In our last preaching assignment for CW102, Preaching and Worship II, I this morning preached the following sermon. It wasn't my best work at all, though there were some good parts. The chief fault is that it is more like an exegetical essay trying to be a sermon. Closely following this is the fault given by FXB when he heard it: no real personal connection or motivation. The incoming dean of UTS, who was the faculty reviewer, did in fact suggest it was a "theological blockbuster," but this was not necessarily a strength.... You may find it interesting nonetheless. I strongly recommend the last two paragraphs - ESPECIALLY IF YOU DRINK COFFEE!SERMON: John 19.28-30
Sisters and brothers, hear today from the Gospel according to John:
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.(NRSV)Water is an amazing thing, is it not? It is present in every part of our day. Coffee, for instance, is 99% water – I enjoyed a cup this morning, did you? Or maybe tea? I then rinsed my cup in the sink. I also showered and brushed my teeth – and I’m just going to assume you did also. Throughout the day we have thousands of options for beverage, all of them basically some kind of water.
The Word of God: thanks be to God.
Water is in every part of our lives, not just drink. We put our clothes in machines that will wash them. We use water to clean our hands and floors and cars (or, for New Yorkers, our pets). We water lawns and irrigate crops with water. We build fountains to make water into art, and we swim or skate or ski to make water into sport. Water can save lives and buildings when firefighters wield it; water saves our lives when it is joined with the Word of God through the power of the Spirit in baptism.
Water makes the world around us work – and it makes the world inside us, inside our bodies, work. The earth’s surface is 70% water; like the earth, the human body is between 55 and 75% water. Our bodies – and all life on earth – are vast chemical systems that depend on different concentrations of water for every single process. We are formed in our mothers’ water, and nourished by our mothers’ milk (which is 80% water). Our blood is 82% water; our muscles, 73%; and even our tough bones, 22%. Without water in our lungs, oxygen would not dissolve when we breathe. Without the right balance of water in our brains, electricity would not flow in those currents we call feelings and thoughts and emotions. Without water lubricating our vocal cords, they would not flap in the air currents we call speaking and singing.
Every part of being alive – and all the parts of living in our world – are possible only in and through water. Whatever we drink, it is mostly water. Whenever we drink, we bring life into our bodies through water from outside our bodies. In every meaningful sense, inside and out, water is life, and drinking is the connection between our life as individuals and the total life of the world. We wouldn’t even be alive without water; but drinking also means that we never live outside of relationships – to the whole world and to one another.
Water is life, life is not without drinking, and drinking is relationship: ergo, as the great Lutherans Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Heidi Neumark have taught, life is relationship. (Imagine that, Lutherans coming up with logic that even Aquinas might accept! Though I’m sure all this talk about drinking would make my Baptist and Methodist relatives nervous!)
Life is relationship, and it is with this truth that I approach possibly the strangest of the words ascribed to Jesus on the cross by the writers of the Gospels. The four different sayings in the Synoptics make some sense as reflections of Jesus’ relationship with God or Jesus’ understanding of his death. John, always difficult, of course has his own set of words – two of which work fine. Jesus first of all makes arrangements for his mother to be cared for by the beloved disciple, which only seems the decent thing to do if you’re the Messiah about to go where the rest of us cannot follow. As for “It is finished,” well, it’s no surprise how the Passion story ends (even St. Mel didn’t change that), so that just makes a Cliffs Notes kind of close.
That still leaves the curious “I thirst.” Jesus drinks in three of the four Gospel accounts – though John is the only one who explicitly acknowledges it. Interpreters of Mark and Matthew suggest that the vinegar or sour wine was offered by those who wanted to keep Jesus awake longer to see if Elijah would actually come. John offers a different reason: to fulfill Scripture, namely Psalm 69.21: “They gave me gall for food, vinegar to quench my thirst” (v. 22, JPS Tanakh). Jesus cited the scripture he was fulfilling, then he fulfilled it by dying – that’s the answer John gives, and that should be enough.
Something keeps nagging at me, though. The whole point of John’s Gospel is to present the signs that can make one believe in Jesus. Again and again, Jesus’ authority in John is his proclamations about himself and about his particular relationship to God. Of course fulfilling scripture is important to John, but Jesus is first and foremost the Word in the beginning, who existed before any scripture. And doesn’t John seem to be trying a little too hard, a little too self-consciously, in explaining Jesus’ words as fulfillment of scripture? Almost everywhere else, it’s what Jesus actually does and says that matters to John: scripture almost always confirms Jesus’ message and deeds, not the other way around.
Jesus deeds speak first, as in Jesus’ first miracle – the wedding at Cana. There, Jesus turns water into wine, so that the wedding celebration can continue. When folks started getting thirsty at Cana, Jesus made sure they could continue to enjoy one another’s company. Another of the signs – feeding the five thousand – also seems concerned with providing for a group of people to remain with one another. Of the remaining five miracles, three are healings and one is raising Lazarus from death: all involve continuing in life together. Aside from these, there’s the miracle of Jesus’ walking on water to join the disciples and calm their fears. Again and again the signs show a Jesus who profoundly cares about remaining in relationship. If John wants us to believe in Jesus because of the signs, then we believe in one who used power to sustain relationships even over-against death.
