SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR

CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

GOOD FRIDAY 2010

“After this, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, he saith, ‘I thirst.’”

 (John 19:28) 

              Have you ever noticed how many of the Passiontide hymns are in the first person singular?

“Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand”

“When I survey the wondrous cross”

“Lead me to Calvary”

“Jesus keep me near the cross”

“Alas, and did my Saviour bleed”

And, of course those plaintive words set to the haunting music of Johann Cruger: “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?  Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee, ‘Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.”

              These hymns bespeak a piety of personal salvation.  They remind us of the standard question that street corner evangelists ask passersby: “Are you willing to make Jesus Christ your personal Lord and Savior?”  There is nothing wrong with this piety, really. We do have to have a personal relationship with Jesus.  There is a sense in which each of us, by the grace of God, must work out our own salvation.  Come Judgment Day, we cannot plead membership in Calvary Church; we cannot drop the names of influential friends.  We will have to answer for our own deeds.

              The problem with such personal piety comes when it is the sum total of our religion.  When I was growing up in Brooklyn in the Fifties, it was still common to see vendors and tradesmen driving horse-drawn wagons.  The horses always wore blinders, whose purpose was to prevent them from looking to the left or to the right, or to be startled or distracted by anything around them.  With blinders on, they were forced to look straight ahead.  Some of us wear spiritual blinders. We just see the cross. Things --- and people --- around us become unimportant, not worthy of our attention.  It’s just me and Jesus --- an attitude that was seriously challenged for some of us when the Peace was reintroduced to the liturgy!

              Jesus’ final hours were busy ones.  He tried to set an example for his disciples by washing their feet.  He instituted the sacrament of the holy Eucharist as a way to assure his followers that he would always be in the midst of them.  Even on the Cross, he is making sure things are in order.  He says to his mother: “Behold your son,” and to John, “Behold your mother,” and the fact that John “took Mary into his own home” is evidence, some say, of the first Christian community.  And after all these things were accomplished, Jesus cries out from the Cross, “I thirst.”  Strange, ironic words from one who called himself the “spring of eternal life,” and who said that “whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

              Yet no one can deny for a minute that we should take this utterance literally.  Jesus, being fully human, experienced the whole range of physical feelings.  Naked, hanging on the Cross exposed to the noonday heat, and slowly and excruciatingly losing blood, he must have been thirsty, to say the least.  Indeed, his thirst is foreshadowed in the words of the Psalmist: “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws.”  But I would like to suggest that it was more than physical thirst that our Lord was experiencing.

              Peter Gomes, chaplain at Harvard, gives us a clue.  He recalls that the order of service for Good Friday at the Congregational church in which he grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, always had a kind of “sub-title” under each of the Seven Last Words.  The one under the Fifth Word, “I thirst,” was “human need.”  What was being emphasized, then, was that the crucified one and his needs were made real.  It was not now the Sovereign Christ who hangs on the tree, as in his previous utterances, like “Today thou shalt be with me in paradise.”  No, this is very much the human Jesus, whose needs we recognize and with which we can identify.

              But there’s more.  This word from the Cross reminds us that Crucifixion is a terrible way to go.  This word is meant to drive home to us that Jesus’ suffering is real and torturous.  The vinegar, for example, on the stick is used not to slake the thirst of the one being crucified; say the Biblical scholars, but is a form of perverse smelling-salts, a stimulant to keep the crucified one awake, not allowing him the dignity of losing consciousness --- keeping him awake so that he can experience and be fully conscious of  pain.  To offer Jesus vinegar, therefore, is literally to add insult to injury.

              The effect the vinegar has on us is that it reminds us that Jesus is deprived of the dignity of human kindness, deprived of the humanity that has been taken from him bit by bit.

              But we are also reminded that to thirst, Biblically speaking, is also to yearn, to long for, to seek after that which truly satisfies.  This is what Jesus means when he says in the Beatitudes “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”  If you visit any chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, whether it be in Calcutta or the South Bronx, you will see the same words over the door: “I thirst, I quench.”  Mother Teresa said that she and the other members of the Missionaries of Charity want “to satiate the thirst of Jesus on the cross for the love of souls.”  The order is dedicated to service to others and believes that each act of service is a drink offered to Jesus. What a beautiful thought.  It is unlikely that Mother Teresa was influenced by the hymn, “Where cross the crowded ways of life,” but a verse in that hymn seems to sum up her theology: “The cup of water given for thee still holds the freshness of thy grace; Yet long these multitudes to see the true compassion of thy face.”

              “I thirst,” Jesus cries from the cross.  He thirsts for us, and we for him.  “As a hart longs for flowing streams,” says the Psalmist, “so longs my soul for thee, O Lord.  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”  This reciprocal thirsting marks the lives of all of us who confess and call ourselves Christians.  But thanks be to God, who has given us gifts to be used to minister to the thirsty, both to satiate the thirst of Jesus, and to quench the thirst of those who long for him.  May God who has given us the will to do all these things, give us the grace and power to perform them.

              Let us pray:

Up in Heaven, sublimest glory
Circled round Him from the first;
But the earth finds none to serve Him,
None to quench His raging thirst.

Evermore for human failure
By His passion we can plead;
God has born all mortal anguish,
Surely He will know our need.                AMEN.