Sermon for CATM – March 15, 2009 – The 7 Last Sayings of Jesus on the Cross: “I am Thirsty”
John 19: 28 Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
The experience of walking through the 7 Last Sayings of Christ on the cross is an overwhelming one. I’ve been in the congregation at this time of year over many years, listening to messages on this general topic a number of times.
This is the first year to my recollection that we’ve participated in an extended journey together through the last sayings of Jesus before His death and resurrection. Of course, walking through the sayings is really a devotional exercise of reliving Christ’s crucifixion.
And we’ve seen how, in short, concise statements, Jesus’ message on the cross has been a summary of his teachings in the three years before He went to the cross.
His first words on the cross are “Father, forgive them”. That, of course sums up the purpose for His coming to us. Jesus came to live among us, and die among us in order to restore our relationship with God.
His sacrificial death on the cross opens the door to you and to me for forgiveness, for reconciliation with God.
His words to the criminal who hung on a cross near Jesus and who asked to be remembered in heaven, Jesus words to this dying man were ones of profound comfort…”Today you will be with me in paradise”. That man was the first, as far as we know, to enter in to heaven under the new covenant.
Jesus’ words to his mother: “Dear woman, here is your son," and to John: "Here is your mother”, inaugurated the web of relationships based on faith in Christ that would become known as the body of Christ, the Church universal.
His words that we looked at last Sunday: “My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me”, recall the reality and the moment when Jesus, separated from God the Father as He endured the wrath of God for the sins of humanity, cried out, expressing the violent sting of alienation from God as He who knew no sin became sin for us.
And today…today we encounter Jesus in a moment that might be the most understandable for us on many levels, because every one of us has known thirst. It is a fairly common human experience.
We have known that feeling of dehydration, we have experienced being parched. And, hopefully, we’ve known the relief of a drink of water.
We rarely think about water as intensely as we do when our body craves it. At others times, especially here in North American, we take water for granted.
For the hundreds of millions of souls who live in Africa and in other parts of the world, no one ever takes water for granted, for its value is understood every day and the devastating effects of its absence have been experienced by all on those continents.
So we can perhaps relate better to this statement on some levels than on others. The statement itself says some important things about Jesus…things that have helped the church understand the mystery of God in Christ. You see, the humanity of Jesus is deeply evident in the FACT that He would thirst.
At various points, during one of the many millions of random controversies about Jesus over the past 2000 years, some people tried to assert that Jesus was God but only APPEARED to be human.
Those people couldn’t believe that God could actually become human because, frankly, they thought that human flesh itself was sinful and disgusting and they would not believe, despite the clear gospel record, that Jesus was God incarnate.
Others couldn’t wrap their brains around the thought of God suffering, that divinity itself could suffer, so they asserted that it was only Jesus humanity that suffered on the cross.
Here’s WHY we need the gospel record: We are quite capable of altering, distorting, revising, reconfiguring the story of God.
There is something in human nature that fundamentally struggles with the revelation of God, more so regarding Christianity than any other religion, because in the Christian faith God reveals Himself perfectly and tells the actual story of God.
That is what we believe and that is what we based our life and our faith upon: That God was in Christ, reconciling the world to the Father.
So the fact that Jesus got thirsty on the cross, after hours of brutal beatings and hours of hanging exposed to the elements, simply supports the conclusion that Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine.
He was thirsty, and his thirst was real. It’s interesting that this ‘saying of Christ on the cross’ follows, traditionally, Christ’s cry of forsakenness on the cross.
Last week we talked about how in that saying and in that moment, it is revealed just how it was that Jesus suffered estrangement from God, that bearing the sins of all humanity, He who had no sin, who knew no sin of his own, became sin for us, and was forsaken as He took on those sins by the Father, who in His holiness will not countenance or accommodate sin.
And shortly after that epically intense moment, we find Jesus thirsty. This is interesting. Separation from God leads to thirst. The impact of sin is to leave us thirsty.
This is telling. This too connects you and I to the gospel record, to Jesus who in suffering estrangement from God find himself in a state of thirst, physically, and I’d like to suggest, spiritually as well.
Scripture speaks of spiritual thirst of course. Let’s look at an important passage and what it can say to us about this kind of thirst.
Let’s read this together: [PPT[ Psalm 42:1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
God’s presence quenches thirst. When we are with God, living in harmony with Him, we may have many feelings, many experiences, but we will not thirst for him. Thirsting for God happens when there is some distance between us and Him.
Now you and I live with the calling to be in the world but not of the world. We live, as we discussed last week for those of you who were here, we live as people who have been reconciled to God through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is the critical beginning of our life with God. That’s what makes us Christians…we believe Jesus died for our sins.
But then we’re called into His body, the Church, and we are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus…we are called to (Is 58:6) “loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke”
We’re called to share our “food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-- when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood”. We’re called to engage the world in a very deep, very loving and very genuine way.
We’re called to be the fragrance of Jesus. Our purpose is at its core is missional and missionary. It is to LOVE the world to Jesus.
Friends…that calling excites me to no end. All of the training and teaching and courses and seminars that we run are to equip us to fulfill this calling.But fulfilling this calling means being out in the world, and when we’re out in the world, serving as we need to serve, we may get our hands dirty.
We serve others while we are still ourselves broken and wounded, sinful and always, always very much in need of God ourselves. We will always be, as it has been said, beggars showing other beggars where to find bread.
And in this we will thirst for God. Our hearts will never stop needing the refreshing and renewal that comes by being with God.
And thirsting for God we NEED to continually and regularly reconnect with the people of God in worship and fellowship in order to stay healthy and to keep going, to not become stagnant or self-reliant regarding our faith. Jesus said that wherever two or more are present, He is in our midst.
Why did He say that? So that we will always understand that we need each other in order to experience Jesus’ presence in the fullest way.
Spiritual thirst can happen when we are too long absent from God’s presence. Looking at Jesus who thirsts after bearing the weight of the sin of the world, we can at least acknowledge that our own sin leaves us dry, leaves us needy, leaves us weakened, leaves us diminished and broken.
And so we go to Jesus, out of whom flows living water, our spirits are renewed.
A profound moment in the life of Jesus illustrates this. Jesus is at a well and speaking to a Samaritan woman. Speaking about the water being drawn from the well, Jesus says: John 4: 13 "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again”.
Speaking of faith in Himself, Jesus says: “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
There is in Jesus an endless stream of abundant life, a reservoir that runs so deep into the life of God that there is no end of refreshment. There is no spiritual thirst that cannot be quenched by Jesus, by trusting in Him and living our lives in Him.
It is terribly sad when people walk away from Jesus, when they choose another path, when they reject life in Him.
Speaking with someone close to me recently who is in a real state of flux regarding faith and at least verbally is saying that they reject Christian faith, I tried to convey that there is no way that truly knowing Jesus, actually living life in Him, that one could walk away from Him.
This person, like all others who choose to abandon faith, used to affirm the logic of the Christian faith. They said it made great sense to them. That was about as far as they got in their faith.
You know, when knowledge of Jesus gets stuck in here [tap head] and doesn’t then become a lived experience in heart [tap heart]; when our confession of faith does not touch every part of who we are, we are vulnerable to being deceived.
This deceived person who is very dear to me, has so far failed to abide or remain in Christ. Jesus says in John 15: “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.5 "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.
And so we are called and equipped to remain in Jesus, to abide in Him. To be disciples in the truest sense in which all that we know of the gospel and of God and of the Son of God works its way from the shallow water of intellectual understanding to the deep water of a lived faith.
A faith that impacts all of our decisions, that impacts our lifestyle choices, that impacts our generosity, that impacts who we are when there is no one but God watching us.
In Jesus is life, in Jesus is purpose, in Jesus is love that can be matched nowhere else.
Coca-Cola had an advertising strategy summed up in this: When people feel thirsty, we want them to think of Coke first – this was their international plan, if you can imagine it. Despite their efforts, when we’re thirsty, really thirsty, we don’t first think of a carbonated beverage.
We think of the purest thing that can satisfy. Our longing is for that thing that is unadulterated, pure, glistening in its completeness; the human body, made of 98% water, yearns to be nourished by more water. Our bodies know what they need and they seek it out.
Your redeemed soul – if your are a Christian your soul IS redeemed…your redeemed soul is a home, a temple for the Holy Spirit, and as such it longs to be filled with that which is pure, glistening in its wholeness….God.
Here’s a passage that brings to light a common problem, however: Jeremiah 2:13 "My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Let’s be honest here…we’ve tried other waters, we’ve looked to people and to advice columns, to Oprah and to Dr. Phil. We’ve sough solace in a bottle or at the end of a needle or a pipe.
We’ve sought to have our deepest needs met in all the wrong places; everything that has presented itself as the answer, we’ve looked there. We’ve tried it on our own, we’ve walked away from God and dug our own cisterns, and we’ve come up empty.
Whatever it was that filled up those cisterns was toxic to us. We’ve been lost in those things, we’ve felt the sting of recognizing that we’ve long been on the wrong path …yet again. So our soul thirsts again for God...for the living God.
Back to our passage for today: Jesus is on the cross, having experienced the sting of separation from God as He alone bears the sins of the world. He is thirsty…thirsty for water, yes, but thirsty also for restored fellowship with God.
We all know that longing, and if you’ve been a Christian for long you’ve learned that God is eager to restore you to right relationship…so eager that He says in 1st John, chapter 1:
6 If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
Jesus is on the cross, and the second thing He says today to us, very briefly, is “It is finished”. What is finished? His life? His mission? His teaching? Of course not. His life and mission and teaching have continued for 2000 years in the church.
What is finished then? The work of the cross is finished. The suffering of God for the sins of humanity has accomplished everything that was intended.
Everything was accomplished, all was completed that needed to be completed so that you and I can walk int eh light as He is in the light. All was completed.
Just As God Would Have It. Just As The Prophets Had Foretold. Just As The Old Testament Ceremonies Had Indicated. Just As The Divine Holiness Demanded. Just As The Sinners Needed.
Let’s review: Show Video – The Last Painting. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqZUnSU_nzA][Also available at http://www.sermonspice.com ]
Then:
One day I came to Him, I was so thirsty.
I asked for water, my throat was so dry.
He gave me water that I never dreamed of.
But for this water, my Lord had to die.
He said, "I thirst" yet he made the rivers.
He said, "I thirst" yet he made the sea.
"I thirst," said the king of the ages.
In His great thirst He brought water to me.
Now there’s a river that flows as clear as crystal.
It comes from God’s throne above!
And like a river, it wells up inside me,
Bringing mercy and life giving love.
He said, "I thirst" yet he made the rivers.
He said, "I thirst" yet he made the sea.
"I thirst," said the king of the ages.
In His great thirst He brought water to me.
Let’s pray. Holy God, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. Have mercy on me, a sinner. Have mercy on each of us. We have known deep thirst and deep longing, as you did. We have known the weight of our own sin. You, who knew no sin of your own, also know the weight of our sin. In your mercy You went to the cross and you won for us the kind of liberty a thirsty people can truly appreciate. So we say: “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for bearing our sin on the cross. Thank you that you died showing us the greatest kind of love. May we live our lives in the refreshment of Your living waters. May we return often and may we dive in, O God, with all that we are and all that we have. Thank you Jesus, Holy Son of God. By Your grace and mercy we will live our lives for and in You. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