Life is relationship – there it is again! – that truth is the heart of Jesus’ deeds and say-ings. Jesus may have been fulfilling scripture when he cried out “I thirst!” But what Jesus meant, judging by John’s own portrait, is that even until the very last moment, Jesus seeks to remain in relationship. “I thirst!” is Jesus’ cry to keep sharing life with the people around him, even if it’s only his mother and a few followers. “I thirst!” is Jesus’ plea to keep the party going at Cana, to join with the disciples, to feed the gathered crowd. So long as Jesus is thirsty, he is longing to bring the life of the world around him – the life he made with those around him – into his own body. A thirsty Jesus is one whose whole person strains for relationship to the very end. A thirsty Jesus uses the last moisture on his vocal cords and the last air from his dried-out lungs to clamor for more life from the life of the world around him. But then Jesus dies immediately after drinking, and the truth that live is relationship turns into the open question: Is relationship sufficient for life?
Now, I should be able to leave that as my hook for you to come back on Easter morning to hear another sermon in which the resurrection finally tidies up John’s anomalous last word of Christ. But that would be a homiletic monopoly, akin to Microsoft bundling its own versions of software into the operating system for hardware. Instead, we have to contend with another problem with the “I Thirst” that John puts in Jesus’ mouth. This is a much bigger problem for John, and it involves what should be our biggest problem with John.
I just tried to show that Jesus’ saying “I thirst” is consistent both on the textual level of what John says elsewhere in the gospel and on the symbolic level of what thirst and drinking mean. But in another sense “I thirst” contradicts everything Jesus seems to stand for in John. Jesus in John is the Jesus who calls himself by many beautiful “I ams,” as if to emulate the “I AM” that is God’s own name: “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the light of the world”; I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I testify on my own behalf”; “I am the bread of heaven”; “I am the water of eternal life.” These “I ams” have been used as the foundation of two dangerous the-ologies – that Jesus is the exclusive disclosure of God to human beings, and that only through Jesus’ sacrificial death could he atone for humans. These two ideas have supported millennia of Christian violence, conquest, and oppression. With only a few steps of decoding, these ideas are the basis for our current war on the unrighteous who are enemies of Jesus and need the atonement of Jesus’ death – otherwise dressed as a national security policy.
The problem with Jesus saying “I thirst” is that Jesus is the one who offers the water of eternal life. As Jesus says at John 6.54-55: “Those who … drink my blood have eternal life … for my blood is true drink.” And John 7.37-38: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” And John 11.25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will … never die.” How can Jesus be thirsty if he is the one who fills the thirst of all others? And how can Jesus cry thirst just as he dies in order to give eternal life?
In order to make any sense of this, we need to look back to the only other time Jesus expresses thirst: with a Samaritan woman at a well, in chapter 4. Jesus asks the woman for a drink, and she is shocked – why would one from his community ask for water from her, a member of a socially despised group? Jesus snottily retorts that if she could recognize Jesus and knew to ask him, she would never have to go to the well again. That well, where she walked every day for water, because she was an outsider. Jesus tempts her with the possibil-ity that she her social condition could be completely different – that she could be freed from the signs of oppression she faced in the daily tasks of survival. The Samaritan woman’s well bears a striking resemblance to water fountains marked “Negro” in the US and “Colored” in South Africa; to windows that read “No Irish” or “No Chinamen” need apply; to protest placards that declare “God Hates Fags”; and to a standard of living that all but says “Stay Out, Global South.” Jesus tempts the woman and us with the hope that such signs of oppression could be erased – if only we knew how to recognize Jesus properly.
Fast-forward now to chapter 19, Jesus on the cross. Instead of a false thirst taunts the Samaritan woman for not recognizing him, Jesus cries out with the Samaritan woman’s own thirst. For he has become an outsider like her, dying the death afforded to hundreds of thou-sands of people judged as criminals, prisoners of occupation, and enemies of state. No longer does he taunt her from a position of social power, but in his cry of thirst he proclaims the ultimate extent of oppression: death. That was a cry the Samaritan woman could not fail to recognize, because it was her own cry as she thirstily walked to the well every day.
And we, too, can recognize Jesus’ cry for thirst in our own time. According to the world health organization, every 8 seconds a child dies because clean water for drinking, hygiene, and sanitation is not available. Overall, five million people die every year from diseases caused by the same insufficient water supply. Between one-fifth and one-fourth of the world’s population does not have access to clean water. At the same time, the United States uses twice as much water per person than any other country in the world, while our water costs but a fraction of what it costs in the poorest countries. In more direct terms, one grande latte from Starbucks has perhaps as much clean water as an individual in the world’s poorest nations drinks in a month. And a large bottle of water – whether it’s Evian or Sarafina or Poland Springs – gives about as much clean water as is available to an individual in the least developed countries over six months. Water is life – this we know. And inequalities in water point to inequalities of power and wealth that are killing millions of people around the world every year.
Jesus’ cry of thirst was a plea to remain in relationship, was a cry out of the truth that life is relationship, as Jesus showed again and again in his miracles. And in the world all around us, we hear a cry for justice, for greater sharing of resources, for restoring the flow of life to each individual. When Jesus moves from “I am” to “I thirst,” he affirms not only that life is relationship, but that eternal life is relationship in justice. If we want to recognize find Jesus in our lives, we must look wherever water is threatened or scarce: there we know life is threatened. There we will hear Jesus cry, “I thirst.” And there we must restore relationship in justice.
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