Some years ago, many Christians were outraged by the film adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' powerful novel The Last Temptation of Christ directed by Martin Scorcese. Kazantzakis, who also wrote Zorba the Greek, has always been one of my favorite authors and I’d read The Last Temptation long before the movie ever debuted. When it showed up in a theater not far from where I was pastoring in northwestern Pennsylvania, it met with loud resistance from a number of conservative Christians who thought that the movie was blasphemous, that it portrayed our Lord in a rather undignified light (although none of them had bothered to see the movie themselves, relying instead on what the Reverend Jerry Falwell had to say about it who admitted that HE HIMSELF had not seen it). They claimed that it made Jesus look all-too human, a person full of doubts and fears and lusts and temptations, a man who perhaps looked too much like “each one of us.” They said it took him down from the heavenly pedestal we like to confine him to and placed him on our OWN level. Every day, there were ads in the newspapers calling for a boycott of the movie, and every evening, there were protesters picketing out in front of the theater.

Well one night, I along with several of my clergy friends braved the screaming protesters to see the film and we all found ourselves profoundly moved by it. In fact, when the video came out, I rented it and showed it to my congregation, afterwards hosting a forum so we could intelligently discuss it. A few of the local churches heard about what we were doing and were outraged that any church would possibly do such a thing, yet some of their OWN members came because they TOO wanted to see it. Of course, Christ’s portrayal in the movie was never meant to be completely faithful to the biblical text as it was Kazantzakis' OWN interpretation of what Jesus meant to HIM. Nobody agreed with the movie in ALL its points but we felt it had done a much better job of presenting Jesus as the "Word made flesh" than those insipid Hollywood versions which turn Jesus into a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Tab Hunter look-alike. To me, THAT was the real blasphemy, not KAZANTZAKIS’ depiction of Christ!

Now if the idea that divinity could also become fully human so as to be “one with us” in every way could be shocking to so many modern-day Christians, how much MORE scandalous do you think that notion was to both the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. For the GREEKS, it shattered every concept of religion they had. They pictured their gods and goddesses as nothing more than extensions of themselves. Their divinities would leave the lofty heights of Mt. Olympus, look like ordinary mortals and walk among us, causing all kinds of mischief or good fortune. But when the situation became too difficult for them, they would tire of it all, throw off the disguise, and return once again to the security of Mt. Olympus. For their gods, it was all good clean fun- but that was not “the Word becoming flesh.” Those gods were not really human, but only LOOKED that way. They did not undergo any real limitations, but simply DISGUISED themselves. They did not subject themselves to the trials and tribulation of our human condition, but were merely PLAYING A GAME and doing so by their own rules.

The idea was EQUALLY offensive to the JEWS. For them, God was distant and remote. Jehovah remained unapproachably hidden behind the curtain that screened the Holy of Holies. In fact, SO holy was God that the Jews were forbidden from ever making any images of God or pronouncing God’s name. Yet, when Jesus spoke of his intimacy with God, calling him "Father" and then went on to eat and drink in the homes of sinners like prostitutes and tax collectors, and when he didn't wash his hands before eating his meals- these acts OUTRAGED the religious leaders who viewed them as a violation of their morality and their sacred traditions. After all, God doesn't become intimate with the creation. God doesn't become "flesh" and dwell among us. And even if divinity COULD, God wouldn’t associate with sinners or LIVE like them- the notion was sheer BLASPHEMY! Or WAS it?

