Sunday 03 • 29 • 20

A person's last words before they die are considered really, really significant. They sort of summarize what a person's life was all about. So consider a few of these.

In her memoir of Elvis Presley, Ginger Alden, who was his fiancée at the time, revealed that Elvis's final words before he died in 1977, right after a night of sleeplessness, Elvis told Alden, "I'm going to go to the bathroom to read." Those were Elvis's last words.

Frank Sinatra—you think he died after saying "I did it my way," but no. His last words were, "I'm losing it."

Sir Isaac Newton, when he died, he said, "I don't know what my life may seem to the world. But as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing at the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smooth pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Herman Melville died saying, "God bless Captain Veer," referencing his then unpublished book, Billy Budd, found on his desk after he died.

The actress Joan Crawford yelled at her housekeeper who was praying as Crawford died. Crawford said, "Don't you dare ask God to help me."

And according to Steve Jobs' sister Mona, the Apple founder's last words were, "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow."

There's something about last words that seem to distill down to the very essence of what a person's life was about. That's why we put such emphasis and significance on people's last words.

We've been working our way through the last twenty-four hours of Jesus's life in this series about witnesses to the cross. And today, we're simply going to look at Jesus. We're going to look at his last three sayings, his last words before he died as given to us in John's gospel. I want you to look with me at these three sayings: "I thirst," "Woman, behold your son," "Son, behold your mother," and also "It is finished." We're going to take them actually in reverse order as we look at these in our study together. Let's take the last one first: "It is finished."

It Is Finished

That's an English translation of the Greek word tetelestai, which was the last thing that Jesus said on the cross. But the words are interesting. He doesn't say "I am finished." That's what you might expect—Jesus dying of exhaustion, Jesus dying defeated. Rather he says, "It is finished."

Tetelestai comes from the word teleo in Greek, which just means to end, bring to an end, to complete, to accomplish something. It signifies a successful end for something that you have put your energy into. It's what you would say after you climbed Mount Everest. It's what you would say after you turned in your final PhD dissertation. It's what you would say after you finished that last car payment. It's what you would say, maybe after you did a 10K race. "It's finished. I did it. I did everything I set out to accomplish."

But here's the other thing. There's something about the way the verb is set up as well. I'm going to get a little nerdy here, but I want you to hang in. Tetelestai is in the perfect tense in Greek. Now "perfect" there doesn't mean the best one—that's a part of speech which means something in the past which has bearing on the present. Something in the past which is done, which carries on into the present. So it's different from just saying, "I went to the store yesterday." It's something that said, "This happened and it's still in effect today."

Let me give an illustration. Think about our current cultural moment. As of tonight, when we're recording this, there's been no publication of some kind of cure for the coronavirus. But let's imagine a scientist discovers a cure for the coronavirus and puts that online, open source, available to all companies and all countries to mass produce. It would be amazing good news, and it would be appropriate to this word, tetelestai. "It is finished." It would mean coronavirus is done today. Coronavirus is going to be done tomorrow. Coronavirus will be done forever.

But even that illustration, as good news as that could be, it doesn't really even touch the words that Jesus has and what it signifies. The finality and the power of what Jesus says. Why is that? Because the work of the cross is not finished in limited scope. It's not limited in scope. It doesn't need to be packaged and distributed like the coronavirus vaccine would need to be. It's not limited in effect. It doesn't work specifically just on one disease. It affects all that ails us. And again, the work of the cross is not limited in time. A cure for the coronavirus would be great for today, for this season. The work of the cross, what Jesus did, what was finished, is good for all people in all times, in all places in history.

And to really get what that means, what Jesus finished and how good this good news is, you have to understand the second phrase that I want to look at. This one: I thirst. I thirst.

Now of these last three phrases of Jesus we're looking at, this is maybe the one we tend to skip. I mean, obviously, Jesus was thirsty. This is a man who'd lost a ton of blood. What else could this possibly be about? He's dying a slow death. He's bleeding out. But I want to tell you that physical thirst is not what this is about at all, and here's why I know that.

