At the end of a long hike over a high pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, we were thirsty. The light was fading as we finally came down the trail to find a camp site beside a small alpine lake. Unexpectedly, we had crossed no streams and passed no other lakes during our day’s long trek. The full water bottles we started with were empty or all but so. We thirstily filled bottles and larger containers and looked forward to quenching our thirst.
Then someone shined a flashlight into one of our translucent bottles and we were dismayed to see tiny flecks moving there in the water we had drawn. They were probably mosquito larvae. We didn’t know. Some of us had already gulped down some of that murky liquid with life in it. The rest of decided to hold our thirst a little longer while the water was boiled. Fortunately, no one got sick, but it’s one of the few times in my life I can recall being really, really thirsty.
The fifth word of Jesus from the Cross, in John 19:28-29, shows us Jesus suffering from agonizing thirst and Himself being offered a questionable liquid to quench it. One good guess (we are not at all sure) is that Jesus was offered posca, a sour wine which was part of the rations given to Roman soldiers. It was often mixed with questionable water to hide the water’s taste and/or odor.
So, unlike the earlier offering of wine mixed with something else (myrrh, vinegar?), which may have had either a stimulant or narcotic intent, in the other Gospels, this offering and receiving of cheap wine just before Jesus’ death, as John tells it, may have been done with some kindness and mercy generally unusual in the process of crucifixion.
Once again I have been surprised that my reading about a word from the Cross has changed the direction of my thought about it. Like many of us, I had assumed that Jesus’ declaration of thirst was pretty much about a display of His total humanity in solidarity with us, a bit like what I said about the Cry of Dereliction this past Sunday. Yet I have found that there is a strong basis right in the text for thinking that this word from Jesus is about more than simply being physically parched and that there is long-standing Christian tradition giving this word a larger spiritual significance.
The part of the text I had not recalled before looking again is the beginning of verse 28, just before He says, “I thirst.” The lead up is, “After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture)…” That prelude to the fifth word suggests that we need to think both about how His thirst relates to the accomplishment of His mission and about the way in which it fulfills Scripture, particularly which bit of the Old Testament it might fulfill.
In answer to the latter question there are two main contenders for being an Old Testament passage which foreshadowed Jesus’ thirst on the Cross. Psalm 69:21 seems to fit the bill particularly well, with its second line saying, “and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Yet once again Psalm 22, which seems almost to predict the crucifixion scene, comes into play at its verse 15, “my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” Either psalm verse or both could be what John had in mind as he wrote.
I think I hear the larger significance of Jesus’ being thirsty expressed in the hymn found in our Covenant Hymnal as “O How Shall I Receive Thee.” The words are an English translation seemingly done by various folks of a portion of an Advent hymn in German by Paul Gerhardt. I cannot find any good basis for the English verse 3 in the German original, but this is how the first two lines of that verse go in the hymnal:
Love caused thine incarnation, love brought you down to me;
Thy thirst for my salvation procured my liberty.
Richard John Neuhaus writes that the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, have put these words over the doors of their chapels around the world, “I thirst, I quench.” Mother Teresa said, “We want to satiate the thirst of Jesus on the cross for the love of souls.”
There is more to say about how that thirst expressed by Jesus as He died was also a thirst to drink completely the cup His Father has given Him. As He said to Peter when the disciple tried to fight to prevent His arrest, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” Jesus’ thirst on the Cross was to drink to the dregs that cup of suffering which would accomplish our salvation. Thanks be to God for that holy Thirst.