I Thirst

The Cross - The Great Triumph of Love

Stephen Cottrell

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781529360936
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

'A movingly personal book... the fruit of much deeply meditated sharing of the good news with people of all sorts. Reading it is a real discovery of the fresh waters of faith.' - from the foreword by Rowan Williams 'After this, when Jesus knew that all now was finished, he said, "I am thirsty."' Jesus' words from the cross - a picture of God sharing the world's suffering, experiencing our humanity - can be a window onto God's purposes, leading to a deeper appreciation of his overwhelming love. I Thirst, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book for 2004, helps us explore what the death of Jesus means and how it relates to our lives today.Bishop Stephen Cottrell follows the passion story in John's Gospel, penetrating the deep mystery of a God who loves humanity no matter the cost. Each layer of meaning in the simple cry 'I thirst' is an invitation to consider our own lives and think again about what it means to be a follower of Christ in the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

The God who Shares

Christ Jesus was in the form of God,

but he did not cling to equality with God.

He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,

and was born in our human likeness.

Being found in human form, he humbled himself,

and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross;

therefore, God has highly exalted him,

and bestowed on him the name above every name,

that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

PHILIPPIANS 2:5b–11¹

In John’s Gospel, just before he dies, Jesus cries out, ‘I thirst’ (John 19:28). The soldiers soak a sponge in sour wine and hold it up to his lips on a branch of hyssop. When Jesus has drunk the wine he bows his head and dies. ‘It is finished’, he says (John 19:30).

At first glance the meaning of the words ‘I thirst’ is quite obvious. It is a painful and poignant moment in a grim story: Jesus is dying on the cross; he is in agony; he longs for a drink to ease his pain. What more is there to say? It is a ghastly death, made strangely more humiliating by the unnecessary indignity of the sour wine the soldiers offer. Surely, of all Jesus’ words, these cannot be stretched into a book?

But the witness of the Scriptures is that the Jesus whom we see thirsting on the cross is the one who, born in human likeness, has emptied himself of equality with God, taken the form of a servant, and become obedient even to death. ‘In Christ’, says St Paul, ‘God was reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5:19). This is God thirsting on the cross, sharing the world’s suffering, sharing our humanity. Therefore, these words from the cross can be a window into God’s purposes. As we uncover the meaning of these words we are led to a deeper appreciation of God’s love for us, made known in Christ, and a deeper understanding of our own calling to follow him today.

Too many Christians rush swiftly from the agony of the passion to the blessed relief of Easter morning. Let us not repeat this mistake. Rather, let us stand beneath the cross and hear over and over again Jesus’ words: ‘I am thirsty,’ he says to us.

The passion of God

The story is told of a mother whose little girl is late home from school one day. As the minutes tick by the mother gets more and more worried. Five minutes go by, ten minutes go by, and the mother does not know where the little girl can be. Fifteen minutes go by, twenty minutes go by and the mother starts to imagine the terrible things that may have befallen her daughter. Twenty-five minutes go by and the mother is convinced something awful has happened. Thirty minutes go by and the mother is on the verge of ringing the police when the little girl waltzes in through the back door without a care in the world. The mother sweeps her daughter up in her arms, deeply relieved she is safe. But as is the way with parents, relief quickly turns to anger: ‘Where have you been?!’ the mother cries. ‘Didn’t you realise how worried I would be about you?’

Well, it turns out that all this while the little girl had been next door, and the woman who lived there had recently lost her husband. ‘What have you been doing worrying that poor lady next door?’ the mother asks, crossly.

‘I haven’t been worrying her,’ says the little girl. ‘I’ve been comforting her.’

‘Comforting her!’ retorts the mother. ‘What could you possibly do to comfort her?’

The little girl replies, ‘I climbed into her lap and cried with her.’

This story takes us right to the heart of what this book is about, for this is what God is like, and this is the first thing we learn about God from Jesus. In Jesus, God shares our humanity. The God revealed to us in Jesus is one who climbs into our lap and cries with us. God shares all the tremendous joys of human life. God also shares the most heart-breaking sorrows.

