I (Hunger and) Thirst (Maundy Thursday; John 19:23-30; March 29, 2018)

I (Hunger and) Thirst

Maundy Thursday
John 19:23-30
March 29, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

You have been with me as I have gamely preached my way through John's gospel. I have tried to hear with open ears what he has to say. To do that, I made an interpretive decision based on the story of the man who had been born blind and his expulsion from the synagogue. I decided that I would read John as a gospel written for a community recovering from deep trauma.

I've also noted that the author, while allowing his community to feel what it feels, also nudges them toward a better way of being in the world. Heady ideas are great, but, in the end, this is a story about the Word become flesh. There is no escape from history. Yes, the community divides the world into two camps, but there are those, like Nicodemus, for example, who is both part of the Jewish leadership responsible for their expulsion from the synagogue and a follower of Jesus, if only at night. Not everyone can be classified as either for them or against them.

As we have worked our way through John and drawn closer to the events that brought Jesus' life to an end, it is understandable that some of these tendencies have become more pronounced. If John's community was traumatized by being thrown out of the synagogue, we can expect that trauma to be newly painful as we find ourselves in the middle of Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution. His is the original expulsion.

I understand this; I get it; I even approve of it as a part of John's attempt to bring his community to a place of healing.

But sometimes, sometimes, in his effort to allow for his community's story and to show them toward the new life of Jesus' resurrection, he tries to have it both ways. And it doesn't quite work.

In our text for this evening's service, we have an odd choice on the part of the writers of the narrative lectionary. We have Jesus crucified by the soldiers who divide his clothing among themselves. Then we have Jesus placing the care of his mother into the hands of "the disciple whom Jesus loved." Finally, Jesus spoke from the cross. He said, "I am thirsty." He was then given sour wine to drink. Then he said, "It is finished," and surrendered his spirit.

It's all very...what shall I say? painless. Yes, Jesus is crucified, but there are no cries from the cross as there are in the other accounts. Jesus seems calm to the point of being emotionless. He dies by giving up his spirit. He says that he is thirsty in order to fulfill scripture. Specifically, the scripture is the second half of Psalm 69:21, and only the second half of the verse, because the first half of the verse reads, "They gave me poison to drink" which clearly does not happen here even though the syntax of Hebrew poetry requires that the two halves cannot be separated.

He says, "I am thirsty," to fulfill Scripture, not because he is thirsty. Is there some reason why John cannot allow his Jesus to say he is thirsty because he is thirsty? Is there some reason John cannot allow his Jesus to be thirsty?

There are other writers who took this tendency to move away from a thirst grounded in a real body. Taken to its logical extension, the result was that Jesus, although resembling a human being, only seemed to be human. That his body, though it seemed to be a body like ours, was not like our bodies at all. And even that Jesus himself did not die on the cross, but only seemed to die, that God arranged for some last-minute substitution so that Jesus walked away unharmed. This was so common an understanding that it had a name. It was called Docetism, from the Greek word, dokeô meaning "to seem."

Docetism is still quite common in the church. Docetism is still popular because it seems so spiritual. If Jesus only seemed to be human, then God doesn't have to muck about with matter, or the real world, or business, or politics. And neither do we. In fact, if Jesus only seemed to be human, the best thing for us to do is to get as far away from the world as we can as quickly as we can. We shouldn't be mucking about with matter, or the real world, or business, or politics. Or at least we should realize that the real world has nothing to do with God or with being a follower of Jesus. We should separate heaven and earth, church and state, religion and politics.

I don't know if John intended this or not, but he certainly left that door wide open. So I tonight I have the audacity to offer up this correction to John's gospel:

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (because he was thirsty), "I am thirsty."

I dare to do this because the heart of the Christian good news is the incarnation. The Word became flesh, not something that looked like flesh, not something that seemed to be flesh, but flesh. God became a human being, not something that looked human or seemed to be human, but a human being. As Karl Barth may have said (and if he didn't, I'll take credit for it), "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Jesus." If Jesus only seemed to share our humanity then there is nothing to see in Jesus, neither divinity nor humanity.

Jesus was fully human, completely human, as human as you are, as human as I am. Otherwise we would not and could not see God revealed in him. Jesus was an infant, crying in the night because he was hungry or because his diaper was dirty or wet or for no apparent reason at all, like babies do. Jesus grew, learned to talk, and embarrassed his family but using impolite words to see how they worked. Jesus talked back to his parents. Jesus fought with his siblings. Jesus got into scrapes with the other kids in the village. He stayed out past his bedtime. And don't even mention that staying behind at the Temple, because “I must be about my father's business" business.

Jesus gave his rabbi fits. He had sexual desires. He had dreams for himself that he gave up reluctantly to answer his call. Jesus enjoyed the company of his disciples. He didn't like non-Jewish people very much.

He made mistakes. There were things he didn't know. He believed that the world was flat. He did not understand electricity.

He had a human body made up of matter. He wasn't made of some sort of special matter that wasn't really material. He wasn't a hologram projection. He had a real body. He had to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He got hungry. When hungry he enjoyed eating. He liked wine. He sweat when it was hot or he was working. If he didn't bathe or wash his clothes he stank.

In short he was human and material.

In the good news that we tell, matter matters and we matter. We matter because we are human. God does not love us in spite of the fact that we are human or material. God loves us precisely in our humanity and our materiality. God made us to be this way. God meets us in this way. And, when our own time-line through history comes to an end, God will meet us in our humanity and our materiality. Our ultimate fate is not to become beings who float around in heaven in bodiless form. Our ultimate fate is resurrection: new life in new bodies that will be just as bodily as the ones we have now.

Jesus said, "I am thirsty," because he was thirsty.

That, in the end, is why we bring our bodies to this very material table. When we come we receive real, material bread. It is soaked in real, and material juices of the grape. We eat and drink. We take these things into our own bodies, bodies that are the means that we have to live out God's dream on this earth. We take these things into our bodies and we digest them. We use them as food and drink. They sustain our bodies in their small way. Some of this food and drink will be incorporated (that is, made a part of our bodies); all of this food and drink will eventually continue to be cycled through the natural order of our world.

This food and drink are perfectly ordinary. They are holy because they are perfectly ordinary. They are holy because that ordinariness is where Jesus met us. They are holy because one day a very long time ago Jesus said, "I am thirsty." They are holy because we are thirsty, too.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.