faith

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How John Travolta Healed My Image of God

Travolta in Saturday Night Fever

“Why couldn’t God have given me a life like John Travolta or Dolly Parton or Clint Eastwood?”

“You don’t know me well, but if you did, you’d know I’m one of the world’s nicest guys. Real polite. I try real hard to make other people’s days better. I hold doors open for people; no one does that anymore. I don’t say a mean word to anybody, even when they deserve it. I’m a good person. So why didn’t God give me a life like Travolta or them others? Don’t I deserve better than this?”

He looked at me expectantly, this crusty middle-aged man who, the first time I introduced myself as a chaplain, responded with, “A chaplain is the last person in hell I need to talk to!” Our first encounter was right before he lost his lower leg. Instead of helping him prepare emotionally for his amputation, he allowed me only to dial the phone for him before he kicked me out.

He was a handful for our staff that first stay — gruff, demanding, foul-mouthed, a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge — except this Ebenezer, who I’ll call Benny, was constantly counting other people’s money piles.

Several months after his amputation he was back, this time with breathing issues. I reintroduced myself and this time his greeting was a snort followed by, “A chaplain? Well, God hasn’t done anything for me lately!”

I wondered how soon he would kick me out this time, but I was in for a surprise. Despite Benny’s barnacled attitude and thinly veiled religious digs, he really needed someone to listen. For the next hour he spewed a litany of woes. He lived a good life, respectful of others, tried to be a good person. He was an artist with an undiscovered opus of Pulitzer-worthy poetry. He tried hard to get published and when that failed, Benny spent his entire savings to self-publish one of his works. No one ever read it, save Benny’s friends, and they didn’t pay for their copies.

Not many friends left. Family somewhat disinterested. No wife (though he talked about a potential Mrs. with a wistfulness I’d only seen in pining young women). Then he comes down with this disease and that condition and loses his leg and that’s a real pisser. Can’t drive anymore. Dialysis sucks. Rehab was going well and he was getting the hang of his new prosthesis until he got hit with this latest spate of illness. Now he’ll have to start all over with the rehab.

Funny thing about Benny — he was realistic and undramatic about his prognosis. Doc told him he has 5 years tops, and that’s only as long as he can steer clear of infections and viruses. Not much of a chance of that in the rehab centers and assisted living facilities that have become his homes. Though he was matter-of-fact and calm about his future, he raged about his past.

Benny’s life was a soggy and disintegrated mess of should-haves, wished-I’ds, and if-onlys. And to give him his due, there really wasn’t a lot he could have done to change his circumstances. It seemed he never caught the smallest break. I was sympathetic. But then he got back to his schtick about how God owed him a life like Travolta and Dolly and the man who played Misty for me.

I tried to push back a little and pointed out that those celebrities’ lives can’t be as shiny as they seem.  He guffawed. I pointed to Travolta’s son’s death two years ago and to Dolly’s obsession with plastic surgery. Is their wealth and fame really a good indicator that their lives are so great — that they are satisfied? They may have everything they wanted, but do they have everything they need?

When I asked Benny about his faith story he stitched together a vague sentence about the Lord. He believed in God but didn’t really care about worship, or the church, nor did he really live much of his life as an offering to God. When I asked him about what I saw as unreasonable expectations of God, this was Benny’s bottom line:

“Well, he’s God, isn’t he? He owes me something better than this!”

I thought about my visit with Benny for several days. It took me awhile to untangle why our conversation left me spellbound and speechless — which I rarely am. As I burrowed down into my silence, I discovered four reactions.

1. Benny’s arrogance made me queasy. It gave me the shakes. If ever I expected lightning to strike and the ground to swallow someone up, it was then and there. To sit in a bed and rail against the Creator of the universe for not giving you health and wealth and fame, when all you did for the Lord was be nice to other people and occasionally hold open doors!?

2. I was in awe of Benny’s lament. His litany of woes and his calling God to account echoed much of what I read in scripture.  (Check out Psalm 88!) Benny’s words made me uncomfortable, but they were honest. I rarely meet Christians who are willing to be this honest about their lives or their faith, or have the chutzpah to address God the way our biblical ancestors did. Good for Benny. He can teach us (me) a thing or two.

