Hello All,
Yesterday, God showed me some cool things. He often speaks to me in the details, in names, and such. Maricruz told us yesterday that the barrio we live in is called ´´Calvario´´ which means ´´Calvary´´ in Spanish. Previously, we didn´t know the name of the neighborhood where we live, and I don´t find the timing of this knowledge to be a coincidence. I knew immediately that the name carries a significance for me. My physical address right now is Calvario, La Esperanza, Honduras which means in Spanish: Calvary, The Hope, The Depths. It is oddly appropriate and obviously isn´t an accident.
That word ´´Calvary,´´ in addition to being the location of Jesus´crucifixion, also means ´´any experience that causes great suffering.´´ While I love Honduras and am enjoying my time here, I am in a place of spiritual suffering--well, mainly, the death of self. I was listening to Brooke Fraser´s song ´´Lead Me to the Cross´´ and studying the Bible some yesterday, and I began to ask God, ´´What does Calvary involve?´´ Death. Silence in the face of adversity. Abandonment. A preparation for deeper intimacy with God (because afterward the Temple curtain split). Thirst.
Before pouring over the Gospels´accounts of the Crucifixion, I had read a little of that Mother Theresa book, and I was surprised by the underlying theme of thirst. In the book, a friend wrote of Mother Theresa:
It was the redeeming experience of her life when she realized that the night of her heart was the special share she had in Jesus´passion . . . Thus, we see that the darkness was actually the mysterious link that united her to Jesus. It is the contact of intimate longing for God. Nothing else can fill her mind. Such longing is possible only through God´s own hidden presence. We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us. Thirst is more than absence of water. It is not experienced by stones, but only by the living beings that depend on water. Who knows more about living water, the person who opens the water tap daily without much thinking, or the thirst tortured traveler in the desert in search for a spring?
I noticed that in every account of the Crucifixion, one detail was consistently mentioned--the sour wine. Initially, Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh--a mild painkiller, but He refused it. I understand why Jesus refused this wine. First of all, it was a painkiller, and Jesus was called to be in a place of suffering. Taking this wine mixed with myrrh would have meant dodging some of the suffering, however small. It would have meant being disobedient to His calling. The other reason relates back to the Last Supper. In Luke 22, it says:
Taking the cup, he blessed it, then said, ´´Take this and pass it among you. As for me, I´ll not drink wine again until the kingdom of God arrives.´´ Thus, taking that cup, again, would have been a form of disobedience.
The idea of the cup is an important one as it does not just hold wine, but it also represents the task God had given Him. This is evident in all of the Gospels. For example, Matthew 26:42 says:
Again he prayed, ´´My Father, if there is no other way than this, drinking this cup to the dregs, I´m ready. Do it your way.´´
Luke 22 also says:
Father, remove this cup from me. But please, not what I want. What do you want?
John 18:11:
Jesus ordered Peter, ´´Put back your sword. Do you think for a minute I´m not going to drink this cup the Father gave me?´´
In every account of the Crucifixion, sour wine is mentioned in various contexts. The Gospel that shed the most light for me was John 19 when it says:
Jesus, seeing that everything had been completed so that the Scripture record might also be complete, then said, ´´I´m thirsty.´´ A jug of sour wine was standing by. Someone put a sponge soaked with the wine on a javelin and lifted it to his mouth. After he took the wine, Jesus said, ´´It´s done . . . complete.´´ Bowing his head, he offered up his spirit.
According to my interpretation of John in relation to the other scriptures, the Kingdom of God arrived while Jesus was still alive. He had said that He wouldn´t drink wine again until the Kingdom of God arrived. Thus, it arrived while He was still living as a human. Perhaps, then, the Kingdom of God arrived not in His physical death, but in His final death of self. Until that moment when He drank the wine and breathed His last, He still could have saved Himself. He still could have done it His own way, but He didn´t. Drinking the wine was the final acceptance of God´s will over His own since it brought about the arrival of God´s Kingdom and new covenant.
While I was studying this, the only dictionary I had was my Spanish-English dictionary. Just out of curiosity, I looked up ´´sour´´ because I wanted to understand the significance of why the wine that Jesus drank was sour. The verb ´´to sour´´ in relation to spoiling is ´´cortarse´´ which is also related to the verb meaning ´´to cut.´´ I found this to be very interesting because it led me to this interpretation: The wine was sour because in drinking it, Jesus was willingly cutting Himself off from the Father in the form of death and hell. In drinking the sour wine, His thirst was not quenched, and He drank the cup, dying His final spiritual death before dying physically.
It is also important to note the significance of the Last Supper and the fact that Jesus gave the cup to all of His disciples to drink. It was a cup of suffering, but cups can also be trophies, prizes. Thus, the cup of dying daily, of death of self, became the ultimate prize as Jesus´ follower. (It still is!) It is a cup of surrendering our will for the Father´s. It is only in taking this cup and drinking it to the depths that the Kingdom of God can arrive in us. Drinking this cup of the suffering of Jesus is the only way to truly be in the Kingdom of God. There is a huge difference between knowing of the Kingdom of God and walking in the Kingdom of God. It´s a line that is evident by the fruit a person produces with his or her life, how that person lives his or her life, and what is most important to that person. It is a line of difference that changes lives forever.
And so this is the place that God has led me. I am in a place of thirst. I am in a place of many desires, but like Jesus, I want to drink of His cup--not that those desires may be quenched, but that I could be in His Kingdom and that His Kingdom may arrive in me as a result of my choice to die to self. I am glad that He has led me to Calvary. I am thankful that He loves me enough to let me share in His suffering, to let me be intimate enough with Him that I can carry some of His burden. I am humbled by the privileged opportunity to allow the Kingdom of God to arrive in me. The opportunity is presented for all of us. It is a cup that He expects us to pass among ourselves, but how many of us will choose to drink?
Longing for His heart alone,
Sarah
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