It is noon at Golgotha, the place of the Skull. The midday sun beats down upon the man dying upon the cross. The Romans preferred method of execution is painful and slow. There is no relief from the heat. His mouth is dry. Jesus’s thirst becomes overwhelming. He manages to find the breath to say.
I am thirsty.
Of course, Jesus is thirsty. Water to drink is the most basic human need to sustain life. A person can go without water for perhaps two days, less in the heat, but then fatal dehydration takes hold quickly. Jesus is fully human, he experiences the discomfort thirst, the pain of the nails in the same as any of us would.
I am thirsty say Jesus from the cross.
In our time, in our world which is so wealthy, so technologically sophisticated, people are still thirsty. 1.1 billion people across the world lack access to safe drinking water. In the shocking accounts of the siege of Mariupol over the last two weeks we have heard how residents have been forced to drink water from radiators and muddy puddles to stay alive.
Yet how can it be that Jesus is thirsty? How can it be that the man who is God’s word made flesh, who is the very image of the invisible God, how can it be that he of all people is here, dehydrated and dying?
Perhaps a memory flashes through his mind, years ago, another hot day, chatting with a woman drawing water at a well. He was thirsty then too, and she gave him a drink, and then the conversation took a new turn. Jesus told her: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but 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.” And she says, yes, yes that’s the water I need. I’ll have some of that.”
And then soon she’s telling everyone, I’ve met him, God’s anointed one, the Messiah, I’ve met him, he’s here. Come and see.
This Jesus who is hanging on the cross is God’s chosen one: he is the one from whom the springs of living water flow. And yet here he is dying on a cross, and thirsty. How can that be? Jesus is the live giver. “I come that you may have life, he says, and have it to the full.” Jesus comes to show us a new way of living, of sharing in the abundance of God’s life – and yet on the cross his own precious life is draining away. He is dying, and he is thirsty.
In the last month, the war crimes in Ukraine have confronted us afresh with the shocking extent of the human capacity for violence and cruelty. This is nothing new. Other such brutal wars have been further from the eye of the camera. Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Palestine. In the chaos of war the worst of human nature, the depths of human sinfulness is given free reign.
When we cease to view human beings as human beings, and see them instead as objects, as things instead of people, then there is no end to our scope to inflict violence.
On the cross, Jesus faces this. He faces the furthest extremity of human sinfulness. On the cross Jesus bears the violence inflicted by evil and sin although he has done nothing to deserve this.
On Good Friday as Christian together we affirm again the extraordinary truth that Jesus is the human face of God. He shows us exactly what God is like. When we see Jesus face, we see God’s face.
When we see Jesus suffering upon the cross, we see God suffering alongside us, suffering in solidarity with his people, suffering in solidarity with the people of Bucha and Kharkiv.
Jesus shows what God is like: a God who does not retreat from human suffering but enters it, shares it, absorbs it redeems it. This is the work of grace. This is the source of life giving water to our thirsty world. Thank be to God.
Ad yet the work of God’s saving grace continues.