Because to this point, the most notable thing about Jesus's sufferings was his silence. This is what's been the main thing repeated throughout John's gospel. Jesus never says, "Ouch." He never says, "Stop it." He never says, "This is killing me." He says nothing. He's remarkably silent. Like Isaiah had said, like a lamb going to the slaughter, nothing comes out of his mouth. Not when he's being beaten by the temple guards, not when he's being beaten by the Roman cohort, not when the crown of thorns is being pressed down into his skull, not when he's being scourged and beaten with the cat of nine tails, not when nails are being driven into his feet, not when nails are being driven into his wrists. Not even when they take the cross and push it up and drop it into place, putting weight on all those wounds. He says nothing the whole time.

So why now? Why does he suddenly say anything about his physical condition? Why now would he say anything about thirsting? If you're thinking there must be something else going on here, you're right. There is something else going on here. Jesus is talking about another reality, something bigger.

The Connection to Psalm 22

And to get what that is, you have to know something of the Old Testament. Going back to the early church, it's why it was widely accepted that when Jesus was dying on the cross, he was mumbling the words from Psalm 22 in the Old Testament. He was saying these words out loud on the cross. This is why the early church called Psalm 22 the fifth gospel. So I'm going to read some excerpts of Psalm 22, and I want to see if you can tell why they would call this the fifth gospel.

Here's what some of the verses say:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. He trusts in the Lord, they say, let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him since he delights in him. I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me. A pack of villains encircles me. They pierce my hands and my feet; all my bones are on display. People stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garments. — Psalm 22

Words written by Jesus? No. Words written maybe by an eyewitness to the cross? No. Words written by King David a thousand years before the events of the crucifixion.

And what's interesting as you look at this and read this is that these words describe a level of suffering and pain that can really only be associated with an execution. I mean, we know a lot about King David and his life. Probably very few other figures in all of the Bible have so much written about them. And yet, there's no event in David's life, even with the hardship he's been through, that comes close to capturing these words and what David was talking about. He speaks of being naked, of his bones being on display, of being pierced in his hands and his feet. And curiously, he describes thirst—great thirst, in fact—dying of thirst.

The Reality of Dying of Thirst

Now I want to think about dying with a thirst, and I hope you don't know anything about this. Water makes up about 55 to 65% of the human body. So it's vitally important to our chemistry. It's vitally important to how your brain works and how your blood flows and how your muscles move. And of course, the lack of water is deadly—very deadly—surprisingly quickly too.

I don't know if you've ever read about how a person begins to die of dehydration. Maybe you've read a book like The Life of Pi, or you've read the real-life account of Louis Zamperini, or seen the movie Unbroken. Zamperini, among other things he suffered in his life, lived seventeen days on the open ocean struggling with a lack of water. But the progression of death by dehydration, thirsting to death, is terrible.

Let me give some illustrations. It begins with what we normally think of as just thirst—wanting water. Thirst becomes serious when you begin to lose about 2% of your body weight in water. Now let's say a hundred and seventy pound person; that's about three pounds. And you might lose that in doing a kickboxing class for an hour at the gym without a drink.

When thirst kicks in, your body clings to all the remaining moisture. Your kidneys send less water to your bladder. That's why your urine gets darker. As you sweat less, your body temperature rises. Your blood becomes thicker and sluggish. And to maintain oxygen levels, your heart rate increases. That's the first phase.

The second phase is feeling faint or weak. This is when you're losing about 4% of your body weight. For a hundred and seventy pound person, that's about seven pounds. That's like riding a bike on a really hot day for three hours without a drink or going two days without water. Your blood becomes concentrated, and as a result, it begins to decrease the blood flow to your skin. Your skin begins to feel tight and shrivel. Your blood pressure drops. It makes you begin to feel weak and faint. You've stopped sweating, and without that, you begin to overheat.

