When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he* breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Pause and let those words sink in. This is not a just a Good Friday lament, this is every day and everywhere. We’ve heard it from those crying in Ukraine. We’ve heard it in Gaza and from the Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage by Hamas. We’ve heard it from global victims of disaster and famine who previously would have received aid from the United States. We’ve heard it from cancer patients hoping for outcomes of discontinued research, and from school children infected by preventable diseases. We may well have said it ourselves. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I invite you to sit with the pain those words evoke, before I hazard another word about it. Which will surely be inadequate to the magnitude of our Lord’s suffering.
These final words of Jesus have traditionally been called the “Cry of Dereliction,” which comes from the Latin word for abandonment. That’s a somewhat antiquated use of the term, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard it. In contemporary speech, dereliction has taken on additional meaning as a failure to fulfill one’s obligations, typically in an employment or military context. Although I don’t think this is precisely what the evangelist had in mind, I still find myself wondering who was derelict in whose duty. Or, at the very least, who abandoned whom? The multiple layers of abandonment—by friends, by political and religious leaders, by God—that brought Jesus to this moment are staggering.
A lot—a whole lot—of theological ink has been spilled over whether and why God abandoned Jesus to the cross. These are important conversations to have about the economy of salvation, and I’m happy to have them anytime. But this is not that moment. This is the moment to simply show up and weep. As author Terry Tempest has written, “there is a deep beauty in not averting our gaze, no matter how heartbreaking it may be. It is about presence. It is about bearing witness.”
But in the corner of our heartbreaking gaze, notice too that the curtain of the temple tore at the moment of Jesus’ death. This is a textual detail worth witnessing for those of us who may ask about the meaning of this disastrous dereliction. The evangelists Matthew and Mark both saw fit to remind us that the barrier between the human and the holy was put asunder in that same moment. Both the glory of God and the awesome power of God escaped their temple boundaries in order that all might share in them. The certainty of resurrection life—which means saying yes to unconditional love and no to coercive violence—has been poured out upon all of us who are willing to accept it. Let us not be derelict in this responsibility to Jesus, and to one another.
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
John’s Gospel has a lot to say about water. I’m reminded of the wedding at Cana—where six abundant jars of water became even more glorious in the form of wine—and of the Samaritan woman who came to the well looking for water in the desert. And found living water instead, in the person of Jesus. Why would the one who was with God and was God—since that very first moment when Spirit hovered over the waters of creation—ever have to be thirsty?
This is more than a rhetorical question, especially in light of how John narrated the passion of our Lord. In a setting in which the most powerful forces of his time were conspiring to deprive Jesus of life, he kept insisting that he was actually the one in control. He was doing it all to fulfill the scripture. Specifically, in John’s version, to fulfill Psalm 69—from which the declaration of thirst is a direct quote—and also perhaps Psalm 22, which is so integral to our Holy Week liturgies. It begins “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—I trust that sounds familiar by now—and continues with “ I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint… my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws.” A devastating description of desiccation.
This and the previous words about forsakenness from Mark’s Gospel are often preached as a witness to the human vulnerability of Jesus. On the cross, he felt grief in his heart. He felt thirst in his body. Just as we do. There is no suffering of body, mind, or spirit that Jesus does not share with humanity.
And while that’s not wrong, I think this is a moment to consider the difference between the way that the evangelists tell the crucifixion story, and the fullness of what they teach us about Jesus. It’s one thing to accept the forces of evil and not retaliate, and it’s another to surrender to them with the certainty that they will reveal God’s ultimate power. That is to say, the power of human faithfulness met the power of the transcendent God. The same God who separated the waters above from the waters below and bounded the oceans that we might have land to inhabit. The same God who gave us lakes and rivers and waterfalls, rain and mist and even Karl the fog.
It is also the power of the same God who thirsted on the cross in the suffering body of Jesus. Not just because he was like us—although he was—but because he was so very thirsty for an end to sin and violence and to death’s cruel dominion over humanity. It was for this deep longing that Jesus poured himself out like water. He thirsted… out of love for us.
