John 19:28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, “I am thirsty.”
On this Good Friday we are reminded of God’s extravagant love for us. When Jesus cried “I Thirst” from the Cross, He wasn’t declaring His physical thirst; instead, He was revealing the true nature of God’s love for us. In those two words, He was explaining why He went through all that He went through during His life on earth, particularly what He submitted Himself to during the Passion Week leading up to The Cross. He was saying it was the “Thirsting heart” of God for love, that drove Him to suffer and hang on a Cross. At Man’s fall, God cried out “Where are you?” in the garden. It wasn’t that God didn’t know where they were physically or spiritually, but it was His anguishing heart, longing (thirsting) for lost intimacy with Man. On The Cross, having accomplished the shedding of blood for our sin, He declares once again God’s heart that longs for us. He doesn’t just love you with a calm, stagnant, benevolent love; He loves you with an aching, longing, passionately driven kind of love. Knowing that is the foundation of every thing else you believe in your Christian life. As, a matter of fact, Mother Teresa once said,”Until you know deep inside that Jesus ‘THIRSTS’ for you, you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you or who He wants you to be for Him.”