DAILY GRACE
April 10, 2020, Good Friday
Hello Everyone,
The Scripture for today, Good Friday, is quite lengthy and so I am not going to set it out here. I encourage you however to read it . . . in its entirety . . . slowly, meditatively, prayerfully.
No “Daily Grace” will be emailed on Holy Saturday or Easter Sunday. The Easter Sunday service however will be available via email link and also through the church’s website. The email link to the service will be sent to you sometime Saturday afternoon or evening.
Peace and Grace to you all,
Pastor Dave
Scripture: John 18:1-19:42
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Meditation
“I thirst. . . .”
So much has been written about the Passion in the last 2,000 years. What more can be said? Even more, how can words describe everything that the words “Good Friday” encompass and all that Jesus suffered for us? Perhaps Jesus’ cry, “I thirst,” best captures the human and divine pathos of this day. All of us know what thirst is. Did Jesus only mean that he thirsted for something to drink? Or was he thirsting for much more? What was Jesus really saying with these two poignant words? Was he expressing the thirst of God the Father for the restoration of ruptured relationship? Was he thirsting to taste once more the food of the kingdom of heaven, where he would enjoy the presence of not only his Father, but ours as well?
One thing is clear: Jesus, the Son of God, had been so completely stripped of everything that he could not alleviate his own thirst. What will my response be? How will I alleviate Jesus’ thirst? Will I understand it simply as a cry for something to drink — a desire that an immediate human need be satisfied? Or, can I hear Jesus cry out these words in the depths of my heart, allow them to reverberate in my soul, and hear in the echo an invitation to a deeper communion?
The litmus test of my response will not be an abstract internal affair. Rather, it will take flesh in the way I respond to the cry of thirst from those in my life, a cry that is often suffocated. If I can hear the undertones of Jesus’ cry of thirst, I may be able to hear my own and others’ unspoken thirst.
Prayer
Lord, I see you naked, bloody, suffering terribly. You cry out in pain and agony. I hear you say, “I thirst.” I feel helpless because I don’t know what you mean. How do you want me to satisfy your thirst? I need help getting in touch with my own thirst —- a thirst that I unconsciously fill with so many distractions that leave me unsatisfied. Help me to know my deepest thirsts. Amen.
Contemplation
“Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink” (Jn. 7:37).