Evening Service, 12 April 2009
“I thirst!” – the Final Request (John 19:28-29)
It’s a warm Saturday afternoon and you’ve been chasing a football around the field for what seems like weeks. You’re tired, thirsty, and sweaty. When the game ends you have just enough time to duck into the change room, change your clothes, and slather on a fresh layer of deodorant before heading off to meet your friends for a 6:00 pm movie.
So what’s wrong with this picture? You didn’t take the time to drink. After all that exercise your body has lost some fluid and you might be a little dehydrated, which occurs when your body loses more fluids than it takes in. Physical activity, heat, drinking tea, coffee, coke or alcohol, and even dieting can dehydrate us. We are constantly told not to ignore our thirst.
When Jesus cried from the cross “I thirst” there is no doubt He that He meant it. Just the physical conditions He had suffered since the Passover the night before, probably the last time He had a drink, would have reduced the level of His body fluids. All the more so because He had been hanging on the cross for 6 hours. Sweating, struggling to breathe, bent over and bleeding. Thirstier than He has ever been. So it is no surprise that He cried “I thirst!” – but one word in the Greek and Aramaic.
There are two references to drink at the cross.
The first one offered to Jesus at the beginning of the crucifixion contained gall, used as a narcotic to help deaden pain (Matt. 27:34). This Jesus rejected.
The second one Jesus was given which he received is described as sour wine. The soldiers took along this drink for themselves because they expected to sit in the hot sun until their duty was complete. Knowing the danger of drinking the local water they used wine which had turned vinegary to mix with the water in the hope of killing any bacteria. But interestingly there was also a sponge and reed which indicates that they thought not only of themselves, but also of the crucified. This mercy-interpretation seems to be supported by the crowds with mocking telling the soldier not to do it.
What are we meant to understand this saying? How do we respond?
1. A Testimony of His Suffering
Jesus declares that He thirsts, expressing a need for that thirst to be met.
He thirsted physically. Some people are so cool in a crisis, so strong under pressure, which would inflame or cripple ‘lesser’ mortals like you and I that we wonder if they are human at all.
One could almost think from the way that Jesus had responded during the trials and now 6 hours of crucifixion that He wasn’t really suffering – after all He seemed to handle it so calmly and patiently. That is until you hear this cry of distress. This displayed his true humanity in no uncertain terms: He felt the moment of dehydration. He was extremely thirsty, clearly fulfilling the words written about 1,000 years earlier: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and My tongue clings to My jaws; You have brought Me to the dust of death.” (Ps 22:15)
“I thirst!” – God does not, angels do not, we shall not in glory (Rev 7:16),but we thirst now because we are human and are living in a world of sorrow. And Christ thirsted because He was a man (Heb 2:17). And as a man He entered fully into our suffering, even the suffering of thirst often associated with those mortally wounded.
But He also thirsted spiritually. His thirst was real but it was not just physical. We need to remember that Jesus was on the cross as a substitute for sinners, and therefore was going through an experience vicariously of a sinner alienated from God and receiving God’s judgement. We all know the close connection of the soul and body, that what occurs in one affects the other – in Prov 17:22 we read “A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones” (see also Ps 32:3,4).
In this remember the parable Jesus told of Lazarus and the Rich Man, where Jesus highlights thirst as a symbol of the experience of divine punishment. The Rich Man after this life finds himself in hell, agonised by an inward thirst, begging that Abraham would be allowed to place a drop of water on his parched tongue. It was a symbol for dryness of the soul, a dryness that could only be relieved by communion with God, a communion which those in hell will never know. It would be astonishing if Christ did not experience here the thirst of that man in the parable. But that He did. He held onto God by faith, yet without feeling Him to be so He cried “I thirst!”
The sinner knows something of this thirst even on this life. Jesus points this out to the woman at the Samaritan well when in John 4:13 He says of natural water and by implication all the things people pursue in order to satisfy their inner thirst: “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again”. Nothing this world offers satisfies the inner thirst of man. The Psalmist knew the answer to that deep inner thirst of the soul: “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.”
Jesus had been forsaken from God because He bore our sin, so He knows its consequence of thirsting after God, for communion once again with His Father. It was not only His mouth but His soul that was parched.
The context tells us that it is uttered in the climax of His sufferings, having just cried “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”, and as such this cry “I thirst!” becomes an emblem of the reality of that suffering.
At the very least then we have confirmation here in this saying that our Lord can relate to and sympathise to our suffering and pain, and to our deepest spiritual needs.
Consider the words of the writer of Hebrews: “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15) Here is One who has Himself “borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4a).
Our Redeemer is “the Man of sorrows”. It is comforting to know that we have a God who understands our suffering, our temptations, and we can be confident that, if nothing else, He will hold us tightly in His loving arms because He understands our painful experiences.
As Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey wrote, ‘Our prayers and cries of suffering take on greater meaning because we now know them to be understood by God. Instinctively, we want a God who not only knows about pain, but shares in it and affected by our own. By looking at Jesus, we realize we have such a God. He took onto Himself the limitations of time and space and family and pain and sorrow’ (from, In His Image).
