Dear Christian friends:

God on a cross? God Almighty and holy on a cross? Doesn't the Almighty God deny Himself by this? God cannot possibly be found on a cross, the place of failure and disgrace! Doesn't His cry, "I thirst," destroy God's majesty and man's dignity? Surely men cannot accept as their Captain one who is executed without resisting.

This scene of the Crucified, thirsting and accepting refreshment from His executioners, seems to deny that He is the majestic Son of God. At the wedding in Cana He had changed water into wine by His Godly power. (John 2:1-11) At Jacob's well He had offered the woman of Samaria living water to quench her thirst forever. (John 4:1-29) He had promised that rivers of living water would flow out of all who believe in Him.

And now in His thirst this same Jesus begs for water from His enemies. Doesn't the almighty, holy God deny Himself? This teaches us that there is no real comfort for us in God's majesty. Those who get excited about God's majesty and can't stand His humiliation don't really know God or themselves. A deaf lady, when I visited in her home once offered me a bust of Christ with the crown of thorns in His agony. She said, "Take it! I don't like it! I can't stand it!" I told here it was beautiful and precious to me and why. There are many people like her. I suspect that all of us tend to be like her.

We need to face reality. We need to face the facts! See this world with its ups and downs, its heights and depths, its abundance and want, its victors and victims.

We need to take seriously what the Bible says about God's power, and then realize that the chaos in the world with its shameful injustice and destruction could not happen if the Almighty did not permit it to happen. If we really do this and think about it, we shall be paralyzed with terror before the Almighty who is able to prevent it, but seems to will it to happen.

Take a good look at His Ten Commandments. Take seriously His promise that He will be a Friend and Helper of those who obey and an Enemy and Destroyer of those who disobey.

Honestly examine your own attempts at obeying these Commandments day by day. How do you feel? If we honestly do this we should tremble and quake before the Holy God whom we cannot satisfy. We shall be filled with fear and despair as we try to obey God, and realize the magnitude of the divine demand. In our every attempt to obey we become only more disobedient.

St. Paul said, "I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet." "For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died." (Romans 7:7,9)

Like St. Paul, Martin Luther in his early ministry as a District Vicar for the Augustinian Order was torn by inner turmoil. The more he tried to obey the Commandments and to justify himself by good works the more he realized what a miserable and wretched sinner he was. His failure to find peace by the Commandments drove him to the edge of despair and ruined his health.

God's majesty is not to be praised. It drives us to despair and terrifying misery. God's omnipotence crushes us in its aloofness from our distress. God's holiness damns us by its complete withdrawal from us sinners. Without Christ, the majesty of God means only gruesome distance and terrible anger. We want to flee from it, but don't know where. We wish that we were no longer human beings, perhaps a bush, a stone or something else, only not a human being who thinks and must go on thinking, who suffers under sin and yet cannot escape it, who yearns for God, but is crushed by God's remoteness and inaccessibility. There is no such thing as human dignity in the face of God's majesty. There is no comfort for sinners in the exalted God, only despair and condemnation.

The comfort for sinners is found in the humiliated God, the God disgraced and mocked on the cross. Let us not flee from the cross, but embrace it!

Look up to the Sufferer on the cross and listen carefully: There is God! Hear Him say again, "I thirst," and know this: Our thirst torments Him! His thirst actually is the terrible thirst of a dying man, whose mouth is convulsed in the struggle of death. And so no other thirst is strange to Him. See this torture in its deepest meaning!

If God's Son endures it, then God is no longer far away and inaccessible to us sinners. The almighty and Holy One shares our suffering and assumes it completely.

Continue to look and see how they give Him something to drink! His thirst seems to be unquenchable. Again and again it is quenched, quenched through the sponge offered by the very men who have beaten and crucified Him.

The Son of the Highest, the Christ in whom the fullness of God dwells has become so lowly that He lets men give Him a drink, so weak and helpless, that it seems fitting to mock and ridicule Him. Behold His disgrace! God's terrifying majesty has vanished in the Crucified One. God is here in the midst of us, the Most Lowly and the Most Humble.

Can there be any doubt that He loves you? If He does this for you, is there anything that He would not do for you? The mystery of all mysteries is here! The love of all love is here!

Pontius Pilate, perhaps the most infamous actor in the divine drama, ironically preached the sweetest sermon for all: Three little words, "Behold The Man!" Behold the humiliated God-Man, Your Dearest! "He who knew no sin, was made sin for you, that you might be made the righteousness of God in Him." (2 Corinthians 5:21)

(Hymn, O Sacred Head Now Wounded)
1. O sacred Head, now wounded,
with grief and shame weighed down,
now scornfully surrounded
with thorns, Thine only crown.
O sacred Head, what glory,
what bliss till now was Thine!
Yet, though despised and gory,
I joy to call Thee mine.

3. What language shall I borrow
to thank Thee, dearest Friend,
for this, Thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever!
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never
outlive my love for Thee.

Amen.