In A Word: “Dipso” (I Thirst)

In A Word, “Dipso” (I Thirst!)

^“ Everything happened as the Holy Writings said it would happen. And Jesus said, ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar of wine vinegar was nearby, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus shouted, “It is finished!” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”  (John 19:28-30).

Only St. John recorded the mention of Jesus’ thirst immediately before His death on the Cross. One wonders what was on John’s inspired mind, and what the Holy Spirit intended, in recording the Lord’s desperate cry of thirst as He is so close to death . There are any number of spiritual applications that can be made as we try to read the intentions of John or even the mind of Christ here. We do know that His agonized cry of thirst revealed two truths about Him while in his dying breaths: Jesus is truly human, and Jesus is truly the Messiah.

Jesus Was Completely Human., The mystery of the Incarnation is that Jesus Christ was fully man and at the same time fully God… 100% human and 100% God. That’s 200%, which is naturally impossible but supernaturally true. When Jesus croaked out “Dipso” as His final physical request, it was spoken as a human being. He was experiencing every aspect of agony that everyone else would experience if in the same place. The human body of Jesus was no different than any other human body. Jesus was being slowly tortured to death in the most inhumane and painful way the Romans could think of. The Roman government wanted the worst form of execution imaginable, and they came up with the old Persian method of crucifixion. It makes sense that our word “excruciating” came directly from that term. Think of what Jesus had endured to this point before His cry of thirst on the Cross… He hadn’t had any fluids in His body since the Last Supper, 18 hours before; He was severely beaten with fists and rods and kicks; He had huge, sharp thorns forcefully jammed onto His scalp that undoubtedly produced quite a loss of blood; He somehow endured a Roman flogging that used a whip with metal pieces at the ends and left open layers of skin that would expose His inner organs. Roman flogging was so brutal and traumatizing that many of its victims died in the process. So there was a significant loss of blood before Jesus even came near Golgotha, resulting in dangerously low blood pressure and thus a desperate thirst. Once nailed with spikes onto the cross, Jesus would have been in physical and emotional shock. He would have been experiencing full-body muscle spasms, six continuous hours of naked exposure to the brutal middle eastern sun, and slow suffocation with immense pressure on His lungs. In every breath. Because of His extreme dehydration, He would have felt like He was literally drying up inside, with parched lips, swollen tongue, enflamed throat, and complete exhaustion. It was a wonder Jesus was able to say anything at all at this point. Nonetheless, Jesus knew He had one more announcement to make, one last word that was profoundly important to Him. So He made known His thirst, was given a little fluid from a sponge, and thus able to make His final pronouncement. Finally, after that small amount of fluid, He was able to open His cracked lips, loosen the swollen tongue from the roof of His mouth, force a swallow in His throat, take a final deep breath, and yell out His battle cry of triumph, His shout of victory, “It is finished!” His confirmation to the Father that He had fulfilled His Father’s mission, His work on earth was done, the debt of sin was paid in full. Jesus submitted to the deepest level of pain possible for a human body, He was willing to crawl inside human suffering at its worst.

And so, whenever we suffer as Jesus did, whether in our body, or in the emotional trauma of shame and pain, or for doing the right thing, or simply as a result of our faith in God,  Jesus says to us… I am so sorry for your pain. I want you to know that I suffered in anticipation of your suffering so that you can share your pain with Me. We are partners now, fellow members of the fellowship of suffering. You are now participating with Me in My Cross as I participate with you in your suffering. When you suffer like this, we are joined together in an unbreakable bond. Would it encourage you to know that My tears literally continue to be recycled in your atmosphere after all this time, My tears of sorrow and pain at Lazarus’ tomb, in Gethsemane, at the Cross! Do you realize that you are literally breathing in My evaporated tears in the very air in which you inhale? And do you realize, dear one, that you are participating in My suffering while taking in my body and blood at Holy Communion? Yes, you are living into My human tears right now, you are digesting My body and blood right now! But, as impossible as this sounds, cheer up! When you join with Me and I join with you in this sacred fellowship of suffering, we are together on the holy journey that leads to the power of the resurrection! My suffering did not have the last word, and neither does yours! Suffering is the only way that can lead to your living in the power of My resurrection, from now into eternity. Yes, I physically thirsted on the Cross, and look where I ended up! You will end up the same way, with your spiritual thirst in your cross leading you to your salvation and resurrection power! Welcome to the Fellowship! My servant of so long ago put this beautifully… “You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation!” (Isaiah 12:3).