3. In Benny I was startled to see myself. In a previous post “Seduced by Onions” I talked about tumbling off my spiritual pedestal. In too-rare moments of clarity, I realize that I’m just another Israelite whose faith in God frays when the way to the promised land is long, dusty, and desolate. Benny loudly spat out words that I’d been hiding in my soul for years. Somewhere deep inside of me there’s a miser who is constantly taking stock of other people’s blessings, comparing them to mine and realizing that I’ve come up short. I’ve descended to that dank place where all I can crave, reach for, and smell is what God owes me. Seeing myself in Benny made me feel…

4. Shame. Shame is the moment I realize how much I’ve been focused on myself. That I’m holding on with a death-grip to what I feel I’m owed and promised, rather than being focused on God’s goodness.

When I come back to God’s opus, the Bible, I remember that God never promises a trouble-free life, a painless existence, a quick and easy way to the milk and honey. Jesus is not a TV evangelist that flashes a mega-watt smile at you through your flat screen and tells you that if you just pray hard enough, if you believe enough, live right enough, or send in a generous donation, that you’ll be healed, or rich, or happy.

In contrast, if we sit at Jesus’ feet for even a few minutes we would hear him prepare his disciples for a tsunami of woe. Jesus tells his followers to prepare for being hated — by pretty much everyone. To get ready for persecution. For feeling like they don’t belong in this world. For being thrown out of places of worship. For being disconnected from their friends and family. For being killed for their beliefs. For grief. For feeling alone and abandoned by their Savior. (see John 15:18-16:33)

Is this God — who doesn’t make our lives easy, doesn’t protect or heal us from every disease, doesn’t give us wealth and fame like Travolta or Dolly or Eastwood — really a good God?

Yes. I can say that God is good (even when he doesn’t give me what I want or think I deserve) because I believe that God is who he shows himself to be in the Bible.

God’s character is not nullified or lessened when the circumstances of my life go to pot. 

God never abandoned his people even when they doubted him, complained about the food, worshiped idols, disobeyed his commands, and otherwise acted like petulant children for forty years in the desert. Not only did God not abandon them, he renewed his covenant with them, led them through the darkness, provided food and clean water, overcame every enemy, and always, ALWAYS loved them. Presence, provision and love — that is the character of God, which doesn’t change like shifting shadows (James 1:17).

If every good gift comes from God, then why are Benny and I so quick to blame God for the bad things that happened?

Why can’t we, in the sucky moments in life, trust that God has not changed? That he is with us, giving good gifts, and loving us — even when we don’t feel the love for, or from, him?

We pave a road called Pain when we create or entirely reshape our image of God based on our circumstances. If life is rosy and rich and full of laughter, God is good, a righteous savior, the very embodiment of love. But if life is uncertain, riddled with loss, or fraught with bad luck, then God is a dead-beat dad, a slimy politician, an adulterer.

We walk down the road to Peace when we start with, and hold onto the image of God, that God himself paints in the pages of scripture.

Benny and I need to make a U-ie. We need to somehow disconnect our spiritual GPS from the cultural and circumstantial maps that make us think that we’ll find God on Indulgence Street. God never promised to give us everything we want. In fact, Jesus painted a very clear picture of the difficult road believers would travel. But God did promise his people across the ages that he would never leave nor forsake them (Deuteronomy 31:6). He proved his character through thousands of years of history – stories we can read in the Bible. God crowned his character with love when he sent his son Jesus to die for all sins, for every sinner. Even the crusty Bennies and the doubting pastors. And if that weren’t enough, God gives us the gift of his Spirit, the Advocate and Comforter who is with us until Jesus returns.

Presence. Provision. Love. Those are good gifts. That is the Good God who knows our every circumstance, knows the number of hairs on our heads, and laid every grain of sand in the sea. If this God knit me together in my mother’s womb, knows me by name, doesn’t change, is with me, providing for me, and will always love me, then that reality is better than any life that I can ask for or imagine. Even better than Eastwood’s.