The supreme example of this is the crucifixion. On the cross, when Jesus cries out in thirst, the misery and anguish he is going through is not just his, though the pain is very real: they resonate with every human cry and with all human suffering. Wherever there is pain in the world, wherever someone cries out, thirsty for water, afflicted with grief, tormented by pain, or craving love, we hear the cry of the one who has come down to earth to show us what God is like. We discover that God is thirsting too. In the suffering, thirsting love of Christ we see the thirsting, suffering God.

But saying this makes an assumption many people today find extremely hard to believe, one that even many Christians doubt. What we are saying is that Jesus – the flesh and blood man from Nazareth – is also God: not just a good man who acted like a god, nor God in disguise as a man, but someone in whom the fullness of God and the fullness of humanity dwelt together. This means that what it was for Jesus to be God was contained within what it is to be human.

This truth about how God is present to us in Jesus is of vital importance for the Christian faith. If Jesus, hanging on the cross, aching with thirst, his heart broken in two, is just one more innocent man dying an ugly death, then his story has little relevance to our suffering and our dying. His example may evoke compassion, we may even marvel at his fortitude, but let’s face it, there’s a lot of suffering in the world, and many people have faced that suffering bravely. What difference does his death make to us? And if Jesus is not really a man at all, but some sort of superman, a god in human disguise, then again, what difference does this make to us?

But if this man – this fully human man – is also fully God, if what it is to be God and what it is to be human are joined together in this man, if in Jesus the frailty of human flesh and the eternity of God are joined together, then the story of this man’s living and dying is the one upon which all the vast and important questions of life and death hang. His life and death have relevance for every life and death.

And this is the Christian claim, the Christian story. The great message of the incarnation is this: the Word that was with God in the beginning has, in Jesus, been made flesh (John 1:14). In fact, the word ‘incarnation’ means literally ‘embodiment in flesh’. We use a form of the Latin word for flesh – carne (from caro) – unwittingly whenever we eat that popular dish chilli con carne, which means ‘chilli with flesh’.

This is a staggering claim to make about God: that he is revealed in flesh, not overpowering what it is to be human, nor diminishing what it is to be God, but perfecting and directing humanity, and revealing God within the terms and language and particularity of a human life, the person of Jesus. Jesus shows us what God is like. Jesus also makes God available to us.

This making God known through Jesus is a central teaching of the New Testament. Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, says that Jesus is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15) and ‘in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell’ (Colossians 1:19). In him ‘we have access to God’, says the letter to the Ephesians (Ephesians 3:12).

In John’s Gospel, Jesus himself says, when Philip idly asks him to show them the Father, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father … Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ (John 14:9,11). Therefore, if we want to know what God is like, we must look at Jesus. Jesus is God’s way of knowing God. And what we find in Jesus is a God who knows what it is like to be human.

A thousand sentimental Christmas cards have blunted the edge of the Christian faith’s radical message. We see the cosy scene – a child lying in a bed of warm straw, adoring parents, angels, shepherds – and we miss the essential offensiveness of the story. This is not how we expect God to be. This is not a God who is above and beyond us, but a very ‘come down to earth’ God. This is not the comforting image of an almighty God, but of a God who chooses to reveal himself as stripped of power, a God who identifies himself with human beings – an affront to the usual religious mindset that likes to keep God’s sacredness separate from the supposed profanity of flesh. And what do we hear God saying to us? Well, the first utterance of the new-born is a cry, and the first thirsting of the new-born is for his mother’s milk. In Jesus, God cries out to us; he is thirsty. And in the manger we find a God who shares all it means to be human. In the manger is a God who thirsts. This was the experience of God in Jesus. He is born as one of us: his thirst is quenched at his mother’s breast, and he knows the intimacy and comfort of his mother’s love. What the Christian story reveals to us is what we can really only call the weakness of God. He is still God, still the all-powerful creator and sustainer of the universe, but no longer unapproachable, distant and removed. Rather, in Bethlehem, we find him very close and in need of help, a weak and fragile God, one who has become a tiny, helpless child, one who has made himself dependent on us. He is crying in the manger and requires our service. He is nailed to a cross and cries out for a drink. He chooses to express his sovereignty and all-powerfulness through the frailty of human flesh.