Thirst was one of the most terrible aspects of our Lord’s execution. He had had nothing to drink since the preceding evening and had lost a considerable amount of blood with his scourging and STILL more from the crucifixion itself. Perspiration as well as exposure to the hot, burning sun would have only increased the loss of liquids from his body. Thus, it would have been most natural for his body to crave liquid of some type. Matthew tells us that when Jesus first arrived at the place of his execution, he was offered wine mingled with gall to drink. However, after tasting it, he then refused to drink it. The gall is presumed to have been a poisonous herb, perhaps opium, that acted as a sedative to help ease the pain and speed up the condemned man’s death. By REFUSING it, however, he indicated that he wanted to die with a clear head, with his mind unclouded by any kind of a narcotic or anesthetic. In other words, Jesus INTENTIONALLY chose to suffer and he did so because by DOING so, he would then be identifying with humanity in all their OWN sufferings, REGARDLESS how extreme those agonies might be. His death would be slow, intense, and AGONIZINGLY painful but in this way, he would undeniably understand the pain and sufferings WE might experience upon that day when death comes for US. Thus, as he understood LIFE in all its fullness, he now experienced our DEATH in the extreme AS WELL.

The SECOND time he is offered drink was toward the end of his sufferings and it was in response to his cry, “I thirst”- our text for this morning. John tells us that this was to fulfill the scripture which most scholars believe was Psalm 69:21: “For my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” The drink was called “posca,” a drink popular with soldiers of the Roman army made by diluting sour wine vinegar with water. It was inexpensive, considered more thirst quenching than water alone, and they found that it prevented scurvy.

The significance of his request is that it assures us that his sufferings were REAL, that he was not simply going through the MOTIONS of dying. There was a heresy in the ancient world that Jesus didn’t really come in flesh and blood, much less die a real physical death on the cross. Those who held to this view believed the flesh was evil and could NEVER be holy, that only SPIRIT was capable of the divine. So Jesus didn’t REALLY die- he only APPEARED to. This was the belief that dominated such Early Church heresies as Docetism and Gnosticism. 

The scriptures, however, state OTHERWISE, that Jesus did IN FACT anticipate his death. He willingly surrendered to it in order to experience it in all its fullness- INCLUDING the intense thirst and physical pain that went along with it. By subjecting himself to the full depth and range of human experiences, he became Immanuel or “God with us” in the largest sense of the word. With his life culminating in his Passion, our Lord experienced all the rigors that you or I will ever face in our OWN lifetime- from the pangs of hunger, thirst, and weariness, to outright rejection, intense mental, emotional and physical suffering, and even death itself. There was no part of life that Jesus was NOT intimately acquainted with and so he becomes our brother “under the skin.” As it says in Hebrews, “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”(Heb.4:15)

For a half century now, Jurgen Moltmann has remained one of the Church’s leading voices and over the years, I’ve been privileged to not only study his writings but to hear him lecture in person. During World War II, he served in the German army and when the war ended, he was captured and transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium. The German Reich had collapsed, German civilization had been destroyed, and the nation along with much of Europe lay in ruins. He personally felt abandoned by God and his fellow human beings with much of the hopes of his youth now gone; he couldn’t see any future ahead for himself. It was then that an American chaplain gave him a Bible and he began to read it, beginning with the psalms of lament in the Old Testament: “I have fallen dumb and have to eat up my suffering within myself…I am a stranger as all my fathers were”(from Psalm 39). 

But then in his reading, he came to Christ’s Passion and when he heard his death cry from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” he knew that there WAS someone who understood him, one who stood beside him when he had NOTHING and everyone else had ABANDONED him. You see, that was HIS cry for God TOO. He began to understand who the suffering, assailed, and God-forsaken Jesus was because he felt that he—Jesus--understood HIM. He grasped that this Jesus is the divine Brother in our distress, that he brings hope to the prisoners and to the abandoned. He is the one who delivers us from the guilt that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future. He said of this experience, “I became possessed by a hope when in human terms there was little enough to hope for. I summoned up the courage to live, at a point when one would perhaps willingly have put an end to it all. This early companionship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the liberator from guilt, has never left me since. The Christ for me is the crucified Jesus.”