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Death and Dawning – Holy Saturday

It’s late in the evening of Holy Saturday, 2012.  I’ve been a follower of Jesus for most of my life, so this day, though holy, is often just a blip between the utter desolation of Jesus’ death and ecstatic joy of his resurrection.  I surely miss out on this significant day because I know what’s coming.  I’ve already celebrated the end of the Easter story and danced in the redemption of the coming days.  But my dear friend and fellow blogger Stacey Gleddiesmith, as she reflects on the wisdom of Joan Chittister, reminds me that Holy Saturday is important because it is the day when all our dreams have died, but a day when we can grow in hope.  (Read her fabulous post at http://thinkingworship.com)  Challenged by Stacey and Joan, I let my imagination unfurl into a different time and place…

It’s year 33 and I am a young disciple of the newest Messiah figure, this one called Jesus, who is just a few years into what looks like a campaign for king.  I have been wandering around the hot desert for months with a carpenter-turned-rabbi who, though he speaks with an authority I had never heard in the synagogue, makes some wildly outrageous (and provocative) claims about the kingdom of God.  A kingdom he could almost literally conjure before my eyes through his riveting stories.  (It’s like he’s actually been to this wondrous places before.  I can almost smell the feast he describes floating on the back of the Galilean wind.)  Jesus’ teaching stirs parts of my soul that have laid as fallow as my father’s field during the sabbath year.  I left my family, my village, my security, to follow this man on a path toward an elusive hope, the hope that life might actually be more than the drudgery I’ve lived.  When I left, my friends called me a fool, my mother wept and my father roughly turned his back.

As I followed Jesus, I discovered a man with a passionate spirit who both perplexes and comforts me with his daily teaching on a kingdom that has no end.  A gentle radical who constructs images of a Godly kingdom (and I’ve lived the opposite) where children are praised for their faith and women are welcomed into the master’s circle.  A kingdom where I can lay down the burden of my shame (and believe me, my soul’s more spotted than the cheapest bird you could by in the Temple courts) and instead take up a yoke so different from this law that I can never fulfill.  Jesus tells me not to worry, because he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets, and when he says this, something in me…releases.  My new master tells me that I will know the truth and it will free me.  God, how I’ve hungered for truth, for freedom!

Throughout the months I was with him, Jesus talked a lot about his father, one so different from my own, a king who rushes to embrace the returning children who abandoned him to chase their own pleasures.  Jesus proclaimed himself the light of the world, the bread of life, the way, the truth, the resurrection and the life.  Even though I didn’t understand everything he said – his stories, his power to heal, his vision for a new kingdom of peace and love and justice, his shalom-filled welcome of the outcasts among us – these things slowly unwound the tight knots of pain and fear in my gut.

Something new was born in me as I followed my dusty rabbi.  It’s hard to describe, but deep in me, where I used to feel shame burning holes in my soul, there was a mending.  A burgeoning courage to live a new way.  And the closest I’ve ever come assurance.  By the end I was a believer in this new kingdom, a devotee of its good, loving king, and an avid disciple of Jesus, this prince among men.

But then Jesus was arrested.  Convicted.  Whipped.  Crucified.  Stripped.  Punctured.  Ridiculed.  Abandoned.

I did that.  Well, not all of it, just the last part.  I abandoned Jesus, but to me that single crime is just as bad as all the rest put together.  I didn’t stay to see the end, or even much of the middle.  (What I know about Jesus’ death, I learned from passersby.)  For all my new hope, the courage that was beginning to shine within me, the wisdom I’d learned at Jesus’ feet, I ran away shortly after I saw blood.  And now I lay here in the dirt, in the exact spot where I collapsed last night, exhausted after my flight from Golgotha.  I’m so endlessly tired from crying.  Wrecked from the confusion about what happened.  This crater of loss sucks me inside out.  What kind of disciple was I to run away when things got hot?

But what kind of rabbi – what kind of prince – what kind of Messiah dies like that?

I lay under a withered fig tree along the side of a road that leads nowhere.  This mouth that Jesus once filled with bread and fish and cool water is now gritty and putrified with dirt and shame.  Jesus made me feel such hope.  Following him made me feel so…vital, like I was living for the first time.  Now I lay here an empty shell.  This is worse than all those years of drudgery back home.  This is nothingness.

