Thirst

This is the Good Friday message for Unfinished Community, drawing in part from John 4:13-14, and largely from John 19:28-30.

Have you ever been thirsty?

Oh, I don’t mean the kind of mildly dry, scratchy-throat one gets after a few long hours under the sun, or the cloying discomfort one has after eating a snickers bar. I don’t even mean the wet, screaming thirst of a child who has come to the stark and sudden realization of their thirst on the eve of bedtime, or even that dry-mouthed, sand-blasted thirst you find upon waking up, first thing in the morning after a terrible head cold. 

No, I mean thirsty. 

I’m talking about that terrible, distracting, all-consuming, thirst that settles on the damaged and the dying, the thirst that speaks of shattered bones, broken bodies, and failing organs. That creeping desiccation that comes as blood and precious moisture swiftly withdraw, yielding less-precious territory in the mouth, nose, and throat in a desperate attempt to parry death’s stroke against the liver, the lungs, and the heart. 

Have you ever felt that?

Have you ever encountered that almost absurd moment, where despite the fact that you can feel that indescribable, ephemeral force of life which up until now you had taken so much for granted withdraw from your body, despite the creeping terror of feeling your body begin that inescapable transition from life to death, from meat to matter, despite that indescribably terrifying sensation….all you can think about, all you can focus on is this sudden, impossible need you have for a drink?

I have. 

I’ll spare you the gruesome details today, since our Bible gives us brutality enough for one day, but you can see clearly that my body still bears the scars of a terrible accident I experienced in college. 

In the moment of course, I ought to have been terrified. I knew that no matter how scared I might have been in the past, it was only now, in this lonely and terrible moment, that death was at last on the table. But once the blow had been struck, once the damage had been done, I braced myself for the onset of fight or flight, to feel that overwhelming, driving, hindbrain pressure that pushes the self to stagger, limp, even crawl away from the nearer presence of God with every last fragment of energy left in my broken form, only to find myself not energized or empowered, neither driven by terror nor electrified by fear, but subsumed. 

In that moment, despite everything else, all I could think about was orange juice. I just. Needed. A drink. 

I was thirsty. 

Fortunately for me of course, I was in a situation where help was near enough to hand, no pun intended. I got my glass of orange juice and, as a happy bonus, an ambulance ride and several weeks of unexpected but much-needed vacation as well. In the years that followed, I would often revisit the overwhelming thirst of that moment as an absurdity, but I knew what it was. And I could never look at the crucifixion the same way again, because I knew what Jesus meant here, what he felt here. Sure, we love to add our own reasons onto this moment - even the author of the gospel of John tells us here of the fulfillment of the scripture - but once you know, once you’ve visited this place, once you’ve known that thirst, you understand that this moment isn’t theological, isn’t transcendent in beauty or placidly beatific in its divinity.

It’s human. In its pain, its suffering, and yes its absurdity, it is so fully, completely, incarnately human. 

And when I see Jesus there, dying in his thirst, I think of that one person I found that day, who took me into their space and gave me that drink which had so consumed me, body and soul, that I had not yet fully noticed the ravaged mess of blood and bones that hung useless beside me. I put myself in his place, as those who surrounded Christ were in that time and place, and I wonder what might have happen if he’d chosen to do nothing. 

How much a cruelty that is, to look into the unvarnished humanity of that kind of suffering, the suffering which transcends all other experiences, where good and bad, politics and preference all disappear before that gasping, grasping thirst; to see that, and do nothing. Can you imagine the kind of heartbreaking indifference that is required to see that kind of pain, to see all but the basest level of our shared humanity stripped away, to see a broken body reach out with broken hands, a broken heart speaking through cracked and broken lips begging for something, anything to slake this all-consuming thirst…

…and to just leave them sitting there? Watching in impotent silence as their body falters and fails, as the shock creeps cell-by-cell through their body, pulling the life from their eyes as they are reduced, their humanity cut away piece by peace as they drift, gasping, into that terrible night. 

Ghosting. A footprint on the beach, as the tide’s coming in. 

Worse even than that, to come across someone so destroyed, and to mock them! To torment them! Can you imagine it? Is there no dignity to be found even in death? In life we may disagree, we may find each other hateful, fearful, or even criminal, but do we not all have within us some small piece of shared humanity that we can glimpse in those great and terrible moments? Don't we all see someone in terrible pain and suffering, and regard them with the same universality of compassion and care that we show children? All is forgiven in the face of death and innocence, or so I have been led to believe.

Have you ever mocked the innocence of a child, or spit in the face of the dying?

Have you ever been thirsty?

Oh, I don't just mean the thirsting unto death, of course. Organ failure produces the same gut-wrenching thirst whether it is your liver, your spleen, or your heart.

Our hearts.

I look at the world around us, and I feel thirsty, don't you?

