WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 4/14/06

Good Friday

John 19:30 “It Is Finished”

“Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” Suppose we had been there that day, standing near the cross of Jesus, what would we have heard, what would we have thought? If we had been part of that little group of disciples who remained close by – mostly women, one or two men – we would surely have listened intently to anything Jesus said. We had been with him for years, but we never imagined it would end like this. The arrest, the trials, the flogging, the agonized path out of the city to “skull hill” – Calvaria as they would later call it in Latin – the brutality of nailing him to the crossbar and hoisting him up for all to see.

Passers-by jeered: but this was meant to be a public spectacle, after all. The Romans crucified dissidents and insurrectionists along the roadside as a warning to others; crosses were so routine you wonder that anyone took much notice any more. But some say that executions were still popular events, and that a large crowd gathered. For the half-dozen women, the couple of men, maybe a handful of other scared disciples hiding in the crowd, this was not a spectacle, it was a tragedy. Every death is a tragedy to those who are close to it.

And then it had gone dark. In the middle of the day, the light failed. It was ominous, like waiting for a terrible storm to break overhead. And in the midst of all this, Jesus spoke almost his last words from the cross. “It is finished.”

It must have seemed like that to his friends. All the years, all the miles, all the hopes - finished, dashed, over. They had thought, for a while, that he was the one they had dreamed of: the one to get rid of the Romans, the one to bring in the Kingdom of God. A healer, a teacher, a miracle-worker; a charismatic leader who really cared for his people. Common people had found a leader in this peasant from Galilee who could even best the Scribes and Pharisees in debate. Crowds of ordinary people wanted to see and hear him.

But now it had come to this – he was arrested, tried, flogged, crucified. It was over, indeed. Two of them would lament it to a stranger on the road a few days later: “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people, and we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” “We had hoped...” That is all over now. It is finished.

But if we had been there, and thought this, we would have been so wrong! Like most of Jesus’ disciples, we would have missed the point, grabbed hold of the wrong end of the stick, failed utterly to grasp what Jesus was really saying. Ears and eyes that are deadened by sin often do that: miss what God is really saying and doing!

Jesus was not saying “It’s all over, my life is ended.” He said, even if ever so quietly, “I have fulfilled what I came to do. My mission is accomplished, my job is done.” This was not despair, this was satisfaction. This was not dying alone and unloved, this was following his Father’s will to the end; this was doing what he had said he would do – “laying down his life for his friends.” Nobody “took” Jesus’ life; he gave it up willingly.

He had spent months telling his closest followers that this was his goal, that this was the way his mission would be accomplished. He would be arrested and tried and crucified, “to redeem his people.” But they had not understood what he meant, they had even argued with him and told him that he did not understand his own mission as Messiah of Israel! Messiah doesn’t die, Messiah reigns victorious over God’s enemies! Don’t you understand the concept? “Get behind me,” Jesus said to Peter, “you do not understand the ways of God.” Indeed none of them did. “We had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel...” But we were mistaken.

Mistaken indeed! “It is finished” meant that God’s plan was fulfilled; the scriptures were fulfilled. Jesus had come to show them the Father, to reveal and to follow the Father’s will, to choose a few people to follow him, to quietly - almost secretly - bring in the Kingdom of God, but above all to lay down his perfect life to redeem his sinful people. All unknown, even to his closest disciples, he was indeed “the one to redeem Israel.” But it was a redemption quite unlike anything they had imagined, and it had been achieved in a way they could not grasp – by the willing sacrificial death of the Son of God, “the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.”

It would take time for them to grasp all this – it would take his rising from the tomb and appearing to some of them, it would take the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost – but it would eventually sink in. God’s plan to redeem Israel, to save people from every nation, to make a new people for himself, was accomplished. “It is finished - consummatum est,” as Jerome would aptly translate it in his Latin Bible. God had won the great victory in Jesus, and the death on Calvary was the pinnacle of their plan.

What a strange thing it is, that the day the Lord of Glory was killed, we call Good Friday! And how far removed, still, are our hopes and perceptions of what God has done and is doing in our world and in our lives from God’s realities. “We had hoped...” for so many things, but if passing years teach us anything, it should be that our hopes are rarely fulfilled in the way we imagined. Can you remember what it was like to be 25, and to believe that anything is possible! To have the world before you; what hopes, what dreams! And how misguided they were! Little did we know what adult life would turn out to be, what marriage and family and jobs and careers would turn out to be!

Thank God, some of these things have turned out very well, even if not quite as we had pictured them! We have, for the most part, lived in times and places that were as good as most people ever enjoy; we have for the most part done better than our parents’ generation in all kinds of ways. Even now, we are pretty well off by many standards. But other things have not turned out as we had hoped. Children, jobs, money, health – they could have been better – much better, in some cases. We certainly didn’t plan on spending so much time alone.

“We had hoped...” but we were wrong in some very important ways. And we probably still are, and don’t know it. What do we expect from God? What are we looking for now? Health and strength, comfort and companionship? For our world to go back to the simpler, slower, quieter life that we seem to remember years ago? For people to become kind and honest and moral, as we’re sure they once were? What do we want from God now? Are we living with chronic disappointment that God still doesn’t do for us what we secretly want?

But what if we are hoping for the wrong things? What if we are just one more generation of Jesus’ disciples to get hold of the wrong end of the stick? What if we are longing for comfort, and he wants us to fight? What if we want victory, but he wants us to learn patience in suffering? What if we think “it is mostly over” for us, but in God’s eyes we still have to “complete the mission” he has given us?

What is our calling at this stage of our lives? What does God want to do in and through us, right now? Do we suppose Christian life is something you can retire from? How does God want us to use our time, our energy, our knowledge, our experience, our money, our love? Who should we be helping? Who should we be teaching? Where could we be volunteering our time? What parts of our church life need us? Where in our communities are there people in need of help that we could give? Who could we be praying for? Who could we write to? Who is alone and needs company? Who needs a phone call every day to be sure they are OK?

What in our life’s mission remains still to be done? And what will he, and what will we, say at the end? “Well, at last that’s over,” or “It is finished, it is accomplished, it is fulfilled; I have done what you gave me to do”?

In Jesus’ death, he completed the work of redemption for us. If we are his disciples, that redemption is his gift to us. Now he calls us to live out the life of redeemed disciples until his work in us is completed, and all that he planned for us is accomplished. Then we can join our Lord in saying, truly, “It is finished.”

Let us pray...