I laid in the dirt for hours.  Silent.  Sullen.  Hollow.  Despondent.  Fearful.  It was so dark but I didn’t care if the sun never rose again.  But then somewhere, deep in that pit that held me captive, I heard a whisper.

“I am the light of the world.”

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

“Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

Between each whisper I feel the thump of my heart, tacky and faint, but there.  I’m still alive.  I want to live, I realize.  I want to live the life that Jesus sketched in the sand of my country.  He said he was the resurrection.  I never understood that.  But, what if?  Slowly, I push myself up on my elbows.  With my hands gripping clumps of dirt, I look toward the horizon.  I wait, wondering.

Where is the light of the world?

Where is the resurrection and the life?

As light slowly hems the eastern hills, a morsel of warmth dawns within me and begins to spread.  Curious, I push to my feet.  The sun is rising and I have this uncanny feeling that today will bring…I don’t know quite what.  But something, something more than this roadside grave I’ve made for myself.  Hoping he is who he said he is, I turn back to Jerusalem, and begin to run.

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The Sixth Lent: Musical Abstinence

I’m still a novice at Lent; this is just my 6th season out of 32 years of life.   My first year I gave up sarcasm and exaggeration and learned an important (and humorous) lesson in growing into, rather than jumping into, a new spiritual practice.  Last year, when I prepared for my forty day fast, I dabbled with the idea of giving up music.  I first thought to give it up entirely, but then my body started twitching and my eyes began to sting and, in a gasping moment of reality when my tongue when numb, I realized that giving up music cold turkey might be a bit extreme.

Abstaining from music for four weeks would be a radically ascetic experiment for this melomane.  (That’s French for “music lover” and said with the caressing accent it gives you a sense of my love affair with music.)  Living without music for 960 hours, or 57,600 minutes, or 345,6000 seconds?  That’s like the 4th of July without the block parties, fruit-flag desserts, crepe-papered bicycles and chest-thumping fireworks.  Last year I wimped out and gave up added sugars, which was challenging, but nothing close to giving up my precious music.

2011 was a difficult year because of a sense of vocational stuntedness and a family loss.  2012 hasn’t yet loosened the grip its neighbor held on my heart.  For me, listening to music and singing along is often as cathartic as sipping a cool cup of water in the scorching Phoenix heat or shattering a glass against the hard stones of a fireplace.  But sometimes I abuse music.  I abuse it, and myself, when I use music to tune out the voice of my inner life.  I suspect that in the past year, music has been more of a muffle than a balm.  So, as much as I love music, as much as it gives me joy and energy and a certain dancing-in-my-soul verve, I decided to set it aside for a time.

I don’t want to become a person who claims that God has abandoned me in hard times.  Maybe I’m not hearing God’s voice because it’s hard to hear a whisper through a cotton ball.  Maybe God is offering me sweet melodies of truth and consolation that would bind together the ragged linings of my soul but I’m not listening well.  Maybe I’ve turned music into noise, a distraction, just an excuse not to courageously face the somewhat barren landscape of my life and follow my Savior Jesus as he ventured, alone, without supplies, into the desert.  Maybe the key to hearing God in the desert is clearing away all the distraction and stepping into aloneness with God.

Conviction tells me it’s time to clean out my ears, so I’ve instituted a silent commute for Lent.  For the two, thirty minute trips to and from work each day, there’s no top 40, no cds, no talk radio.  There’s just the sound of my breathing, the rev of my car’s engine, the squeak of breaks and the hum of tires rubbing against the pavement.  Yesterday at an intersection, the service truck next to me was blaring “Low Rider” and before I knew it I was bobbing my head in time and smiling at the driver.  I miss the music that got me merrily home but in the silence I’ve discovered a jam of thoughts and prayers waiting for their right of way.  In just two weeks, I’ve run into a lot of unanswered questions, discovered wounds that need healing, and prayed that God would grant me the senses to see, hear and feel hope for my future.  I’ve realized how self-centered I am and found forgiveness.  And it seems that with each turn of my tires I chant the name Sara – the one who left our family for other happiness.  But mostly, I sit in silence and listen to the sounds of my commute, the beeps, rubbing, the rattles, which remind me that though I am sitting still, I am going somewhere.

