I Thirst

Living Water- Third Sunday in Lent

“I thirst.”

These are some of the last words Jesus said as he hung on a cross despised, as he hung on a cross to die. In the last moments of the atonement, Jesus expressed a very human need. He was thirsty, just as his ancestral family of Israelites were thirsty in the wilderness. But where Jesus was offered sour wine, the Israelites received flowing water from the rock at Horeb. Flowing water, living water, moving water. Water that wasn’t stagnant or putrid, but fresh, holy water with which to drink until their thirst was quenched.

Moses called the place of the miracle fountain “test” and “quarrel”, because it was there that the Israelites of that generation hardened their hearts and demanded that Moses prove that God—the liberator who had led them from Egypt, who had given them the Passover lamb to free them from the grief of losing their first born, who had cared, provided, and been with them in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night—wouldn’t let them parish in the wild country. They didn’t trust the one who gave them living water. Instead, they demanded a sign and a wonder to comfort them. Instead of faith, they faithlessly cried out that it was better if they had stayed slaves in Egypt than to be free and dependent on the goodness of God.

But it is those with hard hearts—we who demand God’s signs in order to believe—that Jesus came to die for. And at that death, Jesus thirst.

In another story, he was hungry—famished—after his 40 days of fasting in the wild lands before the tempter came to offer him everything he was promised, if he would harden his heart and put God to the test. There, Jesus refused, even refusing to alleviate his own hunger rather than putting the Lord his God to the test.

Jesus wasn’t hard of heart, but he did indeed need.

Jesus’ thirst was recorded another time in scripture. In a foreign land (Samaria) Jesus sat down by a well because he was tired. When he sees a woman come to draw from the well, again Jesus says, “I thirst.”

“A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’”

The son of man had parched lips.

The women at the well had a parched soul.