He needs to drink something. There is not much time left, he senses. His lips are parched and dry, his head spinning. Aware of the end, and in order that once again scripture might be fulfilled and we all might come to belief, he says quietly — for certainly the time for crying out has now left him — “I thirst.”
Once again, he is hearkening back to the psalms of his Jewish heritage (Psalm 69:21-22):
Insult has broken my heart, and I despair;
I looked for compassion, but there was none,
for comforters, but found none.
Instead they gave me poison for my food;
and for my thirst they gave me vinegar.
Indeed, there was a vessel nearby filled with common sour wine. So someone — was this person helping him with such a drink or not? — soaked the simple wine on a sprig of hyssop (the same small branch from the mint family that Moses dipped in blood for the Passover sacrifice) and put it up to his mouth. Jesus sips from the “sacramental” wine — however sour — and prepares for his final words.
If we have any doubt of Jesus’ humanity — and that he is truly suffering — this simple and natural urge to slake his thirst ought to set us straight. Throughout his life, Jesus shows us over and over again the emotions, traits and urges that make him human. He weeps and cries, he mourns, he gets angry, he becomes tender, he eats and sleeps and thirsts. It is his incarnation — Word of God into flesh and bone —that binds and attracts us to him. God the Father knew we would need this, would need someone like us, if we were to believe and be drawn back to God despite our sins that separate us from the Divine.
As Jesus thirsted for drink — a human need in the midst of his physical and spiritual turmoil so, too, do we thirst. We thirst for God and for a relationship with him. We thirst for spiritual nourishment in the midst of our busy, physical lives. We thirst for the one thing that cannot come from any place other than Jesus — living water that never dries up and never fails to satisfy. Tonight at our Holy Thursday mass we sang:
O let all who thirst, let them come to the water.
And let all who have nothing, let them come to the Lord.
Without money, without price.
Why should you pay the price, except for the Lord?
John Foley, SJ (Come to the Water, 1978)
Ask yourself in silence: In my life, for what I am most thirsty? How do I feel as I answer that honestly?
Tomorrow: Finished