This morning in the silence an old chorus popped into my head – “Thou O Lord, art a shield about me; you’re my glory; you’re the lifter of my head.”  I believe those words are true, but I’m not able to feel their truth now.  As I hummed the chorus throughout the day, I stumbled across a thought – maybe it’s not my song to sing; it’s God’s song for me.   I the Lord, art a shield about you, I’m your glory, I’m the lifter of your head.  Okay Lord, I’m listening.  Thanks to the silence.

 

 

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Problems in Church Hiring Practices: Process

I’ve been actively seeking a full-time pastoral position for three years.  I regularly peruse employment sites like ChurchStaffing.com and Indeed.com.  Over the last several years I’ve read several hundred job descriptions.  I’ve applied to approximately 100 ministry positions in various Christian denominations in the US and Canada.  Along the way I’ve been shocked, puzzled, frustrated and downright angered at some of the stuff I’ve seen and experienced.  So I’ve compiled a list of what I believe are problematic church hiring practices.  Some of these problems relate to process, others to professionalism and some even expose prejudicial or discriminatory practices.  I’ll tackle the problems in each of these three categories but I realize that many of these problems straddle the boundaries between categories.  For each problem, I’ll offer at least one alternative practice that may enhance or safeguard the hiring process for both churches and their pastoral candidates.

PROBLEMS IN PROCESS

Asking Candidates ONLY Experience Based Interview Questions

We’ve all heard stories of clergy who have violated sexual or ethical boundaries.  This has led to firing of pastors, the destruction of marriages and families, the division and splitting of church bodies and irreparable damage to denominational reputations. You’d expect hiring committees and churches to be very concerned about the character of the pastor they will hire to lead their congregations.  However, I’ve discovered that churches are far more concerned that they hire people with proven experience. 

Other than questions about my faith testimony, I have never been asked a question that would reveal the smooth or rough edges of my character.  Instead, I’ve been asked 15 different ways about my work experience, how I would accomplish specific tasks, how I have successfully recruited volunteers, what strategies I’ve used to train leaders, etc.  Maybe it’s just me, but I think once you’ve discovered that a candidate is a competent and promising employee, you’d spend the bulk of your time getting at a pastor’s character.  It makes me very uncomfortable to think that churches nationwide are hiring the best managers, recruiters and event planners they can find, but a pastor’s character, moral compass and ethical decision-making skills are of lesser concern.  I know this is probably not the intent of churches, but their processes and questions tell a different and frightening story.

Alternative Practice: Make sure your committee spends as much time developing and asking character-based questions as you do experience-based questions.  Make state and federal background checks standard practice for every candidate.  Call references early in your process to ask questions about the candidate’s character and verify claims made on the candidate’s resume.  Push references to give critical feedback of the candidate and if they only give glowing reports, consider asking the candidate for a few more people you can call.

Combo Positions

These days the budget belt is cinched tight for many churches, so combo pastoral positions are popping up all over.  The idea is that a church really needs two pastors for two very different positions but they can only afford to hire one person so they combine the two.  I’ve seen a lot of positions that combine worship and missions, worship and youth, youth and young adult, children and youth, outreach and discipleship.  The problem with these combo positions is that they often require one person to have a broader-than-humanly-possible skill-set, knowledge base, and spiritual gifts. 

For example, the popular combo “pastor of youth and young adults” is downright crazy to me.  13-17 year olds have vastly different developmental needs and abilities than 18-22 year old.  Why are we asking a pastor to shepherd groups with such wildly different needs?  Why do we expect that one person has equal love of, call to serve, or passion for such different demographics?  The same principle can be applied to many of the combo positions out there. 

Are we forcing pastors to compromise their passions and true calling so we can meet all of our ministry needs with one salary?  When we offer these combo positions, how are we forcing pastors to give less than their best?  How are we short-changing the receivers of ministry when pastors are over-extended and drained by work that doesn’t flow out of their gifting?   