Phase three becomes really dangerous: organ failure. Now you've lost about 7% of your body weight. For a 170 pound person, that's 12 pounds. Now your body is having trouble maintaining blood pressure. And to survive, it begins to conserve resources and pull back from some of your organs. Your kidneys begin to shut down. Without your kidneys filtering your blood, cellular waste begins to build up. You're literally dying for a glass of water.

And then of course, the last one is death. Death comes at the point where you lose 10% of your body weight to dehydration. Now that's horrible. Dying of thirst, dying of dehydration is an agonizing, chronic, degenerative condition. It gets worse and worse over time until it consumes you. But as bad as that sounds, this is what happens to the human soul apart from God. A slow death by thirst. Your body is thirsty for water. Your soul is thirsty for God. This is how God made us. This is how he designed us. And this is why thirst is such a big theme in this book. It's all over this book. Thirst and the slaking of thirst, the relieving of thirst.

Now these people lived in a desert climate and they knew lots more about thirst than we do. When we're thirsty, we go turn on the tap and out of the tap always comes water. But not these ancient people. They had wells. They had cisterns. They had to work for all the water that they got. And they also lived close by to the Dead Sea, which was a body of water that was completely undrinkable because of the salt content. They were very aware of water and thirst.

And if God wanted to teach his people how they were made, how we're designed, about a deeper spiritual truth, a condition which is agonizing, a painful condition that gets worse and worse over time until it overtakes you and kills you, what would he choose? Thirst. God uses thirst throughout his Bible, throughout his word to teach us what it means to experience the agony of being without God.

Thirst in Scripture

So here's a couple scriptures. When God's people began to forsake God, what does he call himself? He said, "I am the fountain of living water." And what is abandoning God? What does that look like? He describes it this way. He says his people abandoned God in favor of other things or other idols. And he said it this way: they went to broken cisterns that could hold no water.

They went to broken cisterns that could hold no water. — Jeremiah 2

He calls God's wayward people parched with thirst. In the Old Testament, God threatens to make unfaithful Israel into a parched land and fill her with thirst. The tongue of the one afflicted by God's judgment sticks to the roof of their mouth. That's in Hosea, Lamentations.

Jesus took this idea which was sketched form in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, he makes it three-dimensional and in Technicolor. So Jesus in John seven stands up at one of the feasts over a pool of water with a pitcher and he pours it out and he said, "Living waters are coming from him." He meets a woman at a well in the middle of a really hot day and tells her he can give her living water that she would never thirst again but find with him a well springing up to eternal life.

And surprisingly though, Jesus also says the opposite. He talks about the agony of thirst, of soul thirst, of living without God. Jesus tells this parable about a rich man and Lazarus. This is in Luke chapter 16. This is not the Lazarus raised from the dead. This is just a parable. But here's how the parable goes. There's a rich man who's selfish and stingy. And every day he walks by a poor beggar who's laying at his gate, a man named Lazarus. And every day Lazarus asks him for something from his table and the man denies him over and over again.

Well, as Jesus tells the story, eventually they both die. And Lazarus goes up to be in heaven. The rich man goes to hell. And the rich man says this, he pleads.

He pleads for Lazarus to come from heaven down to hell to dip the end of his finger in water and to cool his tongue. And this is what he said, "For I am in anguish in this flame." I mean, what is hell according to Jesus? Never ending thirst. Never ending thirst. Deep soul thirst.

Now why? Because thirst is an agonizing, degenerative condition of turning away from God, being apart from God. And there is no better way to describe hell. Jesus talked about hell more than anyone in the Bible and hell is not something that we consider polite conversation. It's not something we like to talk about. Maybe we even teach our kids not to say the word. It's a bad word.

But of all the bad words in the English language, the other ones are just words. They're words that have taken on cultural meaning. They're words for acts or body parts or things, and culturally we've come to say those are bad words. Now, if you're watching this kids, you can't tell your parents pastor Jeff said it's okay to cuss. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that this word hell is different from all the other words. Where the other ones are just words, hell is a reality. It's an agonizing place, a condition of soul thirst apart from God.