Our hearts are failing with every day that justice is deferred, every day that war is suffered to continue, every day that genocide is permitted to endure. Our hearts are failing with every black and brown body that falls to the pavement with a wet thump under the policeman's boot, our lungs failing with every member of the LGBTQIA+ community cast out into the winter cold, breaths drawing harder and shorter as snow and ice fill the spaces within them left by families led astray by false prophets and teachers that we suffered to exist unchallenged among us. Our throats fail and close with a thousand unsounded screams with every aid convoy washed away in a hail of bullets for the crime of being hungry, our stomachs fail with every singe rope of barbed wire we permit to settle into the muck beneath the Rio Grande, waiting to tear the flesh of those huddled masses desperate enough to brave the waters, yearning to be free.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled," said he who hangs broken before us, pierced and penetrated for having the audacity to speak of a world where God’s mercy might be made known, where God’s love for the outcast and the rejected might be made gloriously real. 

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” says he who thirsts before us, aching for just one more drop, one last sip at the divine draught of life, the one whose own thirst we answer with hyssop and sour wine every single time we turn away from the least of these saying that it’s not our problem, that it’s just too much for us to handle, that there’s not enough time, not enough money, not enough resources, no more room at the inn.

The end is the beginning; the beginning and the end. 

Are you thirsty, yet?

Good Friday is a painful time, a desperate time. It is a time when we find ourselves seated at the foot of the cross, hearing the thirsty rasp scratching from his failing lungs, looking with him over that distant horizon and realizing with dawning horror that we have arrived in this place complicit; sponge in hand.

Centurions all. 

Here now comes the fight-or-flight, here now comes the desperation. Christ crucified, Christ thirsting for a divine righteousness to which we have been blind all this time convicts us, motivates us, drives us into the fight. We leap from our pews and charge out into the world, drawing our wallets like swords as we harken at last to the thirst surrounding us. We rail and we scream, preaching and teaching, calling our representatives in congress, making facebook posts with pretty ribbons - language copy and pasted from person to person like chain letters of old - hosting bake sales and fundraisers, and doing everything we can to get as far away from this place as possible, to put the cross behind us and the kingdom before us so that this great and terrible thirst need never be seen again. 

We drink, and we drink, and we drink, again and again and again…but still we are thirsty. Still we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice, for a reckoning that always seems to be just one more mile over the horizon. We run as fast and as far as we can, but with every turn Golgotha still winds up ahead of us, and the cross still looms before us. Harder and harder we try, doing everything we can think of but we can still hear the cries of the thirsty, the suffering, the outcast, the beaten, and the dying. Our frustration mounts and our hearts grow weary, until finally we can do nothing but scream at the heavens, eloi eloi, lama sabachtani!

A life spent drinking this water, but still, we are thirsty. 

There is a silence here, when we realize that all we have to offer is the indignity of sour wine. A moment of terrible, soul-rending realization when we bear witness to the truth that we were always coming to this place.

We cannot avoid this, cannot prevent this. We cannot unmake this thirst, cannot bring back those who have been murdered by the so-called “justice” system of the United States, cannot bring warmth to those who have frozen alone in the cold for the love they shared which we allowed to be called hate, cannot breathe life again into the children of Palestine, or give back to the Ukrainian widow the husband taken from her and her children. 

We cannot follow the road away from Golgotha, nor can we meet Jesus Christ anywhere else but here. 

The road to the kingdom doesn’t lead away from the cross.

It leads through it. 

So at last, we must do that thing that Christians have done for millennia now, and turn our eyes to the cross. Not out of fear, or hatred, but because in Christ there is no other way. We turn our eyes there because it is our destination, it is the place to which we all must go. 

We must be thirsty too. 

In three days, we will celebrate the victory over death. In three days we will stand in awe as the stone rolls away and life is breathed into the world once again. In three days we will smile, and sing, and rejoice as resurrection is made wonderfully and gloriously real.  

But today is not that day. Today we sit together beneath the cross, sharing in the thirst of Christ. And in the stillness and the silence, when all has finished, when his head is bowed and he has at last given up his spirit, when darkness has fallen and all hope seems lost, we wait. 

And we listen.

And we remember.

We remember the words of the one who has gone on ahead of us, words he said in mercy when the cross was just a pinprick on the distant horizon, when bellies were full and drink was close at hand. We remember the words of Christ Jesus who gave the great truth of the Gospel to an outcast woman, drawing water from the well at mid-day:

“…whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 

The grass withers, the flowers fade; night falls on Golgotha as that heavy stone is rolled into its place. 

For all the world, it seems as though the Gospel story ends here. 

But we know what comes next. We know that from death there comes life, from crucifixion there is resurrection. We know that this thirst will be quenched by a spring of water welling up to that life eternal, and we know that justice comes down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

So as we make ready in the dark, as we prepare ourselves for the breaking of the dawn, I have just one question for you.

I am thirsty; Aren’t you?