“I Thirst” John 19:28

As I read this today, and thought about it, I kept going back to Jesus being this “living water” John 4:10. It seems to me to be a picture of this fulfilling, and delicious substance that when we drink is both pleasure full and satisfying; must be like beer.

What if theology is like beer: intoxicating, best in community, adds joy and celebration, and is both pleasure full and satisfying. As I began to think about this a few things came to mind. The first was Lucky Lager (or whatever trashy beer comes to mind). This is a beer mostly drank by under aged kids who just need to get wasted, it’s like Max Lucado. Max Lucado is the Lucky Lager of Theologians. He is awesome when you are young in your faith and just need to get wasted by God. He’s cheap and easy, and was instrumental in my faith. When I first began to thirst for the true Creator God, he pulled back the veil and gave me a peak. But my thirst began to become deeper, it needed something fuller bodied.

(Of course we all know the best bears come from small breweries, not mass produced cheap stuff. Which is why we should avoid books and ideas mass marketed by the multi-million dollar Christian industry.)

A new thirst is born, the thirst you have on a hot summer day when you are barbequing steak on the back porch with friends. At this point, only a good porter or stout will do. This is the stuff that fills your stomach long before it has the chance to impair your mind, and that you drink for the taste and pleasure more than for the affect. You are moving from the gift to the giver. Many theologians have become my oatmeal stout (NT Wright most of all). These are the Christian Mystics, the people who lust for the wonder of God, who seek not to mass produce but to refine and deepen. So while I needed Lucado at a certain point on my pilgrimage, now I have completely different needs. I am not looking for a spiritual high, but for something that is thick with the presence and mystery of God. Something I have to drink slowly, because it fills my spiritual stomach long before it has the abstract spiritual affect I looked for in my youth. I now need a deep, dark, gritty faith that makes sense in my world and at the same time changes my world.

So what are we drinking? Are we just grabbing the cheapest thing we can find, hoping to get trashed as quickly and easily as possible, or are we searching for the sweet nectar? The word from God that is “sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb? (Psalm 19:10) Most of all what was it that Jesus was thirsting for? Much of the Old Testament speaks of Israel being a thirsty people in a dry land, they are exiled and thirsting for the fulfillment of their covenant with God, a covenant of course they did not keep. What if this cry of thirst is about the new Exodus? Maybe Jesus is thirsting for something real, more than the “I raised my hand one Sunday and play Church once in a while” Christianity? Maybe his longing should be echoed in our hearts as we search to drink from the sweetness of His Kingdom, to taste the heavenly brew.