Alternative Practice:  If you have two ministries that need oversight and pastoral presence but you don’t have the budget to hire two pastors, ask yourself it is possible to find and train competent and gifted lay-leaders from within your own congregation.  Perhaps the Young Adult Pastor could supervise and encourage a team of passionate and competent lay youth leaders without being expected to actually juggle two full-time pastoral roles in one week under one salary.

Homogenous Search Committees

How often do we gather ministry committees made up of the 20%, those ever-willing, highly involved and available church members, rather than committees that actually reflect the diversity, values and demographics of our congregations?  Too often.  The same trend applies among pastoral hiring committees.  The problem with homogenous search committees is that they may fail to ask a breadth of questions that target the various needs of the congregants the pastor will be serving. 

Alternative Practice:  Take the time to study the diversity, demographics and values in your church.  Then build of the commitment of varied ages/generations, appropriate gender ratios, race and ethnicities that reflect the congregation, as well as persons that speak for the ministries at the core of the church’s identity or the job description. 

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Prayers for the Table

Feasting is an endangered cultural act.  In ancient times, feasts lasted for days, accompanied by delicacies, dancing, singing, storytelling, toasting and prayer.  Even if the harvest was small or times were bleak, communities, tribes, clans and families would scrounge up whatever edible treasures they had, travel from great distances and gather together to feast.  They would spread a lavish table filled with their best wine, choicest meats, freshest herbs and fill their lamps with oil.  All of it was a deliberate celebration of life, symbolic thanks to a God who richly provides.  Some holidays continue this celebratory tradition — Thanksgiving and Christmas are a few of the feast days we Americans preserve.  We still excel at the food — the lines at the grocery stores testify to that!  Exuberant music still fills the air and in some regions dancing remains the nightcap of a good feast.  And while prayer is not completely absent from our modern-day feasts, I wonder if our prayers have become cliché, bland, trite, etc.  Do we really carve out a few moments to reflect on what we have before us?

As a Christmas gift, I offer these prayers for your table.  Whether you borrow one that I wrote or pen your own, may your table be even richer this year, as you take the time to give word to the feast in your heart.

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Abundant God, thank you for filling our table with food to nourish our bodies, people who bless our lives, and most of all, your presence. May we look at this table, this food, and see that you have given us more than we need.  May we learn to take only a fair portion and share with those beside us. Help us remember those who go without — without food, family, health, shelter, or hope. Show us how our riches can fill the hands of those in need.  This coming year, make room in our hearts and at our tables for people with whom we can share your abundant love.  Amen.

———-

The candles lit before us are symbols that the darkness is overcome. God of light, by the flame of your love, you made paths through shadowed wastelands. You led your people through bleakness, fear, doubt, and pain. You shepherded them through fields of twinkling stars, into dawn where the soft rays of day warmed their skin. In the same way, lead us out of the darkness of this past year. Give us the warm hope of new life, new opportunities, new vision. Help us see the Son each day, so that when dusk and midnight come, we can walk confidently toward morning. Amen.

———-

Comforter, we remember the loved ones we lost this year. In our hearts we lift before you the names of our beloved friends and family.  (silence)  We pray for those far way from us and from you. Bring them near. Give us patience as we wait for their return. (silence) We pray for strangers, for the aliens and foreigners in our country and in all countries; may they receive kindness and friendship. (silence) God, thank you that we are together, sharing our time, our stories, this food. May all we do and say show love, joy, peace and patience. May we give gifts of kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness. As we eat, may we have self-control. Fill us with your love. Amen.

———-

God, I’m desperately lonely. I have food but no friends. I have a house but no hope. I have disposable wealth but I’m spiritually poor. Where are you God? Who are you? If I ask, will you join my table? Do you even love people like me? Anyway, I’m here. There’s an empty chair and it’s yours if you want it.

———-

Hosts:  We are thankful for each person here tonight.

Guests:  We are glad to be here.

Hosts: We are thankful for this food.

Guests: May it bless our bodies.

Hosts:  God, help us recognize the gifts you have given each of us.

Guests:  Lord, teach us how to pass blessing to others.

Hosts:  Guide our conversation.

Guests:  May we encourage one another.

All:  Thank you for this table, this feast, this love.  Amen.

———-

Person 1: May this food fuel our bodies;

Person 2: May this laughter fill our spirits.

