AS the Man of sorrows hung on the cross to die, one complaint only was uttered about the suffering of His soul, and likewise only one complaint about suffering after the body. Utter anguish of soul forced from Him the “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani”, and the agonizing death struggle after the flesh drew from Him the cry: “I thirst”.
In that “I thirst” spake the mortal anguish of the wound fever. His flesh was truly human flesh, His blood in truth our blood. And therefore when His body was injured, and He was cruelly wounded in hand and foot, and the weight of the body hanging by the splitting wound in the hand, disturbed the circulation of the blood, and occasioned inward rebellion in His veins, it could not help, but that the heat of the wound fever must make itself felt. And this burning in the blood was bound to increase moment by moment, till the breath in the lungs was set on fire, and the moisture gland in the mouth dried up, and the tongue could scarcely move, and not without great effort could He utter the “I thirst”.
“I thirst”, so did your Savior languish for a cup of cold water. That there might be one who, from compassion and commiseration, might dip the tip of his finger in water and cool His burning tongue.
“I Thirst!” so He cried, not to evade death, but that before He died He might taste the sweet of human comfort.
“I thirst!” because from thirst His mouth was almost in the grip of lockjaw, and He must still utter the final words: “It is finished”, and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Thirst is a something so dreadful. Hunger is a sharp sword, but thirst is as a poisonous arrow, which penetrates into the very pith and substance of our being.
Hunger comes from the flesh, but thirst from the blood, and in the blood is the stirring, the motion of our human life. In the blood body and soul touch one another. For as God had declared unto Israel, in the blood is the soul.
Therefore it was the blood also that counted in the atonement. This was seen already in the offerings that were offered in Israel for sin. For truly the body of these animals was broken, but not as end; for the purpose always was that the blood should be shed and sprinkled upon the mercy-seat. And so it was here with the Lamb of God.
Of the Lamb of God also you read it every time, that on His death hangs our life, but almost always it is His blood shed for you, to which the holy apostles refer.
With Him there is also a breaking of the body, but only as means to the shedding of His blood, and in the shedding of that holy blood is your reconciliation.
How could it be otherwise? Where we had sinned our life away, and the life of our blood had been poisoned, and we had continued to sin in that blood, how could our Mediator bring about our forgiveness, except as He takes of our blood, and make this blood taken from us the vehicle of His own life, and in our guilty blood pour out His life upon the altar of the Holy!
Just because in the shedding of His blood lay our reconciliation, it could not be hunger, that distressed Him, but in dying on Golgotha He must needs be distressed by insufferable thirst.
Not in hunger, but in thirst does spiritual suffering play its part in bodily suffering.
Jesus Himself shows us this in the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus, in which He sketches that rich man as opening his eyes in hell. And see, what there in hellish pains consumes and distresses him, is not hunger but thirst. He perishes from thirstpain, and would give a world for a drop of cold water to cool the tip of his tongue.
All hellish pain is described as false burning and unholy glow, an inextinguishable fire, that calls for water, but which no stream of water can put out.
And when over against this natural thirstwoe of hell the blessedness of etenal life is outlined for us, this always stands in the foreground, that in that blessedness there shall be no more thirst. When the new heaven and the new earth have come down in the vision of John on Patmos, and he saw the heavenly Jerusalem, the Lamb of God stood before him, and said: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, and I will give to him that is athirst of the fountain of life freely!” (Rev. 21: 6).
Surely your Savior is also the Bread of life, but yet He puts a far stronger emphasis upon the fact, that He shall quench your eternal thirst. “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst!” (John 4:14). And standing in the porch of Jerusalem’s temple, to call the people to Him, the invitation rang from His lips: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink!” (John 7:37).
“To be athirst” was the crying, panting image in which psalmist and prophets of old pictured the longing of a soul after the living God. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O, God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!” (Ps. 42:1). In Psalm 63 it reads: “My soul thirsteth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is!” And as already from of old in Isaiah (63:1) the Messiah calls His own, His voice goes forth saying: “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!” God’s most glorious promises are, that He “will pour water upon him that is thirsty” (Is. 44:3) and will make “the thirsty land springs of water” (Is. 35:7). Yea, God Himself, the Eternal Being, is called the Source and Well and Fountain of all good.
So do our blood and our thirst hang together; and because in our blood there is also the life of our soul, in this thirst of the blood the image of our bodily and of our spiritual suffering merges into one; but so also is the quenching of that thirst the glorious image of the banishment of all hellish pains and the enrichment with heavenly wealth in a glory without end.
Thus when your Savior had to say: “I thirst!” (John 19:28) there spake in this troubled cry something of hellish woe. It was your thirst, which you should have thirsted eternally, which for your sake your Redeemer endured; a thirst risen in the blood which at His Incarnation He had taken from your blood; a dreadful drying up of the lifeblood to which for your salvation’s sake, He had bound His own Divine life.
When He now cried: “I thirst!” the world had nothing for Him save a narcotic drink or vinegar. But He refused the narcotic drink, and from the sponge of vinegar He has cooled His burning lips. And with that drop of vinegar the world deemed that it had paid its toll of commiseration to the dying sufferer.
O, if Jesus were still hanging on the cross, and from His dying lips were heard the cry: “I thirst!”, thousands would risk their lives to offer Him coolest water from purest and clearest wells.
So it would be now; now that the fruit of His death has operated and His own have been brought to Him.
But by nature such your irreconciled heart is not. If you had stood on Golgotha irreconciled even as those soldiers of Rome’s emperor, you too would have thought, that it was quite enough, if you had refreshed with vinegar one guilty of death, who hung there to die.
First your Savior must suffer this mortal thirst and in that thirst caused by wound-fever die, to make you understand the sense of His atoning thirst.
And yet, who understands the depth of it? Who is there that perceives, that from this thirst of his Savior either he must drink in eternal life, or himself once perish eternally in his own unquenchable, hellish thirst?
Forget not, Isaiah speaks of a thirsty one “who dreams, and, behold, he drinketh; but when he awakes, behold, he is still faint, and his soul pants for water” (29:8).
And are there no people even now, who are in the church of God, and who dream that their eternal thirst is quenched, and of whom it is still so terribly to be feared, that when once they shall awaken, their eternal thirst shall still be there and their soul shall languish with faintness?
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