by CCW | 14 May 2023 10:00
Our Eastertide reflections on the seven last words of Christ in the light of the Resurrection brings us to the fifth word in the Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoy’s ordering of the words of the Crucified on this the fifth Sunday after Easter commonly called Rogation Sunday. The conjunction is suggestive and intriguing.
It is the most physical of all the words of the Crucified, the one word which has an immediate relation to the body and its needs. Thirst is a property of the body in its finitude. Yet the idea of thirst also functions metaphorically in the Scriptures with respect to our relation to God and to one another and to the overarching themes of creation and redemption. This word complements paradoxically the theme of Rogation about the land and our lives as embodied beings. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It is not about a flight from the world or from the body.
This word testifies most strongly to the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ and thus to the dynamic of the interchange between the divine and the human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. Through the physical reality of the body, something profoundly theological and psychological in an older philosophical sense is opened out to us, the counter to the incomplete and partial agendas of the advocacy culture of our day. This thirst which is very much of the body is also very much of the spirit. As such it speaks about ourselves as not only “hearers” but “doers of the word,” about “think[ing] those things that be good” and “perform[ing] the same”. Such ideas have everything to do with our lives in the land where we are placed. And everything to do with the radical meaning of Christ’s overcoming the world. “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” Jesus says, “but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
His thirst on the Cross is far greater than what we can imagine. Why? Because it embraces both the body and the soul in an intensity of suffering, the intensity of the Passion which reveals the greater intensity of divine love. This word gathers into itself a whole host of associations. It speaks to us about what we seek and what God, too, seeks for us. This thirst belongs to what Jesus says in these last verses of chapter sixteen of John’s Gospel. He speaks of the Father’s love for us, and our love of Christ as the one who has “come out from God.” He tells us that “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” No words capture more fully the logic of the Incarnation and the Trinity than these. Everything comes forth from God in creation and returns to God in redemption revealed in the suffering humanity of the Crucified but as grounded in the life of the Trinity.
In this word, “I thirst,” Jesus speaks directly and personally to us both about the radical meaning of his Passion but also about the love of God for our humanity. It clarifies for us a number of scriptural references about water and the land, about our thirst for God and God’s thirst for us. As the Psalmist says, “like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,/ so longeth my soul after thee, O God./ My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God” (Ps. 42). God is the ultimate good and truth that we seek as spiritual creatures. Here imagery from the physical world is used to speak about the deepest yearnings of our souls. We are made for God.
In another place, our humanity is likened to a barren and dry land. “My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also longeth after thee,/ in a barren and dry land where no water is” (Ps. 63.2). Thus Christ’s word is our word, the word of our suffering humanity because of our separation from God, on the one hand, and our thirst for God, on the other hand; in short, our desire for salvation and wholeness through the awareness of our limitations and brokenness.
But it also connects to the divine love which seeks the restoration and the wholeness of the whole of creation. As Isaiah puts it, “I will pour out water on the thirsty land/ and streams on the dry ground” and then extends that physical imagery to something spiritual that belongs to the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Eastertide preparations for Pentecost. “I will pour out My Spirit on your offspring/ and My blessing on your descendants” (Is.44.3).
There is a blessing in our thirsting because it belongs to what God seeks for us. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” This is the paradox of this word. Christ’s word, “I thirst”, fulfills what God seeks for us; his righteousness for us and in us. He thirsts for our good. His thirst signals the physical effects of human sin and suffering and the overcoming of sin and evil. This is the true meaning of his overcoming the world. It is the overcoming of the world that stands in contradictory opposition to God.
We are meant to live in this understanding now in and through our lives in the land. Rogation means prayer in its most basic sense and prayer signifies everything that we do towards God. Prayer embraces our lives on the land. Rogation reminds us that we are very much of the land as embodied and encultured beings through which we are recalled to the radical truth of our lives as spiritual beings. We are made in the image of God and in the concrete realities of our creatureliness in the robust categories of male and female. We are more though not less than our bodies yet the physical aspects of creation belong to the matters of the spirit, to our lives as lived in a Godward direction through the things of the body and the land. As one of the great poets of our Anglican tradition, Thomas Traherne, puts it. “You never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God,” and so too for ourselves. Christ thirst for our good so that we too should thirst for the good of one another and of our world in God.
Thus Rogation Sunday returns us to creation and redemption with a new and deeper understanding. It emphasizes the truth that our humanity is very much a part of the natural world. We are part of what we seek to understand but as spiritual creatures who think and act. We are not simply collapsed into the natural world but have a special vocation in relation to God and creation. “Man”, as Herbert puts it, “is the worlds high Priest.” We are called to sing the praises of the whole of creation to God through our prayers and labours in the land.
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes.
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.
It is a lovely way of speaking about our lives in Christ. His love is to be written out in our lives in the world, in the places of our lives in the land. His thirst is for the ultimate good of all creation. And our good is found in our thirst for him who thirsts for us.
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday, May 14th, 2023
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