Why was Jesus thirsty?

Oh, I have been telling myself I was going to write a post for, I don’t know, weeks now. I’ve joined a couple of extra causes/projects lately, which has absorbed some of life’s spare room. In the space of one week recently I had a meeting for women’s convention (I’m on the committee of that for another year), a parish council meeting (I was asked to nominate for that, which I did, then when I got on it I was asked if I could also take the minutes, so now I have that job), a meeting of the evangelistic course team (there’s a little team of four of us running a six week evangelistic course at my church, which is great, but it’s new so we’re working it out, and it has involved going to morning church also to make announcements), and then a meeting of the kids church leaders at church. I’ve also had some out-of-hours work functions to go to recently. And I think that’s about all the things I can manage to concentrate on for this year. I don’t write that to somehow sound impressive. The truth is, sometimes I think I am frightfully unambitious, because I am actually not so interested in a life crammed full of activities or achievements ... The older I get the more I’m drawn to the slow, simple life. It’s not that I don’t want to be productive and serve and be involved with people and learn new things, I just wish sometimes I could do it differently – with less scheduling and more time to just be with people and more time to learn the things I’d like to learn outside of my job. But life is what it is for the moment. There’s been fun though, and I’ve been on a few bushwalks and started a new crochet project and continued on poking around with plants and been trying to throw away "stuff". A few weeks ago I went on a 25km walk in the middle of nowhere with one of the guys from church, which was great and accounts for that Saturday (he doesn’t call these walks "dates", so I don’t treat them like dates). Then another week a large mob of 16 of us went on a much shorter walk. There was also a walk on Anzac Day, but it was going to be a whole day affair so I bowed out of that one to just catch up at home, and did a little local walk and took the picture above instead. All good times. But now for something to say. One of the guys at church has started up a little facebook page where we are to share a little reflection every now and then on something we’ve learnt from bible reading to spur each other on. I recently read through the book of John, in the lead up to and post Easter, and now I am reading Ezekiel as that is what we are doing for women’s convention (Ezekiel is so weird, let’s be honest). But I had a little bit of a revelation when I was reading John in conjunction with Tim Keller’s book Encounters with Jesus, about why Jesus was thirsty when he was hanging on the cross. Now, I don’t know whether it’s perhaps a long bow, but when you think about the number of times Jesus called himself the living water, I think it works, so this is what I shared on that page (I’d highly recommend Tim Keller’s book  - there’s a chapter in there on the ascension which I also found kind of revelatory).

I’ll have a shot at this, because I learnt something new today, which was one of those ‘ah hah’ moments. I have been reading through the gospel of John in the mornings (I read on the bus in the morning, because I am captive on it for 45 mins, and always get a seat when I get on, usually in the corner of the back seat, and it works for me), and this morning I was reading chapter 19. In that chapter, Jesus is crucified and hanging on the cross, and right at the end of his life he says ‘I am thirsty’, so they give him sour wine on a sponge, then he says ‘it is finished’ and he dies. I had the thought as I read that this morning that it was odd, that he needed/wanted that little drink, right before he died. Then on the bus on the way home I was reading Encounters with Jesus, by Tim Keller (partly in prep for the evangelism course we have coming up), and he is discussing the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, in John Ch 4, which begins with Jesus asking that woman for a drink, then going on to tell her that he is the living water and anyone who comes to him will never thirst again etc. Keller explains that Jesus was thirsty in chapter 4, because he’d emptied himself of his glory and become a vulnerable human. Then he writes:

“That is not the last time Jesus Christ said, “I thirst,” in the book of John. On the cross just before he died, he said, “I thirst,” and he meant more than just physical thirst. There Jesus was experiencing the loss of the relationship with his father because he was taking the punishment we deserved for our sins. There he was cut off from the Father, the source of living water. He was experiencing the ultimate, torturous, killing, eternal thirst of which the worst death by dehydration is just a hint. That both paradoxical and astonishing. It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied ...”

Some of that is not new to me, and maybe it doesn’t work without the context, but I guess I had just never thought about the thirst on the cross being so spiritually significant and connected with the idea of living water and eternal life etc (but it makes sense that what he is recorded as saying on the cross is significant!) - and of what else that means for what Jesus experienced on the cross for us, and thus what it also means for us.

Maybe it's just me, but I have never heard anyone suggest that about Jesus saying he was thirsty on the cross before.