Person 3: May these friendships give us joy;

Person 4: May your love birth contentment.

Person 5: And however we are wanting,

Person 6: Grant us peace, faith and patience.

All:  Amen!

———-

Jesus, today we have come together to celebrate your birth. If you had not been born as a human child, grown and ministered as the wise Son of God, died like a thief and rose from the dead, we would not know forgiveness, freedom from sin, the delight of new life, or hope for an eternal future with you. We are profoundly grateful for your ultimate gift of sacrifice — to die in our place. Thank you Lord. Thank you Lord. Thank you Lord.  Amen.

———-

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

In love and faith, Corrie

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I Thirst

The following is a homily I delivered tonight as part of a Good Friday tenebrae service. 

“Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, ‘I thirst.'”  (John 19:28)

It was early summer in 1999 when I spent a month studying and traveling through Israel.  I was taking a course on the religions, history and archeology of the Holy Land and spent hours each day hiking through ancient ruins.  Having grown up in Ohio and lived in costal California, I wasn’t used to the intense heat and wilting sunshine of the desert.  I remember one day where temperatures soared over 120 degrees and no matter how much water I drank, I remained incredibly thirsty.

When I chose these words of Jesus for my homily, my first instinct was to attribute his thirst to Israel’s oppressive heat.  But then last week I spent an afternoon slowly reading the Gospel of John aloud, doing my best to pause and place myself in each scene as an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry.  That exercise led me to a very different conclusion about Jesus’s statement, “I thirst.”

Just a few moments into John’s story, I found myself a guest at a wedding feast where Jesus, informed that the wine was running low, turned six vats of water into the finest quality wine.  His very first miracle was to quench people’s thirst!

Missing Jesus’ involvement and the miraculous transformation, the master of the banquet says to the bridegroom, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”  I don’t think the master of the banquet realized he was speaking symbolically about Jesus.

A few months later I watch as Jesus, weary from a long journey by foot, stops to rest outside Samaria, a city of people scorned by Jews.  There’s a woman sitting alone at the well.  She’s an outcast among outcasts; she’s had a suspicious number of husbands and now lives with a man who is not her husband.  From this unclean woman Jesus asks for a drink.  They have a provocative conversation, during which Jesus tells the woman that he can offer her “living” water that will “spring up into eternal life.”  He claims that if she drinks his living water she will never thirst again.  It’s obvious he’s not talking about physical thirst or literal water.

Flash forward to the Feast of Tabernacles when Jesus tells the crowds gathered in Jerusalem’s temple courts, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

Eventually I reach this point in the story – the crucifixion.  By now, Jesus has been betrayed, arrested, questioned, falsely accused and handed over to Pilate.  He’s been slapped in the face, whipped, mocked and ridiculed.  Finally, he is stripped naked and nailed to a cross.

He’s been hanging there for hours.  He’s exposed and exhausted and I’m not surprised when Jesus says he is thirsty.  His thirst is certainly a result of his weakened state, the abuse he’s suffered and exposure to the heat and sun.  But now, when I hear the words, “I thirst,” I think back over the three years of Jesus’ ministry.  I remember the wedding feast when Jesus turned water into wine.  I think of when he offered the lowliest of people living water, eternal life.  And I remember his words from the day he preached on a mountainside, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Jesus says he is thirsty and I watch as a nearby solider soaks a sponge in wine and lifts it up for Jesus to drink.  Except, this is not fine wine fit for a king.  It’s the vinegar extracts of a cheap wine too bitter to drink.

The contrasts are clear between what Jesus offered and what he received:

Jesus gathered disciples, loved them and taught them the way of truth; they betrayed, denied and deserted him.

Jesus treated people like honored guests at his Father’s banquet; they rejected and crucified him as a criminal.

Jesus gave the people the finest wine to drink; they gave him bitter vinegar.

Jesus offered to forever quench the spiritual thirst of undeserving sinners; they nailed him to two slabs of wood and left him to die, thirsty.

Physically thirsty – yes – but more than that.  I think that Jesus, in his very last moments, is still desperately thirsty for the spiritually parched people witnessing his death, to believe that he is the Son of God able to give them the living water of eternal life.