John 19:16-30

10/03/10
John 19:16-30
Hudson UMC

“It is finished” is not a phrase that we think about too often. When we are talking about a work of art or even just an ordinary task around the house, we often will say, “It is finished,” to let everyone know that there is nothing more to do. However, when a man actively dying on a cross in extreme pain says “It is finished” it seems a little different. There are some who have said that Jesus was nothing more than an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who expected to bring in the golden age of God through their ministry. Dying on the cross would have put an end to all of that. Instead of saying, “It is finished,” it would seem that it would be more appropriate to say, “I am finished,” or “My ministry is finished,” in the sense that it is done away with. But this does not seem to be what Jesus is saying, and if we remember the entirety of Jesus’ ministry, we can see for sure that Jesus means something else.

If we really allow the intense significance of these simple words from the mouth of Christ, “It is finished” to penetrate into our hearts, minds and lives, we would realize that they are incredibly important. They do not only tell us something about God, but something very important about ourselves. It is mainly this aspect that I want to focus on this morning.

There are people in the world, even in the Western world like in Europe and America who would say that human beings do not need to be forgiven and redeemed, that humanity does not have any problems that we cannot solve. However, if we can agree for a moment that humanity needs some help to make it what it ought to be, how would we go about doing that, or rather, how would we think that we should go about doing it? Well, modern human history has shown us that, if we were to set ourselves to redeeming human nature, we would try to do it through improving the information that people have; that is, we would tend to try to solve the problem through education; teaching people what is right and what is wrong, showing people how to make good choices. And, if that does not work for everyone, we would imprison them.

Now, if we wanted to be distinctly religious in our thinking about this problem, we might even go so far as to say that God needs to help us out. After all, we are finite, but God is infinite. We do not have the understanding of context or the wisdom to choose the very best option that God does. However, what would we think God should do in order to redeem us? Again, we in the Western world tend to think in terms of information. God should send a great teacher or a prophet, someone who can tell us what we need to do to fix our situation. We need people who will tell us that, at the end of the day, love is a better option than hate, that working together is more effective than destroying others.

Now, if this is the case, we can understand, at least to a certain extent, why Jesus came among us. We needed to be taught the ways of God, we needed to see examples of love, we needed to hear the word of forgiveness from the mouth of a great man. In Jesus, we hear the word of the Lord and, in our own lives, we realize that we are not self-sufficient, that we need God, the one who is greater than we are, to rest on. Without Jesus we would still not know the wisdom of His teaching, we would still be ignorant of what we needed to know.

However, in my opinion, there are two major problems with understanding God’s redemption primarily in terms of information. First of all, it doesn’t seem to work all that well. We have a history of people in the church who continually act as if the teachings of Jesus have no impact on them whatsoever. How many holy wars, how many crusades, how many inquisitions, how many persecutions, have been launched in the name of the one who said, “love your enemies?” How many people have heard the call of Christ to care for the widows, orphans and the poor in the land and then go their merry way as if they had not heard anything? How many people use their religious convictions, supposedly rooted in Jesus, as a stick with which to beat those who disagree with them? We can’t get out of this problem by saying that the people probably just didn’t know the teaching of Jesus because that isn’t true, either. We can see that the religious leaders since the beginning have known the text of the Bible very well indeed. The people have always known the basic teaching of Christ and yet have behaved terribly in spite of it.

The other issue with understanding redemption primarily as receiving information is that, if we think about faith mainly as knowledge, or, more exactly, “knowing the right thing to do,” we can make absolutely no sense of the crucifixion. If Jesus was primarily meant to be a teacher, who could show us right from wrong, who could give us the information we need to live the right kind of life, why did He need to die? What purpose could that possibly have served? After all, by dying in His early thirties, Jesus’ teaching ministry was radically cut short. If He had not died, He could have spent so much more time teaching. The fact that Jesus was crucified and that both He and the disciples make such a big point out of the fact that He had to be crucified should show us that there is something more to Jesus than just His teaching. Some people like to call Jesus a great human teacher like a Ghandi or a Mother Theresa or a Mohammed, or a Martin Luther King Jr., but neither Jesus nor the apostles will let us rest here. There is much more.

In many ways, the significance of this is shown so well in Jesus’ last words on the cross in the Gospel of John, “It is finished.” Over and over again, Jesus has been saying that He is not doing His own work, but is doing the work of His Father and that He will not be done until that work is finished. Here, Jesus says that the work He had come to do, the work for us and our salvation, is finally finished. After several years, after difficult times, after a tiring ministry, and now, finally, in death, the work of God is completed.

The point that I want to raise is that Jesus says, “It is finished” here and not before. This is extremely important. It is not as though Jesus had actually completed His Father’s work earlier and just forgot about it, nor is it the case that Jesus had not realized that He had done so and it was only now, hanging on the cross, that He could see that His work really had been done. Jesus did not declare that His work was finished earlier simply because it wasn’t finished earlier. Only in death, an innocent death at the hands of the religious leaders who hated Him, the very act and being of God in their midst, that His work was completed. There is something deeply important about His death in the plan of God.

What does it mean that Jesus only says that “it is finished” here on the cross? It means that our problem as human beings is not simply informational; it cannot be solved merely by education, regardless of how well we are educated. After all, the ones who orchestrate the world’s greatest disasters are not usually the ones who have had no education, but those who, because of their education, are able to coordinate evil on a large scale. If our problem could be overcome simply by hearing the wise words of God, Jesus’ work would have been finished after Jesus spent time teaching the multitudes, but this is not the case. Jesus does not say His work is finished until He is all but dead.