When the Apostles’ Creed says that Jesus “descended into hell,” Martin Luther interpreted that as referring to his incarnation, the Creator becoming one with the creature. For the great Reformer, his “descent into hell” began when he abandoned the prerogatives of heaven to be born in the back of a small garage in Bethlehem of Judea. Jesus thus became Immanuel or “God with us” in every way. It assured HIM--just as it does US--that our Lord has been where WE are and that he understands the public and private hells WE live in for he has been there HIMSELF. Therefore, we are assured that he understands loneliness and fear and hatred and jealousy and all the consequences that such passions produce. In that cross, he entered into all our finitude and forsakenness, and as a result, there is now no offense or failure so horrible that he can’t forgive us of it. At the bottom of every abyss, we are not alone for he stands right there beside us.

Helmut Thielicke, the great German preacher and theologian, tells how when his children were still quite small, he retold the story of Christ’s ascension into heaven. When he finished, his youngest son noted, “When the Lord Jesus finally got to heaven the Father told him, ‘Better stay up here, otherwise something will happen to you again.” Well that may be how WE might react, isn’t it. As a loving and concerned parent, we would hardly allow any child of OURS to experience the kind of hatred and rejection and indignity that Jesus did when he first came to earth- would we? However, God had ANOTHER answer. Our Heavenly Father KNEW what awaited his Son—from the rejection he experienced at his birth by there being no room for him at the inn to all the forsakenness he suffered there at that cross—and STILL he let him come to us. For you see, a God without blood on his shirt and sweat on his hands and tears on his cheeks is not any kind of a God that could speak to any of US in the middle of OUR concerns, is he? 

John Stott was one of the most important evangelical theologians of the 20^th century and in his classic work The Cross of Christ, he made it clear that he could never himself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In it, he wrote that “In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arm folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering.”

In summary, we see how Jesus’ thirst PROVED that he WAS a man. The scriptures reveal to us that from a child on up, he ate and drank and slept among us, that he often grew frustrated with his disciples and weary from the crowds as well as angry at the injustices committed by the religious leaders. But there were ALSO occasions when Jesus wept and showed sympathy, whether at the grave of his friend Lazarus or over the faithlessness of the people of Jerusalem. He was human in every way and this was supported by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. where Christ was declared to be “truly God and truly man,” with the two natures united in one person. 

Furthermore, by becoming human through his incarnation, that cross and especially his cry, “I thirst” showed his complete and utter solidarity with us so that we can never say that God CANNOT understand our situation or that God DOES NOT know just how we feel, and because he HAS and he DOES, we are assured that he will never turn a deaf ear to our OWN cries but offer us his complete and utter assistance. Whether we’re ravaged by hunger or thirst, feeling unjustly abused, threatened with home foreclosure or the loss of a job, overwhelmed by assorted health problems, betrayed by those closest to us, mourning the loss of a loved one or perhaps facing our OWN death, Christ’s appearance on that cross is our assurance that God feels what we feel, that he understands our situation, that God knows our deepest needs- knows all our joys but also our SORROWS, knows all our pleasures and all our PAINS, knows all our victories and especially our DEFEATS. And because WE know that God knows and understands us so well, having virtually crawled into our skin for the purpose of saving us, we can be certain that our God, our Heavenly Father, will care for US and sustain US even during our darkest moments; we can be assured that NOTHING will ever separate us from either his presence or his love. 

And finally, we can STILL offer Jesus a drink TODAY and we DO so when we see people who are thirsty THEMSELVES and we reach out and minister to their need. As Jesus said, “When you have done it for one of the least of these my BROTHERS and SISTERS, then you have done it also for ME.”(Matt. 25:40) Thus, when we offer a cup of water or provide some clothing or treat someone to a meal, we are actually ministering to Christ HIMSELF. Mother Teresa--who was recently canonized by the Catholic Church--made alleviating the sufferings and needs of the world her life work. She was convinced that when she looked into the face of a naked child or a hungry adult, she was looking into the face of Christ HIMSELF. Posted above the entrance to the chapel in every one of her missions was a sign that read “I thirst, I quench.” Like HER, may we ALSO learn to see the needs around US as opportunities to minister unto Christ himself, and in doing so, not only slake their PHYSICAL thirst but enable them to receive that LIVING water which if drunk, promises they will never thirst again. Amen.