Sunday book pick: In ‘Thirst’, Jesus is god’s son, a miracle worker, and a man who was killed

“It is I who am able to feel love for everything that exists. That is what it means to be Christ.”

Jesus’s story is one for the ages. It inspires horror, pity, and, as Amélie Nothomb shows in her novel Thirst, also mirth. The fact that Jesus was subjected to such extreme cruelty at the hands of lesser beings also brings comfort – if god’s own son could be destined to such a fate, then why should you and I be spared life’s lesser humiliations? Perhaps that is why Jesus is the eternal muse – of painters, sculptors, writers, and sufferers.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson, the novella opens with Jesus's simple acceptance: “I always knew I would be sentenced to death.” He has selflessly performed his miracles in service of the grieving mother, the blind man, the leper who begged for alms, the couple who ran out of wine at their wedding. Unfortunately for him, his help, once generously received, has literally become the cross on his back he has been sentenced to carry.

Plainly put, Jesus has not been omniscient enough, and now the benefactors of his miracles have to deal with the various disadvantages of a normal life. Jesus thinks of himself as a man and nothing human is “foreign” to him – including the bitterness that so many feel for him. And because he is a man, he knows that the “enigma of evil is nothing in comparison to mediocrity.” He was forced to be exceptional, and now the commoners have turned against him.

The most incarnate of human beings

When Pontius Pilate orders the crucifixion, Jesus knows he is done for. His divine birth offers no comfort to him – his mother is loving albeit hysterical, and his father is the stuff of the lores and barely around. As far as Jesus is concerned, he is the most “incarnate” of human beings. He is not as afraid of death as he is of the crucifixion. Death, despite its finality, is nothing more than an abstract concept for the living. We fear the moment when we’ll reckon death but being suspended in that state is incomprehensible to even those with the most refined intelligence. Whereas, if we were to know the cause of our deaths, we’d never live. The impending crucifixion enervates him as he waits out the final hours of the night experiencing this “concrete fear.”

Confined in a cell, Jesus’s mind wanders from person to person and back and forth in time as he tries to understand the fate that brought him to this moment. At 33 years old, Jesus wants what every young person does – to live a quiet life with his girlfriend Madeleine in a small cottage away from the madding crowds. Like many of us in love who can’t believe how lucky we got, Jesus too cannot fathom someone so exceptional as Madeline finding him worthy of her. He remembers the early days, their easy togetherness, and examines the very nature of love. It was Jesus who said “Love thy neighbour as thyself” but Nothomb explains what he meant by it – “Universal love is an act of generosity that presupposes painful clarity,” she writes. Jesus’s love was made of sterner stuff and despite the unfairness of his death, he sees every human as a capable vessel of offering love and redemption.

While ruminating on what some people assume is Jesus’s omnipotence, Nothomb makes the reader acutely aware of the limitations of their own existence – in the most primal sense, humans are nothing but degenerating pieces of flesh. And yet, we perform miracles every day – we keep our body alive, feed it, we love and care for other flesh vessels made in our image and other species. But perhaps, Nothomb suggests, what made Jesus’s love divine was the courage to “elude the spirit” – to seek what is just beneath the skin. Very few before Jesus were able to perform miracles borne out of love and very few will after.

The physical body is indispensable, for it is what contains the spirit and the soul. Therefore, to deny the body its pleasures is not just wrong but perhaps even sinful. The thirst that Nothomb alludes to, is very much physical thirst, and particularly, for that of water. A single sip of water can bring back a person to life. It is all you need after a long, tiring day. The harsh sun and back-breaking labour make you all the more grateful for it. “The love you feel in that precise moment for your sip of water is God” and Jesus’s ability to love every creature as he loves – and thirsts for – water is the most telling sign of his divinity.

As the night breaks into the morning, Jesus dreads what the day will bring. The weight of the cross on his back is unbearable and to add insult to injury, the townspeople have gathered to watch this spectacle. He fears the pain will become so extreme that he might even miss the “great moment” of his death. Still, he has been granted small reliefs – his mother has been forbidden from seeing him and Madeline’s presence in the crowd offers some comfort. The discomfort he is feeling doesn’t stop him from philosophising about what Freud would many centuries later label as the “ego” and the “superego”. Jesus wonders about the “strange sin” human beings commit around the age of three – we learn to accuse ourselves and that is how we start practising self-hatred. To him, this is the “greatest flaw” of creation.

To die and be dead

The walk up the hills of Calvary is not particularly strenuous but with a wooden cross on your back, the sun blazing in the sky, and death hanging on your head, it is a journey that even the devil would be hesitant to undertake. As he labours through his last breaths, Jesus’s mortality can no longer be denied. But his death – so cruel and so painful – will not be in vain. Does death bestow you with uncharacteristic wisdom before it claims you? It is hard to say. Still, there is comfort in making peace with one’s temporality in this world and accepting that our existence makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. The world will go on as before. Like an affirmation, Jesus leaves us with a freeing realisation: “I am allowed to enter the other world without leaving anything behind. It is departure without separation.” Like most of our deaths, Jesus too dies without event. It is true that there was much excitement to the moments leading to his death – but the end, when it came, was silent. The Eternal simply “did not give a damn.”

But life is never without attachments. The death of a child – perhaps the cruellest of all – is the most intolerable for the mother. Time quite literally stops for her. When Mary is finally allowed to hold Jesus’s body, he feels joy even though he is no longer alive. His body is no more in suffering and he is free to feel the joy that only a child can feel when their mother holds them. As for Mary, who is ignorant of the happy state her dead child is in, sinks to the depths of grief. In Jesus’s absence, she has become his orphan.

Nothomb goes on to ruminate on what it means to be dead. Not from the perspective of those left behind but the one who has crossed over. It is perhaps the silence and not so much the absence that constitutes our grief. Death is final – there is simply no way to reverse it. But thankfully, love is stronger than death. “If you love your dead,” advises Jesus, “trust them enough to love their silence.” The greatest declaration of love is perhaps to let go.

What starts as an irreverent recollection of Jesus’s final few hours turns into a philosophical enquiry into what death and dying mean for not just mortal beings like us, but someone infallible like Jesus. There is comfort in knowing that death comes for us all, including those with divine parentage. We are kept alive in memories, in the love that our dear ones feel for us, and in the eternal life that we are granted after death. And what might this eternal life be? To know thirst, to live so intensely that you die thirsting, and to value the life-giving taste of water.

Thirst, Amélie Nothomb, translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Editions.