After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.' (John 19:28)
Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, "He saved others, Himself He cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him: for He said, 'I am the Son of God.'" (Matthew 27:41-43)
But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:14)
As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
So panteth my soul after Thee, O God.
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my meat day and night,
While they continually say unto me,
"Where is thy God?"
(Psalm 42:1-3)
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Living in Singapore as we do, the experience of real thirst is probably fairly alien to most of us. Among the many things we take for granted in this country, one of them is surely the clean water that flows so freely from our taps. (That most of this water is in fact bought from our good neighbour up north at the cost of quite some moolah and much high-level diplomacy, is something that most of us don't want to think about too much). Consequently, our understanding of one of the most powerful symbols in scripture is also necessarily limited by our lack of experience. Even when we do get thirsty, we're usually quite certain that water is within easy reach - and so feel none of the desperation that accompanies the kind of thirst that doesn't know when, or if, it will ever be quenched.
So if we're lucky, most of us will never feel the ravaging thirst that Jesus felt on the cross, the kind that leaves your tongue clinging to the roof of your mouth (Psalm 22:15) and your throat so hoarse that your voice is reduced to a mere rasp in the wind. None of us, I dare say, will ever have to feel such thirst while also hanging on an ancient Roman torture instrument, breathing our last with our bodies lacerated from scourging, nails driven through our wrists and feet, betrayed and/or abandoned by almost all our friends, giddy from hunger and blood loss -- a naked, bloody spectacle for jeering mobs of the great unwashed.
All of which, really, is more than enough for any human being, let alone one who also happens to be God incarnate. Yet, if the theologians are right, that was really the least of the sufferings Jesus went through on the cross. What happened to Jesus during the crucifixion went beyond physical pain - it was an existential blow that struck at the very core of His identity as the only-begotten Son of God, making Him who knew no sin become sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21) and cutting Him off from the intimate communion with the Father that He had enjoyed since before the dawn of time.
This understanding of Jesus's experience on the cross gives new meaning to the words recorded as His penultimate utterance before His death: "I thirst," whispered our Lord, before finally gasping with his last breath, "It is finished." Of course, He was talking about physical thirst, but I think that to read this only at the literal level would be to miss out the real significance of what happened at Calvary. Separated from God, bearing the guilt and punishment for all the accumulated evil and corruption of the world, past, present and future, the Son of God thirsted for God. He felt the desperate yearning for love, goodness and wholeness that all human beings feel, whether we admit it or not. And He knew the hopelessness, the angst, that is the corollary of knowing, deep down, that there is nothing we can do to fill that longing - no human love, no human art, no human ingenuity can give us the rest that we seek, and we know that it is vain to try.
The miraculous cosmic irony in all of this, of course, is that the One who thirsted on the cross is also the One who calls Himself the living water (John 4:10), and who, by the power of the resurrection, invites all of us to come to that cleansing water and drink to the full. When we come to Him, we know that we stand before the One who is able to satisfy that ravaging thirst, but who can also empathise with us in our humanity and weakness because He has lived through the same thirst and impoverishment that is the human condition (Hebrews 4:15).
In all the seasons of our lives, we can turn to the comforting words of the prophet Isaiah:
Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters... (Isaiah 55:1)
We need not wander forever in the desert. We can stop and drink. Jesus has already done what needs to be done to make possible the quenching of our thirst. All we need to do, is to want to.
...
...
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
easter musings
This was written last year. Thought it belongs here more than on the pink blog, which is where it was originally posted.
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In the past few months, I've been thinking, or trying to think, about justice. This is partly thanks to Tania Roy, whose Monday evening classes on post-traumatic writing have been the inspiring focus of much angsty yet enriching intellectual labour in this last semester; partly also thanks to a much-put-upon Jewish prophet by the name of Ezekiel; and last but not least, to the New Testament accounts of Jesus' last hours before and during the crucifixion.
Familiarity breeds contempt, we are told - which is why once in a while we need new eyes to see the world afresh. And what worse than to grow so familiar with the old stories from the Bible - after all, they've made their way even into secular language, they structure so much of the way we see the world - that we fail to see the wonder in them, the sheer preposterousness of what they propose. The Monday evening classes have helped to defamiliarise the Passion narrative for me, and because of them, I've been thinking anew about legal systems, claims to justice, truth claims, perjury, testimony and witness. And that is why I've suddenly seen, as if for the first time, just what a travesty of justice took place on Good Friday.
Rewind to a cold stone courtyard almost two thousand years ago. It is early spring. Just after midnight. There is a feeling of expectancy in the air - something is about to happen. One of the great superstar religious teachers of the day has just been arrested. Look, there He is, next to that pillar, being taken to speak to the governor. Everyone wonders what will come of all this; no one dares to ask.
So we see Jesus being shunted about from one tribunal to the next, all of which fail to find any real reason for convicting Him of any crime.
In John's Gospel, we read:
'Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium, and it was early morning. But they themselves did not go into the Praetorium, lest they should be defiled, but that they might eat the Passover. Pilate then went out to them and said, "What accusation do you bring against this man?"They answered and said to him, "If He were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered Him up to you."Then Pilate said to them, "You take Him and judge Him according to your law."Therefore the Jews said to him, "It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death," that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which He spoke, signifying by what death He would die.'
(NKJV, John 18:28 - 32)
In other words, what took place in Jerusalem that day was a blatant case of human rights abuse. Firstly, His accusers were unable to give any account of the crimes He had committed, resorting instead to the tautologous equivocation of claiming that they would not have brought him to trial if he had not been a criminal in the first place. I'd like to see someone try that one in any legitimate court of law today. (Perhaps a contemporary equivalent might be the invasion of Iraq on the basis of its possession of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)
And then, instead of being given a fair trial within his own ethnic and religious tradition, as was the custom, Jesus was brought before a foreign tribunal for no other reason than the fact that this foreign tribunal had the authority to put people to death. Basically, what was happening was this: his enemies wanted him dead; they knew they had no case; they had to figure out how to kill him while still appearing to have the law on their side; so they handed him over to some foreigners who conveniently happened to have the legal right to execute prisoners.
