Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA GOOD FRIDAY 2009

"After this, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus saith, 'I thirst.'" (John 19:28)


A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a sermon that the "crucial" hymns in our hymnals, that is, those whose theme is the Crucifixion, are the ones in which we are more likely to find thoughts and wishes expressed through 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 Savior bleed." And of course there are those plaintive words set to the haunting music of Johann Cruger: "Who was the guilty: Who brought this upon me? 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 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 --- and here I date myself, 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, lest they be startled --- or "spooked" as horse people would say --- and upset the applecart or whatever kind of cart it was. 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.

Jesus, it will be noted, did not allow himself such a spiritual luxury. His 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. Jesus, it can be said, founds the Church from the Cross.

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 "whoever believes in me shall never thirst." Yet no one can deny for a moment that we should take this utterance literally. Jesus, being fully human, experienced the full range of physical feelings. Naked, hanging on the Cross, exposed to the noonday heat, slowly and painfully losing blood, had to be thirsty. Indeed, his thirst was foreshadowed in the words of the Psalmist: "My strength is dried up like a potsherd (a dusty fragment of pottery) 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.

Richard John Neuhaus, the renowned Jesuit theologian, who died just a few months ago, says that this "Fifth Word" from the Cross has traditionally been taken to refer to the church's missionary impulse, an impulse driven by Jesus' thirsting for souls. In his pre-Crucifixion activities, he is primarily concerned with his intimates --- his disciples, his mother, his followers. Now that all is accomplished, he turns his attention to the world he has come to save.

I am told that if you visit any chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Theresa, be it in Calcutta or the South Bronx, you will see the same words over the door: "I thirst, I quench." Mother Theresa said that she and the other members of the order 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 those multitudes to see the true compassion of thy face."

The Prayer Book Liturgy for Good Friday makes it very difficult for us, indeed, to put on spiritual blinders. Lest we be detracted by our devotions to the Cross, lest we be detracted by receiving our communion having come back from keeping vigil with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the church bids us to focus on the world beyond the stained class windows (I've always been intrigued that such windows prevent you from seeing in or out). The invitation to the Solemn Collects, based on John 3:16-17, pierces our pietistic bubble: It says: "Our heavenly father sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. We pray, therefore, for people everywhere according to their needs."

In a former era, the Church, on Good Friday, used to pray for "Turks and Infidels" (and if you remember that, you predate even the 1928 Prayer Book) those who had not received or who had refused to hear the Gospel, in far flung parts of the earth. We need not look so far afield. There is a ripe mission field at our doorstep, made up of our "families, friends and neighbors and those who are alone." Men, women and children, some of whom are in the bosom of the church, who are the victims of hunger, fear, injustice and oppression. But we should do more than remember them before God. We should ask God to show us ways in which we can be instrumental in quenching their thirst.

Earlier this week, your parish clergy, together with some 30 other priests of the Diocese, renewed their ordination vows in the presence of our assisting bishop, Robert Johnson, in Trinity Cathedral downtown. It was a moving service that reminded us of why we were called to the ministry in the first place. And yet it was a bittersweet moment, as we were reminded of those who would have joined us in previous years but who have since left our fold. And we knew that many of those priests would gather in the same Cathedral the following morning and renew their vows. Clearly, our Lord thirsts for us, as he looks down on us confused souls, from the vantage point of Calvary. On a day on which we read of the seamless robe of Christ which even the Roman soldiers would not divide, we are reminded of the "unhappy divisions" which still be set us in the church.

"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 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 thirst 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: Jesus, in thy thirst and pain, While thy wounds thy life-blood drain, Thirsting more our love to gain: Hear us, holy Jesus. May we thirst thy love to know; Lead us in our sin and woe Where the healing waters flow: Hear us, holy Jesus. The Hymnal 1940, 82.