Are we not encouraged to cast all our cares upon Him knowing that He cares for us (1 Peter 5:17)?
2. A Testimony of His Submission
We read also that this was a conscious cry of Jesus. It did not simply slip out of His mouth under the sheer pressure of this physical and spiritual thirst. No, though the thirst was real, yet this word was carefully and deliberately chosen, for we read here that “Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled…”
Jesus was clearly aware of what was happening, very much in control of His thoughts despite the suffering involved for Him as our sin-bearer. He knew that there was this one prophecy of the Bible not yet fulfilled, and so spoke this way in order to fulfil that Scripture given in Psalm 69:21.
Jesus was dying according to the timetable fixed in eternity and in part revealed in the OT. Other things had been happening this day without His direct action to fulfil biblical prophecy, by which His Father bore testimony to Jesus as the Messiah, Suffering Servant, Redeemer. But here Jesus was deliberately and directly acting so that the prophecy might be fulfilled.
In other words He was very conscious of God’s agenda here, and showed His determination to decisively fulfil His Father’s will through satisfying His Father’s design in so sending Him into this world. He had but moments of life left and but little energy to speak He uttered these words because He was committed to that program. He was making that submission, even in the depth of His suffering, known for all to see. He bowed to the authority of Scripture in His death as in life!
Jesus saw that suffering always has a purpose, and He submitted to it. What good came out of it! Our very salvation! That is a great comfort and encouragement to us. But it also brings an exhortation: did not doubt the sovereign power and love of God even in suffering. Rather, submit to God, seek positively to submit to what He has revealed in His Word and trust him in His secret will. Is this how we see suffering? That we will let the revealed will of God rule our response to the secret will of God? This is the perspective of Ps 119:30-31, 59-60. Are you anxious to fulfil the Scriptures in your life? (Ps 119:35-36, 133).
3. A Testimony of His Sureness
Not only was Jesus committed to God’s program, He clearly saw Himself as God’s Man, the Messiah.
Even when everything was screaming against Him: suffering, rejected, forsaken – how satan must have sought to attack Him saying ‘How could you possibly think You are the Messiah’. Yet Jesus by this very deliberate word was saying ‘NO – look at the Scripture this is what is said of the Messiah, this is what I can say about myself – I am the Messiah.’ All that has been happening these last few hours doesn’t undermine but underlines that reality! He knew that by uttering this word now the chain of events that fulfilled Ps 69:21 would take place – and they did. Bearing the wrath of God and the approach death had not robbed him of His understanding of Who He is and what He would achieve through it, but confirmed it. The cross may be a stumbling block to the Jews and an offence to the Greeks – but not so to Jesus. It was the declaration of His Messiahship and the scene of His great victory over sin, satan and death.
By this word then Jesus identified Himself to the whole world as the Saviour. He is saying I alone can met man’s thirst now and free them from enduring that thirst intensified throughout all eternity.
Returning to John 4:14 we note that in answer to the inner thirst of this woman which is unsatisfied by any and every solution the world can offer, Jesus says “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” It is a spiritual thirst, that’s why the pursuit of the pleasures and promises of this natural world can never satisfy. It is Jesus alone Who has and is the solution. The woman of Samaria tried to satisfy that spiritual thirst with man after man – but Jesus says ‘I am the Man you need’ by which He was not proposing marriage but calling her to faith in Him.
The Lord Jesus Christ suffered thirst so that we might drink of the water of life forever and thirst no more. Do you know the sureness that Jesus is the Messiah? Have you turned to Jesus and received the ‘water of life’ that He gives? Are you drinking deeply of the life that He gives to His people through the Holy Spirit and the Word of God? There is no need for any of us to continue to thirst, not even as Christians.
4. A testimony of Victory
We see also in this cry, “I thirst”, a victor’s cry. Jesus is saying the victory has been won. Look at the verse in John chapter 19:28, “After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished; that the scripture might be fulfilled, said, I thirst.” Knowing that all things were know accomplished He had fought the battle, He had seen it won and then He thought of Himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson tell us a story about a ship on the high seas. It is caught in a storm and carried near some treacherous rocks. The passengers and crew were terribly frightened. They were afraid they would be caught upon the rocks and the ship would sink. The passengers were in the restaurant part of the ship. one of the passengers went up to the bridge to see the captain and there he finds him lashed to the bridge. He watches him fighting with that wheel, he sees him striving to work the ship away from those rocks. The pilot sees him and smiles. The fellow turns and goes back to his companions and says, ‘There is no need for you to worry, I have been up on the bridge, I have seen the captain and he smiled.’ The battle’s won.
Although our Lord was not smiling on the cross, He cries out and says, “I thirst” and it is an affirmation to us that the victory has been won, the battle is over. He has won the battle for our souls. Having done all He cries out, “I thirst.”