Thirst

Today, Good Friday, we are in a waterless place. Death surrounds us. We are afraid and anxious. There is so much going on we are confused. We cannot move. We cannot breathe. We are in Calvary.

Today, Good Friday, we see our Lord, fastened on the cross, gasping for air, thirsting for water. The wood of the cross is drenched in his tears and blood. He cannot move. He thirsts for something much more than water.

Today, Good Friday, we are in a parched place. In this withered landscape, the heartache is real. The heartache is now as it was then. We thirst for something much more than water.

We may turn to different things to slake our thirst. But when it comes to our deepest desires, our thirst is not much different from each other.

We thirst for answers. We want to know. We want to understand life itself, why life should begin at all and why it must end, why we are here. We want to know if there is a purpose for our being in this universe, or if our existence is just some fluke of nature. We want to be understood. We long to be loved, to love, to be forgiven and to forgive. We thirst for some assurance that we have not been abandoned, that we are not alone.

We thirst to know why our thirst itself is never quenched. Why the incompleteness, the vulnerability, the dissatisfaction, the lack of wholeness?

With St Augustine, we confess to you O Lord that our hearts will never find rest, until they rest in you. As you have shaped our hearts in the likeness of your own, we will always be wanting and thirsting until our thirst is quenched by your love.

Today Good Friday when we hear your cry of thirst on the cross, we see someone so like us we wonder whether we are missing something about the Christ-ness of you, the God-ness of you. When you tell us of your thirst, we only see someone as empty and wanting as we are, and we wonder how someone so beloved of God could run out of water. The One who turned water into wine, who walked on water, who calmed the angry waves, how can he now run out of water?

We wonder where life is watered in the withering fire of this day. We ask where love might grow in this parched place.

We hang on to the words of the prophet Isaiah sent to us like the dewfall in this desert.

And yet ours were the sufferings he bore,
ours the sorrows he carried.
But we, we thought of him as someone punished, struck by God, and brought low.
Yet he was pierced through for our faults, crushed for our sins.
On him lies a punishment that brings us peace, and through his wounds we are healed.

Today Good Friday, in this waterless place, we seek shelter in the shade of your cross. Please help us to believe that in your thirst our longings are somehow quenched. By the restlessness of your soul we find peace. And by your thirst for something much more than water, we are healed.