This outcry shows us that there is something much deeper and much more profound that needs to be overcome by the power of God. It shows us that, at the end of the day, we are not always the best judges of what is wrong with us, if indeed we ever are. We think that we need to be taught, to be guided in a better way. In Christ, God shows us that the entirety of our humanity needs to be dealt with and dealt with in such a way that does not stop short of death.

Think about what this means. It means that our condition outside of God is somewhat more dire than we often like to think. We almost always think about sin according to what it is that we do. We commit sin. When we say that we are sinners, we almost always mean primarily that we do sin, that we do not go even a day without committing sin in one form or another. This is, of course, reinforced by the way our legal system works where you get punished more or less depending on what you do and, if you don’t do anything wrong, you do not get punished at all. In fact, even many preachers who emphasize our need for grace will point out the sin that we do in order to show us that we need God. We look first at the things we have done, then we compare them to the laws, then we realize that we have done wrong and so we feel guilty.

The point is, though, that this does not go nearly deep enough. When Jesus says, “It is finished” while He is on the cross and not beforehand, we begin to understand that His death was not just an accident, it was not merely a tragedy. The putting to death of the innocent man Jesus shows us that He did not just come to teach us and to be an example of the godly life; indeed, we see that Jesus came to die for us, on our behalf and, perhaps more importantly, in our place. We see that sin is not only lodged in what we do but in who we are. At one point, Jesus says that all the sins that we commit flow from the heart, from our inner selves. Sin is not just not knowing what is right and what is wrong and so we accidentally choose the wrong, but knowing full well between right and wrong and choosing wrong anyway because we like doing wrong. We like calling the shots, we like being in charge and we like to do things our own way.

This fact, that our sin is rooted deep in our very being and not just in our acts, is very important. If sin was only what we do and not also who we are, we might say that, when we die, our death could pay the penalty for everything we have done wrong. After all, what more can we pay? In places where capital punishment is still legal, the death of the criminal marks the end of what the law can demand. However, what good is our death at atoning for our sin if sin is not just what we do put part of who we are? How can the death of someone who is a sinner atone for their sins? By the fact that God thought it was necessary to die on our behalf and in our place, we see that sin is a much bigger problem than we often like to admit.

But there is another sense of the phrase, “It is finished” that I want to emphasize because it is equally important, if not even more so, for our Christian lives. We always need to remember that the redemption that God has worked for us in Christ did not stop short of death. We do not sacrifice animals in our worship service, but Christianity does not have a bloodless forgiveness. Our redemption has cost God dearly and was bought at the price of His own innocent blood given up for us out of sheer love. However, as important as that is to remember, we also need to remember that our redemption is indeed finished, it is absolutely completed.

Our redemption is finished, the work of God is completed in the sense that nothing else needs to be added to the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ to make it “good enough.” All our love and obedience, all our faith and praise, does not add the smallest bit to the work that Christ has done for us and in us. We cannot make God love us any more by what we do. The burden has been lifted off of our shoulders and placed onto Christ’s, the only one who can bear it. The work of God is so complete that any attempt that we make to try and improve upon it, or earn our standing in God’s eyes, is actually a denial of Christ. Jesus’ life and death of obedience were not just on our behalf but also in our place. Jesus provided the one response that is acceptable to God and so it would be utter foolishness to say, “Pardon me, God, but I don’t feel like I was consulted about how you would rescue me. I want to help out because, in fact, I think I can do it better.”

Some might worry that for me to say that Christ has so completely finished the work of God for us and our salvation is to say that there is no need to live a godly life. That doesn’t bother me. People said that about Paul, they said it about Luther, and they said it about Wesley. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If it is Christ’s response that is pleasing to God, our lives cannot fall into irresponsibility or laziness. The only rational response is to join in Christ’s human response to God. When we see that only Christ has lived a life of complete faith and obedience, we don’t respond by living a life in contradiction to God, but by living like Christ lived. To use the language of the gospel, we renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ in every way.

In a moment, we are going to celebrate Holy Communion, we will feast at the table of our God. It is a wonderful morning to do so for a few reasons. First, it is always good to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as it is one of the main ways that we remember and join in with the work of Christ. Second, Communion is not just a nice ritual that we do, but one that was instituted by Christ to remember His death on a cross, which is the subject of our text today. There can be nothing greater than remembering the death of Christ, not just by words and preaching, but by an act of communion as a body with Christ. Finally, because it reminds us that, when Jesus said, “It is finished,” He really meant it. The work has been done. We do not ask you to be worthy before you come forward to receive; if we did, nobody would ever partake. We do not ask you to be good enough, because only Christ is good enough. We ask only that you come forward, willing to receive whatever Christ will give you, knowing that He never gives us gifts apart from, but only in and with, himself.

“It is finished.” It was finished two thousand years ago, long before you were born. Christ died before you ever committed sin, and long before you ever knew Him. When we gather around this table, we are reminded that Christ did not die for us after we proved ourselves to Him but, as the New Testament says, while we were yet sinners. The issue of worthiness is indeed an issue at communion, but it is not our worthiness, but Christ’s worthiness and He is indeed worthy. Our faith is not good or bad depending on how much faith we think we have, but depending on the object of that faith. We do not trust in faith because we are faithful, but because God is faithful. Let us always remember, but especially today, that God’s love is not something that we earn or somehow twist God into giving, but something that is freely and selflessly given, with nothing asked in return. Let us pray.

AMEN