“After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished,
said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’” –John 19:28
“Our Lord is the Maker of the ocean and the waters that are above the firmament: it is His hand that stays or opens the bottles of heaven, and sendeth rain upon the evil and upon the good.
“The sea is His, and He made it,” (Ps. 95:5) and all fountains and springs are of His digging. He poureth out the streams that run among the hills, the torrents which rush adown the mountains, and the flowing rivers which enrich the plains.
One would have said, ‘If He were thirsty He would not tell us, for all the clouds and rains would be glad to refresh His brow, and the brooks and streams would joyously flow at His feet.‘
And yet, though He was Lord of all He had so fully taken upon Himself the form of a servant and was so perfectly made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that He cried with fainting voice, “I thirst.”
How truly man He is; He is, indeed, “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,” for He bears our infirmities.
How great the love which led Him to such a condescension as this! Do not let us forget the infinite distance between the Lord of glory on His throne and the Crucified dried up with thirst.
A river of the water of life, pure as crystal, proceedeth today out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, and yet once He condescended to say, “I thirst.”
He is Lord of fountains and all deeps, but not a cup of cold water was placed to His lips. Oh, if He had at any time said, “I thirst,” before His angelic guards, they would surely have emulated the courage of the men of David when they cut their way to the well of Bethlehem that was within the gate, and drew water in jeopardy of their lives.
Who among us would not willingly pour out His soul unto death if He might but give refreshment to the Lord?
And yet He placed Himself for our sakes into a position of shame and suffering where none would wait upon Him, but when He cried, “I thirst,” they gave him vinegar to drink.
Glorious stoop of our exalted Head! O Lord Jesus, we love Thee and we worship Thee! We would fain lift Thy name on high in grateful remembrance of the depths to which Thou didst descend!
While thus we admire His condescension let our thoughts also turn with delight to His sure sympathy: for if Jesus said, “I thirst,” then He knows all our frailties and woes.
The next time we are in pain or are suffering depression of spirit we will remember that our Lord understands it all, for He has had practical, personal experience of it.
Neither in torture of body nor in sadness of heart are we deserted by our Lord; His line is parallel with ours. The arrow which has lately pierced thee, my brother, was first stained with His blood.
The cup of which thou art made to drink, though it be very bitter, bears the mark of His lips about its brim.
He hath traversed the mournful way before thee, and every footprint thou leavest in the sodden soil is stamped side by side with His footmarks.
Let the sympathy of Christ, then, be fully believed in and deeply appreciated, since He said, “I thirst.”
Our Lord says, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink,” that thirst being the result of sin in every ungodly man at this moment.
Now Christ standing in the stead of the ungodly suffers thirst as a type of His enduring the result of sin.
More solemn still is the reflection that according to our Lord’s own teaching, thirst will also be the eternal result of sin.
For he says concerning the rich glutton, “In hell he lift up his eyes, being in torment,” and his prayer, which was denied him, was, “Father Abraham, send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”
Now recollect, if Jesus had not thirsted, every one of us would have thirsted forever afar off from God, with an impassable gulf between us and heaven.
Our sinful tongues, blistered by the fever of passion, must have burned forever had not His tongue been tormented with thirst in our stead.
I suppose that the “I thirst” was uttered softly, so that perhaps only one and another who stood near the cross heard it at all, in contrast with the louder cry of “Lama sabachthani” and the triumphant shout of “It is finished.”
But that soft, expiring sigh, “I thirst,” has ended for us the thirst which else, insatiably fierce, would have preyed upon us throughout eternity.
Oh, wondrous substitution of the just for the unjust, of God for man, of the perfect Christ for us guilty, hell-deserving rebels.
Let us magnify and bless our Redeemer’s name.”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, ‘“‘Lama Sabachtani?’’ in Majesty in Misery, Volume 3: Calvary’s Mournful Mountain (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2005), 188-189, 191. (See also, C. H. Spurgeon, “The Shortest of the Seven Cries,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 24 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1878), 24: 219, 220-221, 222-223.
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