Thus we can affirm that Jesus’ death is not just one more innocent waste of life, but in Jesus, God shares human life. The one who died on the cross, crying out in thirst, is the one who was born in the manger, the one who shares. By sharing our life on earth he makes it possible for us to share God’s life in heaven. Because Jesus shared our humanity we can share his divinity. In Augustine’s famous phrase, ‘he becomes what we are, in order that we might become what he is’.

The Athanasian Creed puts it like this:

Although he is both divine and human

He is not two beings but one Christ.

One, not by turning God into flesh,

but by taking humanity into God.²

Emmanuel

At his birth, Jesus receives two names, both of which have great meaning. First, he is called Jesus, which means, literally, ‘God rescues’. Jesus is the one who is coming to save people. But he is also called Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’.

The one whom we see as a helpless child is God with us. The one whom we see impaled on the cross is also God with us. Because of him our whole understanding of God, and of God’s involvement with the world, is completely changed. His life and death reveal the true nature of God as the one who shares, as the one who communicates his complete and self-surrendering regard for his creation by becoming part of it, by becoming the one who is with us, who has climbed into our lap and holds us, weeping with us, dying with us. In Jesus, God speaks to us in a language we can understand, the language of a human life.

From this point onwards we can no longer think of God as one who is unaware of our human predicament or uninterested in our plight. God is alongside us, holding our hand when the pain is at its worst and leading the way, the only glimmer of light when everything else is lost and dark.

And his purpose is love. God becomes flesh in Jesus in order to love in the only way love knows how: to offer love without any thought of reward, and without any hint of compulsion that we should love in return. What we see here in the thirsting of Jesus, first at his birth, and then in his passion and death, is his sharing our humanity – sharing it to offer love, and sharing it to communicate love in a loving way.

Thus a pattern is set for the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry. He walks the path of love; he never coerces or manipulates. The prophet Isaiah put it like this

a bruised reed he will not break,

and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.

ISAIAH 42:3

As we shall see later, these are words that in all probability Jesus himself contemplated deeply to understand his own vocation. Jesus doesn’t just show us love; he isn’t just loving; he is love, because he is God, sharing our humanity, drawing us to himself and through him to the Father, and doing this all by love.

John baptizes Jesus in the river Jordan, not because he needs baptism (after all, he is the one person who does not require forgiveness!) but because his mission is to show complete solidarity with his beloved. He heals the sick, he forgives those trapped in sin, he restores the outcast to life in the community, he feeds the hungry, and he speaks words of hope and challenge. He shows us a new way of living. He demonstrates a glorious and liberating humanity. He brings God down to earth, and takes earth up to God.

But at the human level there is also, whatever the particular circumstances of his death might be, the stark and simple truth that to share human living to the full must mean sharing death. And when it comes to finding solace amid all the deaths and sufferings of human life, it is here, more than anywhere, that we see what being Emmanuel really means.

The way of the cross

Jesus knew that his vocation, to be the one who shares and rescues, would bring him into conflict with the religious authorities of his day. He often spoke to his disciples of his impending death and tried to prepare them for what would happen afterwards, and what it would mean for their lives (though they barely understood a word of what he was saying).

He tried to evade the snares set for him by the Jewish religious authorities, but in the end there was no place to turn. To be true to his vocation meant also to challenge these authorities. While claiming to speak for God, they were actually getting in the way of this new and complete revelation of God’s purpose and nature. Jesus saw clearly that those authorities were chiefly concerned with preserving their own power and status, but in doing so were cutting themselves off from God. The tragic irony is that all this was done in the name of God: upright, law-abiding religious people arrested and executed Jesus!

But religion can be dangerous. There is always the tendency to replace the risky freedom of relationship with God with the controlling safety of a religious system, where some are counted in while others are excluded, and where rules and regulations monitor and control belief as well as behaviour.

It might be going a bit far to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Foreword by Rowan Williams
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 The God who Shares
• 2 The Word that Shapes
• 3 The Call to be Thirsty
• 4 The Tenacity of Love
• 5 Enduring Thirst
• 6 Living Water
• Epilogue: The Story of the Cross
• The Rising
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Copyright