Ready to go home...

“I Thirst”

(John 19:28-29, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, August 15, 2010)

28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth.

After this... (28)

After Jesus spoke to His mother and His disciple, He was ready to die. He had been eager to go to the Father for some time, but there was work to be done that only He could do. So after He said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son,” and to John, His disciple, “Behold, your mother,” He was ready to fulfill the last little portion of Scripture. It was all essentially finished.

He had been through much. For the purpose of understanding these words, “I thirst,” I want to draw your attention to three episodes in His life that were now long gone. They are the other places in John's gospel where this word for being thirsty is used. Many months before, the occasion of His physical thirst led to a discussion with a Samaritan woman about a different kind of thirst. Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” The second time he spoke about thirst was after providing bread to a large crowd in John 6. Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. Then in John 7, in Jerusalem, at a time when there were large crowds because of one of the Old testament festivals, Jesus got up and spoke. This is what He said: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.”

All three times before the cross in John's gospel when He talked about thirst, His point was always the same: He said that He was the key to water from heaven that would really satisfy the thirsty soul. This was an important part of His entire ministry. He is the answer for our thirst. That combined with one additional fact: In order for us to have the benefit of that heavenly water, Jesus had to obey the Law as our substitute, and then He had to die in our place. This is seconds away; so close that John tells us that Jesus knew at this point that all was now finished, a fact we will examine more thoroughly next Sunday.

“I thirst.” (28)

For now, I want you to notice that on the cross, “after this,” after doing everything He came to do, at the very last moment, instead of talking about Himself as the answer for our thirsty souls, He talks about His own thirst. He says, “I thirst.”

He was thirsty. We could just let this be, except every other time He uses this word in John's gospel, he takes the meaning further than physical thirst. Very often, the Psalms and the prophets do the same thing. That's important, because John says here that Jesus uttered the words “I thirst” to fulfill something from the Old Testament Scriptures. What was it that Jesus was fulfilling when He said these words?

The most obvious passages are two psalms about the suffering righteous servant of God, both of which have several details about the facts of Jesus' death in them, Psalms 22 and 69. Psalm 22:15 says, “My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” That just points to the reality that the death of the Messiah would involve some method of suffering that included extreme thirst. Psalm 69 says something more directly significant. Verse 21 reads, “for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.”

That obviously fits in well, and it is true. We'll look at this some more in verse 29 in just a moment. Two things drive us further to a deeper meaning to this thirst. First, we have already seen that Jesus can use a true physical thirst to make a point about the thirst of His soul. Second, Psalms 22 and 69 refer to the Lord's condition of thirst in the extreme suffering of His body, but neither of those psalms actually contains a cry of a thirsty man. John could say that the Scriptures were fulfilled because Jesus is bringing about their prophesied response to His thirst or that the condition of His thirst on the cross is enough of a fulfillment of what is being described in these two psalms, and Jesus simply draws attention to this thirst now that He has done everything that needed to be done. That's possible.

Yet it would be worthwhile to see if there are places where a righteous man cries out in thirst in the Old Testament, and then see what the thirst there was all about. We do find places like that in the psalms. Psalm 63:1 “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Psalm 143:6 “I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.” Psalm 42:1-3 “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?”

These intense longings match exactly what we know about Jesus from John's gospel. Particularly as our Lord came to the end of His ministry, there can be little doubt that He wanted to go home to heaven and to His Father. That's where He begins to talk about the fact that He was going back to God, to His Father, and to His Father's house. In John 16:28 Jesus says plainly, “I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” When Jesus prays in John 17, the first thing He says is, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son...” and then He says. “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” He is ready to go home. Why? His soul thirsts for God.

A jar full of sour wine... (29)

This is not generally understood by men. Certainly those who were there took His words to simply indicate His physical thirst. Therefore they got Him some sour wine to drink before His last words, thus literally fulfilling the words of Psalm 69:21. They did not show any indication that they understood anything about the thirst of the soul of Christ, that though His body is dying, His overwhelming impulse now that His work is virtually finished, is to return to the Father. They did not understand that.

Do you understand the thirst of Jesus for His Father? There is a part of man that requires more than normal food and drink to be satisfied. The soul was made to thirst for God. Jesus' soul worked perfectly, even at this desperate moment, when his body has been so badly hurt.

Think of what Christ resisted on the way to the cross. See Luke 4:5-8. That's what some people are thirsting for. How about you? Jesus could resist the devil so well because He thirsted for something better than what Satan could give Him. Just to admire the purity of the thirst of our Savior is a good thing. Before He died, to fulfill the Scriptures, Jesus said, “I thirst.”

1. What is the connection between these verses and the prior events?

2. In what sense was the work of Jesus now finished?

3. What did Jesus mean by the words “I thirst?”

4. What did the crowd that day not understand regarding Jesus?