Jesus Was Confirmed as the True Messiah. Scripture was fulfilled throughout Christ’s agonizing experience on the Cross. Psalm 22, for example, is often called the ”Psalm of the Cross” because of the uncanny prophecies that were made that make no sense unless one considers Christ on the Cross. His physical suffering alone is accurately reported in this Psalm: “I’m poured out like water, completely exhausted; every joint of my body has slipped out of joint; my heart is like wax, my courage has vanished, melting away within me; my strength is dried up like the broken fragments of a sunbaked piece of clay pottery; I am thirsty to the point of my dry tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth; they have pierced my hands and my feet; I look so emaciated that I can count all my bones.“ Continuing from that, the specific prophecy of Psalm 69:21  is messianic and clearly fulfilled in Christ’s statement about His acute thirst on the Cross and the immediate limited remedy: “… and they gave me soured wine to drink.” Sour wine was a cheap liquid refreshment used by the Roman soldiers on duty who had no access to clean water, and so drank this fluid, diluted with water and no actual alcohol in it, and was considered the same as vinegar. In this scene, the soldiers had a jar of the vinegar nearby for their use, heard Jesus croak out his thirst, and offered to Jesus on the Cross a sponge placed on a hyssop branch that was soaked with the vinegar. Jesus sipped from the sponge after they had raised it to His lips. Jesus was thus able to shout, “It is finished!” so everyone within listening distance could easily hear it. John mentioned the hyssop plant in particular because of its historic significance in the Hebrew Scriptures… The hyssop plant was instructed by Yahweh to be the instrument used to splash the lamb’s blood on the doorposts during the Passover event in Egypt. And too, hyssop was later used in the Tabernacle’s rites of purification, especially with the lepers. John was trying to make the point that hyssop had a bloody history of being used in deliverance and in purification. Both are spiritually connected to the momentous events happening on the Cross of Christ.

Some have wondered if Jesus was purposely doing those things that would prove that He was the Messiah, as if He had the presence of mind in the midst of His torturous death to even think straight, no less make strategic plans to convince others of something He actually was not. Another way of thinking of this is that John mentioned these details of the Cross to convince others that Jesus was indeed the Messiah as prophesied through the centuries. As Dr. Whitacre pointed out in his commentary on John, “Scripture expresses God’s will, and Jesus on the Cross is submitting to God’s will, so His activity fulfilled the Scripture because it all flows from the same source, and is being controlled by the same Father.” In other words, since Jesus was the true Messiah, it was inevitable that He would fulfill all the Scriptures expected these things to occur.

There are any number of spiritual applications that could be made about the thirst of Jesus on the Cross. There is no doubt one could use this cry of thirst to learn some spiritual truths… That the physical thirst of Jesus on the Cross represented our spiritual dehydration; that Jesus was expressing His thirst for souls to believe on what He accomplished on the Cross; that His thirst for water would remind us of His cry at the Feast of Tabernacles, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me! Let anyone who believes in me come and drink!” (John 7:38), which point us directly to passages like Isaiah 55:1, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me! For as Scripture says, ‘From His heart shall flow streams of living water;”; that only the waters of Jesus as found in the Holy Spirit could possibly satisfy us at the deep spiritual level; that He wanted to remind us of the powerful ’thirst” passages in Psalms, such as Ps. 63:1,   “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”  Maybe Jesus was hinting that it is easy for us to suffer spiritual dehydration in a world that has nothing to offer but broken wells instead of the fountain of life in God. One might also speculate that Christ’s cry of thirst was His direct appeal to the Father to remain with Him in His aloneness, that Jesus was thirsty for the Father’s presence in the midst of carrying the world’s sin. Or maybe it was a cry of lamentation, that He would be leaving, for a season, His friends, His community of dear companions, the people He loved, which was everyone.

Christ’s cry of thirst on the Cross could be taken to mean many things, and some suggestions are more conjecture than others. But my belief is that it was rather simple… He was simply declaring His human thirst, revealing that He was fully man and in complete solidarity with mankind; and He was confirming the fact that He indeed was the Messiah prophesied so long ago, fulfilling the Hebrew expectations as expressed in God’s Word.

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