I Thirst for You

Bread and Wine Reading: "I Thirst for You", Mother Teresa

Scripture Reading: John 7: 37-39
On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” ’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Scripture Reading: John 19: 28
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’

The first Scripture for today is one of our favorites. We look at it as God’s promise of refuge, of healing, of comfort. But we miss what I think may be the focus of the passage: “Come to me.” God created us and made us in the image of God, made us so that we would desire to be with the one whose image we share. As Mother Teresa beautifully portrays in her essay, “I know you through and through—I know everything about you…I have followed you through the years, and I have always loved you—even in your wanderings.” That is the crux: God loves us. God love us so much that God created us, created the world in which we live, and has tried since the onset of Creation to get us to “come”.

We read this first Scripture with the assurance that God embraces us, that God will be there when we are in need. It is one of our favorites. God is there when we need God the most. And yet, we still don’t come. But God created the world, trying so many ways to convince us how much we are loved. “Good grief,” God must have thought at times, “how many burning bushes and over-zealous prophets does it really take?” And yet, we march on…we allow poverty to continue in our lives; we let greed consume our being; and in an effort to preserve the image and the lives that we have created for ourselves, we turn aside or plow over or underutilize or march against the one next to us, the one who God loves just as much as God loves us. No, we never came.

And so God comes to us once again. God comes to show us what life is, how life should be, and when we rejected the thought of change, God hung there with as much love as in the beginning. “I thirst.” God will always welcome the thirsty and quench our thirst. But God thirsts with a depth and profundity that we will never grasp. God thirsts for us to come. God thirsts for us to enter the Passion of Christ and stand at the foot of the Cross that we might be swept up in the new beginning, the New Creation. “I thirst…” “Come to me.”

Discussion Questions:
1.) What gets in the way of our truly believing and accepting that God loves us this much?
2.) What would that do for our lives if we truly embraced that?
3.) What is your own response to God’s thirst for you?

So go forth and quench the deep and abiding thirst of God!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli