‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford. For more information, visit www.universitychurch.ox.ac.uk’
In this sixth episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘It is finished’
Music sung by the University Church Choir.
Sound design by Ana-Maria Niculcea
It is in the silence that we hear Christ’s fifth word from the cross: “I thirst”. We know what it is for a human being to thirst, taking even sour wine to moisten parched lips. A physiological account might be given here of a dying man, his arms pinned back on a cross in the heat of the day. But in contemplating the cross on Good Friday we are not trying somehow to get back to an event in the past and feel sorry, either for ourselves or even Jesus. Most especially, in reflecting upon the cross, we are seeking to enter more deeply into the work that Christ came and did on and through His crucifixion. If we grieve for our waywardness and tepid forms of love, then we are moved so we might be formed more deeply by Christ and conform more closely in imitation of Christ, like the beloved disciple. So, what is it for God to thirst? My answer follows from the gathering in that I spoke about with the penitent thief and the birthing of a new community with the interchanges between Christ, his mother and John. God longs to take into Godself, into the body of Christ, the whole of creation. The thirst is for righteousness: to turn the sour wine offered on a sponge into a new eucharistic vintage. This is a strange incorporation of all things into himself, a birthing that takes place by returning all that has been given life into his body. Coming to Jesus at night, Nicodemus asks “How can a man be born when he is old? How can he enter again into his mother’s womb?” The great reversal of life and its processes as we know them, begins on the cross as we die with Christ to be born again in Christ into eternal life. Everything in redemption turns upon this incorporation; the satisfaction in God of the thirst that “all may be one even as we are one”, as Jesus prays earlier to the Father. “I in you and you in me.” Nothing but everything can quench this thirst in God for that which came from God out of nothing and its reconciliation. In the quenching of that thirst is the final overthrow and judgement of all violences, hatreds, enmities, jealousies, angers, oppressions, fears – everything that would tear apart the body of Christ, everything that put Christ on the cross from the moment his ministry began; for Luke and Matthew, from the moment Christ was born. God thirsts for our salvation. God longs from the cross for our approach. God in Christ draws us to Himself by being strung up as the crucified one, the one who lays his life down that we might have all our own longings, lustings, thirstings, desirings and lovings reformed by the love and longing of God for us, because, ultimately, what we thirst for is what God thirsts for: that we might be one.
