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Good Friday, 04/14/2017
It is finished
Sermon on 1-19:42 18:, by Paula L. Murray
1When Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the brook Kidron, where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered. 2Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, for Jesus often met there with his disciples. 3So Judas, having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and weapons. 4Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” 5They answered him, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus said to them, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. 6When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. 7So he asked them again, “Whom do you seek?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.” 8Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these men go.” 9This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken: “Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one.” 10Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.) 11So Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword into its sheath; shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” 12So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him. 13First they led him to Annas, for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year. 14It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people. 15Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he entered with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest, 16but Peter stood outside at the door. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out and spoke to the servant girl who kept watch at the door, and brought Peter in. 17The servant girl at the door said to Peter, “You also are not one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” 18Now the servants and officers had made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and they were standing and warming themselves. Peter also was with them, standing and warming himself. 19The high priest then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching. 20Jesus answered him, “I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. 21Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me what I said to them; they know what I said.” 22When he had said these things, one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand, saying, “Is that how you answer the high priest?” 23Jesus answered him, “If what I said is wrong, bear witness about the wrong; but if what I said is right, why do you strike me?” 24Annas then sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. 25Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. So they said to him, “You also are not one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” 26One of the servants of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” 27Peter again denied it, and at once a rooster crowed. 28Then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor’s headquarters. It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor’s headquarters, so that they would not be defiled, but could eat the Passover. 29So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” 30They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” 31Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” The Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” 32This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die. 33So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” 35Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” 36Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” 37Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world — to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” 38Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, “I find no guilt in him. 39But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” 40They cried out again, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a robber.
1Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. 3They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands. 4Pilate went out again and said to them, “See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” 5So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!” 6When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.” 7The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.” 8When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. 9He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. 10So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.” 12From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” 13So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. 14Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” 16So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, 17and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. 18There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. 19Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. 21So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” 22Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.” 23When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, 24so they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.” This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, “They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” So the soldiers did these things, 25but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” 27Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. 28After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. 31Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. 32So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. 33But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. 35He who saw it has borne witness — his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth — that you also may believe. 36For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” 37And again another Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.” 38After these things Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took away his body. 39Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight. 40So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. 41Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. 42So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.
IT IS FINISHED
It is finished. As recorded by the Gospel of John, the last words spoken by Jesus Christ this side of the grave are, “It is finished.” As the summation of a life goes, that is an odd choice of words, particularly given the claims we make for this dying man: Son of Man, Son of God, true God from true God, Messiah, Savior, Lord, Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Prince of Peace. As majestic, as cosmic as those claims are, the last witness of the claimant seem curiously commonplace. “It is finished.” What is finished? A life? Why waste the breath to state the sadly obvious. The dying? Given the way he died, death comes as blessed release, and perhaps a whimpering, “It’s about time!” would be more the thing.
It is finished. We finished our Lenten journey yesterday at sundown, the close of the liturgical day. For most of us, we probably thought the Lenten journey came to an end last Sunday when, trying to wave palms, walk, and sing at the same time we stumbled through the doors of the sanctuary, bemused by the thought of the citizens of Jerusalem welcoming our Teacher and our Master into their city like he was some kind of king with palm branches and the shirts off their backs. I don’t know about you, but when I get to this point in Lent part of me is regretting the end and part of me is thinking, “It’s about time.” It’s time to be done. It’s time to be finished with the purple and the extended confessions and the dolorous music. Like any lengthy walk through some patch of God’s sweet earth everything begins to look the same after a while. It’s hard to tell the hills, the rocks, the trees apart after just a few hours much less weeks. The weeks of Lent are filled with repetition, the same themes, the same phrasing in hymn after hymn, and often the same texts. What is it with psalms 51 and 22 over and over again? Maybe the “it” that is finished is simply the near endless rerun of the same narrative over and over again, Christ on the road to the cross.
It is finished. The apparent end of the journey, at least for Jesus, is here, on a bleak hill outside of Jerusalem, where stands the cross on which he hung, and died. But perhaps the it of which he spoke is not geographical but social. Could that “it” be the dreams, the hopes, the prayers of a people who had seen in this man their freedom from the tyranny of dictators and the oppression of poverty?
It is finished. The tendency among too many of us self-identified Christians, especially amongst the professional Christian set, is to identify the “it” of “It is finished,” with the most currently fashionable form of social justice abroad in the land. Yet it was Jesus himself who said, “You will always have the poor with you,” a simple acknowledgement that the world is broken and fallen and therefore injustice is inescapable. To reduce that last statement of the Johannine Jesus to a street protest against poverty or oppression is to erase the cross from history’s stage, sometimes, it seems, for reasons of a hidden loss of faith. After all, many thousands of men died in just the way Jesus died.
Those last words, “It is finished,” are more than the final acceptance of man’s inhumanity to man, the occasional dullness of life’s everyday rounds, or the reality of death, either as our common end or our very personal end. None of those meanings that might be attached to the phrase, “It is finished,” would lead to history’s long romance with Jesus’s death, nor the creation and the survival of the Church of Christ over these many centuries since his death.
It is finished meant more than in is over, or it is done, or it is concluded, because otherwise you and I would be doing something else this evening than sitting in this church. In the Greek, the original and glorious language of the Gospel of John, the word for finished can also mean perfected or completed. Hear Jesus’ last words again, only now, hear them to say not, “It is done,” but “It is perfected,” or, “It is completed.” Now, whatever it is that Jesus is saying is finished, it is clearly not his life or his dying, for we do not perfect life or complete it, perfect dying or complete it.
The clue to the meaning of those most famous last words, “It is finished,” is found not so much in this evening’s reading from John, as it is in the earlier readings from Isaiah and Hebrews. Of the Suffering Servant, the set-up, if you like, of John’s portrait of the Messiah, the prophet Isaiah says this. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Or, as John puts it in the glorious prologue to his Gospel, “He came to what was his own, and yet his own people did not accept him.” He through whom creation itself came into being is held in contempt and destined for destruction by those whose very lives are his gift. As great as his suffering this last day of his life was, surely the greater part of Jesus’ Passion is this terrible disdain and rejection by those whom he loved more than he loved his own earthly life.
It is finished does not mean an end to Jesus’ suffering of the spirit and the body endured by Jesus during his earthly sojourn. In that suffering, as terrible as it is to observe even twice removed as we are, was the perfection of Jesus’ obedience and the completion of his earthly ministry. Jesus’ life is not taken from him by the political forces of the day; rather Jesus willingly yielded up his life, his sinless life, as the perfect and ultimate sacrifice for sin. In the political parlance of this day, what looks to be a loss is instead a win, not for Christ, but for those who, turning repeatedly towards sin, reject their Lord with every misapprehension and misdeed. This sad day is indeed “Good Friday,” for us, for rather than rejecting us in his turn our Lord instead responded with sacrificial love. As the author of Hebrews says, “He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”