Those cartoonish pictures of hell with red devils and pitchforks, they're silly pictures. But the one thing they get right is this: thirst, heat. So Jesus on the cross says, "I thirst." Of course he's suffering physical thirst, but he never opened his mouth about his physical sufferings on the cross. Instead, Jesus is telling us something about what's going on with him that we can't see. We're invited to witness something that we can't see with our eyes by these words.

When he cries, "I thirst," that is the cry of the damned. That is the cry of Jesus enduring hell. Hell is eternal agony apart from the presence of God. He's suffering the agonizing and degenerative condition of being apart from God. He's suffering what would be my soul thirst. What would be your soul thirst. He's suffering this.

What Is Finished on the Cross

This is what is finished on the cross. When Jesus says "It is finished" and he bows his head and dies, this is what is finished: eternal agony, soul thirst, this kind of suffering, our spiritual thirst. And because of this, when Jesus rises from the dead, his thirst is quenched and that means good news for us.

God will hear the cry of thirsty people. This is a promise from Isaiah 41:

When the poor and needy seek water and there is none and their tongue is parched for thirst, I the Lord will answer them. I the God of Israel will not forsake them.

And he did. And he did. So this is why in response, we can cry out to the one who is living water himself and say just like he did, "I thirst" and he will fulfill and satisfy.

It's interesting the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, in the very last chapter speaks of the thirst that is quenched through Jesus and now poured out flowing all over. Listen to this:

The angel showed me the river of the water of life, brightest crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city, and on either side of the river the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding fruit for each month. And the Spirit and the bride say come, and let the one who hears say come, and let the one who is thirsty come. Let the one who desires take the water of life without price.

Right now, in our country, people are increasingly becoming awake to their thirst in a way that maybe is unprecedented in our entire lifetime. It's getting rough and it's going to get worse. Here's what we're going to see over the next few weeks, if I can be very direct. Right now, you might have heard of or know of a few people who've gotten sick. It's like one or two degrees of separation right now. Over the next week, you'll know people personally who get sick. Over the next week or two, you will know personally people who die of the coronavirus. This is the reality of what we're living into.

And we do not want to offer trite and silly phrases like, "Hey, there's nothing to be afraid of." We know that there is something to be afraid of. But we don't need to be afraid in an ultimate sense because we have a real and certain hope in Jesus Christ. We know the living water himself. He who is able to sustain you, the one who calls himself living water, who can make water flow up within us to eternal life, he promises to sustain his people and care for us. He is your hope. He is your relief. Look to him, dear brothers and sisters, look to him.

Finally, I want to look at the last word of Jesus. Jesus is dying and he looks from the cross and sees his mother and several other women and one of the disciples, John, who wrote this book. This is what it says in verses twenty-six and twenty-seven:

When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold your son." And then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother." And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. — John 19:26-27

At face value, this just looks like a throwaway line. Like, oh, Jesus loved his mama. But that's because we are modern western people. You and I just don't get it. This is Jewish culture. This is first century Jewish culture.

People in that time were not introduced the way we introduce ourselves now. You might introduce yourself this way: "I'm Jackie, I'm a real estate agent." "I'm John, I teach first grade." We talk about ourselves based on what we do. But people in the first century defined themselves in terms of their families. Jesus's last name wasn't Christ. That's his title, the anointed one, Jesus Christ. Jesus's last name was Bar Joseph, son of Joseph. That's how he was known. Family was everything.

Did Jesus and Mary have any other family at this point? Yes, we know that they did. We know that Jesus had a lot of brothers and at least one sister. Jesus was the oldest son. We know that in the New Testament, it appears that after Jesus is about thirteen years old, we never hear of Joseph again. It appears that Joseph has passed away. But Jesus then would have been the oldest son in charge of the family.

So here he is dying on the cross and he looks and sees his mother. And according to Jewish custom, who would have taken over the care of his mother and be the head of the family? It would have been the next brother in line. We know that Jesus at least had the brother James who became a leader in the early church. But this is absolutely amazing because in this scene, Jesus is dying and he looks at his mother and he turns to John, one of the disciples not related to him, not kin in any way. And Jesus now says to John, "John, this is your mom now." He turns to his mother and says, "Mom, this is your son now. He's going to take care of you."

