Lent--Jesus' Fifth Word for Our Time: " I Thirst"

  

“I thirst” we’ve all said it more than once. When we whispered many nights: “Mama I’m thirsty.” When the teacher told us we were to drink eight glasses of water a day. When our Mamas or Papas  put our feet in a basin of water and washed the dirt off our feet after we had played all day.When we came in from a walk or a run. When we were so sick in that hospital room and some angel of mercy took a cue tip and touched our lips with water or put a straw in a glass and held it to our lips. 

So when this fifth word came down from the central cross I think the church kept it because this is a universal word of identification. We all get thirsty and without water the body dehydrates and death could come.

But wasn’t this :”I thirst” remembered from the lips of Jesus a courageous word. Jesus thirsty. 

Jesus? there toward the end simply uttered what we all say: “I thirst.” Through the ages so many from the early days until today have tried to mute Jesus’ word here. We’ve all heard it. He appeared to be like us. He was God’s son and he was different from the likes of us. So we cosmetize this Jesus. Even from the cross we have dabbed away the blood and the grimace on his face and very little of his wounds show. Why many of those crucifixes show a downright pretty Jesus. But in my own Southern Baptist tradition of years ago we wouldn’t dare have a cross in our churches or on our steeples. (It’s Catholic!) We would say he hung on the cross but the cross is empty and Jesus had been resurrected. Yes, this is true. So we don’t need to decorate our churches with crosses.

But before that first Easter day we cannot dent that he whispered from his cross: “I thirst.” John Steinbeck knee deep in the middle of the terrible Depression wrote these words about Jesus and about us:

“Christ nailed down might be more

than a symbol of all the pain.

He might in very truth

contain all pain.

 And a man standing 

on a hilltop

with his arms outstretched, 

a symbol of a symbol,

he too might be a reservoir

of all the pain that ever was.”

So the church through the years has kept this word which most have largely ignored. John in those opening verses told us what the Lord had come to do: “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

And so Irenaus would say: ”He became like us that we might become like him.” Not only kind and loving. Not only stretching out his arms to everyone. Not only giving hope when there was no hope. But more. 

There is a legend that in the middle ages plague after plague killed 60% of the population in Europe, which was somewhere between 25 million and 200 million. Some artist painted Jesus like some plague victim festering with sores, hanging there crosseyed with unrelenting pain everywhere. And this painting became the centerpiece of one church. And priests and nuns and some family members would bring in their suffering love ones on pallets and place them beneath that painting of Jesus. And the sick would look up and know that in their suffering they were not alone. He really did thirst and ache just as they all ached and thirsted. 

And today? We need to stand close and hear this fifth word: “I thirst.” For in this strange time when everything is shut down, most of us are confined to our homes or wearing masks or suffering alone in some isolation unit. We do not know what the future holds for any of us.  We think of all the suffering Jesus’ thirst represents. Those worried about loss of paychecks. Scared of foreclosures of houses and cars. Those with no insurance. Or many with insurance beginning to see that nothing we do at the present moment can stop this scourge. 

He became like us that we might become like him. Not only on those sunny days in Galilee but when death hovers close and the pain is unrelenting from illness or grief or disappointment he was there. And even in the silence of the cross behind it all there was one unseen that cared and loved and kept him. And us, too.

I keep under the glass on my desk the wonderful words of the Carmelite nun, Jessica Powers: “I came upon earth’s most amazing knowledge someone is hidden in this dark with me.” I remember those words on my hard days. I have scribbled them on notes for so many sick at home or in hospitals. And as I pray and lift up these words for the names of my friends and loved ones and all the sufferers around the world.

photo by Tamaar / flikr


--Rogerlovette/ rogerlovette.blogspot.com