Month: May 2023

“I thirst”

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.

(more…)

Print this entry