What is this? It's very simple. Jesus is telling us that his cross means even more than just personal salvation. Yes, it means that. Yes, it means deliverance from hell. Yes, it means that God enters into our lives and makes us new. But it also tells us we have a new family. Jesus places a primacy, a priority on other Christians as your family. These are your people now.

The Church as Family

You know, history is filled with accounts of people who consider their blood kin the most important thing. Lots of blood shed between tribes and peoples and groups. And there's one critical exception to that: the local church. The local church.

When two people share Christ, even if they have nothing else in common, they share something deeper than blood. They share a connection that calls them to be family of God together. The New Testament gives us a dramatic picture of how immediate this realization began to take effect in the early church. This—"Behold your son, behold your mother"—began to get traction in the early church. We read in Acts chapter four:

Now the full number of those who believed, those Christians, were of one heart and soul. And no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. — Acts 4:32

How then do we practice Acts four—this one heart and one soul—in our present day family of God? People of God, this is our moment. Can the church, which in America has generally been about meeting together occasionally and doing life together seldom, shift gears? This is what God gives to us in the people of God. Of course, right now we're in a moment where social distancing from this virus is spreading, but we don't have to let social distance become social isolation. You and I, we have all kinds of opportunities right now to be the family of God to one another, to contact one another, to check in, even when we can't touch, to provide for the needs of others, to reach out and be the family of God to one another.

By way of conclusion, let me come back to this. These three last words—these three last words of Jesus—like other people's deaths, they seem to just sort of encapsulate what Jesus is about, who he is and what he did. His life, his teaching, his death, his meaning. By contrast, if you look at some of the last words of some of the other great religious leaders and the other great world religions, they really stand out. Consider this: the last words of Muhammad, the father of Islam. Do you know that the prophet Muhammad's death was also agonizing?

He was poisoned by a Jewish woman whose family had been slaughtered by Muslims. The poison worked slowly over time and ate his organs, and he suffered a really agonizing death. As he was dying, his last words were, "May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the palaces of worship at the graves of our prophets." Words of cursing for his enemies, words of judgment, words of anger.

But Jesus—what do we find in his last words for his enemies? Words of forgiveness, words of welcome, words of him taking the judgment.

Or consider the words of Buddha, founder of the way known as Buddhism. As he was dying, he said, "Let the discipline that I have taught you be your teacher. All individual things pass away. Strive on untiringly. Push, work harder, never give up."

But Jesus says nothing about what we're supposed to do. He doesn't call us to action, to push harder, to strive, to achieve. He says only this: "It's finished. I did all that was required."

This is the great hope, brothers and sisters, that we have today—the cross of Jesus Christ.

The Cross and Divine Suffering

John Stott wrote this many years ago in his book called The Cross: "I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as God of the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I turn to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross—nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged into God-forsaken darkness. That is the one for me. He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his.

"There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark—the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. The cross of Christ is God's only self-justification in a world such as ours. The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak. They rode but thou didst stumble to a throne. But to our wounds, only God's wounds can speak, and not a god has wounds, but thou alone."

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Communion and Giving

It's at this moment in our service when we usually get to go to the Lord's table together. And it's a real loss right now not being able to gather in a room together. A screen is great, but it just doesn't approximate in any way what we experience in being God's people together, gathered around this table, taking His body and His blood as one.

I can't wait to do that again. And it's right that we can't right now because communion is communing. It's coming together around Jesus together. I hope that this makes you hungry—hungry for when we can gather again.

Before we sing this last song, I'll remind you that you can give in response to what God has given you. Part of the way we worship Him is by surrendering all that we have and all that we are to Jesus. So I invite you, if you would like to give, you can do so online on our website.

If you're not a part of our church fellowship, please feel no compulsion to give. This isn't a tip. This is a way we worship. And so we invite you, if you want to respond to Jesus Christ in this way, please feel welcome to do so.

Let's continue to worship together as we sing this song.