And He acceded to all this, allowed all this, indeed, made all this happen.
We sometimes miss the powerful human drama pulsing through the story of Good Friday. It is a story of how greed, ambition and cowardice combined with the existing power structures of the day to put to death the only person who has ever deserved not to die. Yet by missing the human drama we miss the larger divine message as well. So much for all our meliorist optimism about human potential, our trust in the systems of law and governance we have set up through the exercise of our reason. What happened on Good Friday is a humbling reminder of human fallibility, of our tremendous potential for messing up even the best of what God gives to us.
And yet we call this Friday 'Good'.
Because God subjected himself to all our screwed-up Machiavellian manoeuvrings, just so that His greater purposes could be accomplished. And accomplished they were, on the Easter after Good Friday. Because what that empty tomb tells us is that all this crap, all our crap - the petty politics, the power struggles, the loyalties betrayed, the imaginative tortures, the institutionalised corruption: all of these things that we despair of precisely because, when we really look at them, we see our own smudgy fingerprints, our complicity in their lies and evasions - all our crap which makes life so much less than what it could be, is not the final story. Because, for some unfathomable reason called love, we know that there is a God whom all these things cannot keep down, who has somehow lived through all of this - no, died through all of this for us; and over whom even death had no ultimate power.
And for this reason we have hope.
...
...
------------------------------------
In the past few months, I've been thinking, or trying to think, about justice. This is partly thanks to Tania Roy, whose Monday evening classes on post-traumatic writing have been the inspiring focus of much angsty yet enriching intellectual labour in this last semester; partly also thanks to a much-put-upon Jewish prophet by the name of Ezekiel; and last but not least, to the New Testament accounts of Jesus' last hours before and during the crucifixion.
Familiarity breeds contempt, we are told - which is why once in a while we need new eyes to see the world afresh. And what worse than to grow so familiar with the old stories from the Bible - after all, they've made their way even into secular language, they structure so much of the way we see the world - that we fail to see the wonder in them, the sheer preposterousness of what they propose. The Monday evening classes have helped to defamiliarise the Passion narrative for me, and because of them, I've been thinking anew about legal systems, claims to justice, truth claims, perjury, testimony and witness. And that is why I've suddenly seen, as if for the first time, just what a travesty of justice took place on Good Friday.
Rewind to a cold stone courtyard almost two thousand years ago. It is early spring. Just after midnight. There is a feeling of expectancy in the air - something is about to happen. One of the great superstar religious teachers of the day has just been arrested. Look, there He is, next to that pillar, being taken to speak to the governor. Everyone wonders what will come of all this; no one dares to ask.
So we see Jesus being shunted about from one tribunal to the next, all of which fail to find any real reason for convicting Him of any crime.
In John's Gospel, we read:
'Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium, and it was early morning. But they themselves did not go into the Praetorium, lest they should be defiled, but that they might eat the Passover. Pilate then went out to them and said, "What accusation do you bring against this man?"They answered and said to him, "If He were not an evildoer, we would not have delivered Him up to you."Then Pilate said to them, "You take Him and judge Him according to your law."Therefore the Jews said to him, "It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death," that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which He spoke, signifying by what death He would die.'
(NKJV, John 18:28 - 32)
In other words, what took place in Jerusalem that day was a blatant case of human rights abuse. Firstly, His accusers were unable to give any account of the crimes He had committed, resorting instead to the tautologous equivocation of claiming that they would not have brought him to trial if he had not been a criminal in the first place. I'd like to see someone try that one in any legitimate court of law today. (Perhaps a contemporary equivalent might be the invasion of Iraq on the basis of its possession of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)
And then, instead of being given a fair trial within his own ethnic and religious tradition, as was the custom, Jesus was brought before a foreign tribunal for no other reason than the fact that this foreign tribunal had the authority to put people to death. Basically, what was happening was this: his enemies wanted him dead; they knew they had no case; they had to figure out how to kill him while still appearing to have the law on their side; so they handed him over to some foreigners who conveniently happened to have the legal right to execute prisoners.
And He acceded to all this, allowed all this, indeed, made all this happen.
We sometimes miss the powerful human drama pulsing through the story of Good Friday. It is a story of how greed, ambition and cowardice combined with the existing power structures of the day to put to death the only person who has ever deserved not to die. Yet by missing the human drama we miss the larger divine message as well. So much for all our meliorist optimism about human potential, our trust in the systems of law and governance we have set up through the exercise of our reason. What happened on Good Friday is a humbling reminder of human fallibility, of our tremendous potential for messing up even the best of what God gives to us.
And yet we call this Friday 'Good'.
Because God subjected himself to all our screwed-up Machiavellian manoeuvrings, just so that His greater purposes could be accomplished. And accomplished they were, on the Easter after Good Friday. Because what that empty tomb tells us is that all this crap, all our crap - the petty politics, the power struggles, the loyalties betrayed, the imaginative tortures, the institutionalised corruption: all of these things that we despair of precisely because, when we really look at them, we see our own smudgy fingerprints, our complicity in their lies and evasions - all our crap which makes life so much less than what it could be, is not the final story. Because, for some unfathomable reason called love, we know that there is a God whom all these things cannot keep down, who has somehow lived through all of this - no, died through all of this for us; and over whom even death had no ultimate power.
And for this reason we have hope.
...
...
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