Midweek Lenten Service - "It is Finished"

Midweek Lenten Service
April 10, 2019
7 Last Words
“It is Finished” - John 19:29-30

It is a great joy to be with you all this evening. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the “other” Pastor Alex, Pastor Alex Witt from Our Saviour’s Luther. As many of you may know, I’m a new pastor, just ordained this last November, as I accepted a call to serve at Our Saviour’s. Thank you to Pastor Alex and Stonehouse for hosting this evening - and providing a delicious meal. As a new pastor and as one relatively new to Williamsburg, I’ve personally greatly appreciated these Lenten services and our ecumenical relationships. I’ve enjoyed getting to know local colleagues and getting to know you all whom I’m now in community with. In addition to being able to worship with you all, it has been a joy to build relationship and get to know some friendly faces throughout these weeks in Lent. I’m thankful to be able to be here,  for the opportunity to wrestle with this text and Jesus’ last word, and to share in the Word with you all this evening.

“It is finished” “It has been fulfilled.” “It has been brought to completion.” “It has been accomplished.” All are possible translations of Jesus’ final word on the cross in the Gospel of John - τετέλεσται. Just one word in Greek, yet that one word holds so much meaning as we think about Jesus and his crucifixion.

It is seemingly an ordinary statement. We “finish” things all the time. I’m a list-maker; I have a white board in my office that lists all the tasks I need to accomplish, checking them off one by one. I like the feeling of checking something off my list - completing tasks and projects. We complete projects at work. We accomplish our goals. We also have moments of victory that lead us triumphantly to say “I have done it.” I remember the first time I beat my dad as a teenager in tennis. It was something that, when I started playing, I thought I’d never do. In that moment, I felt that I had accomplished something. It was a high point in my tennis career. On the other hand, we have moments of defeat or frustration where the best we can say is “at least it is finally over. I finished it” - like for me, college calculus. A seminary professor once told us, “a sermon is never finished. It is only as complete as it can be by Sunday morning” (or in this case by Wednesday night). We finish and accomplish things (or not) all the time. Jesus’ words seem so mundane, but there’s something - a heaviness, a gravitas to his words that lead me to see them as so much deeper than just checking something off a list or just getting through a difficult situation. But isn’t that so often what Jesus does? What seems to be so ordinary (like bread and wine, or water, or finishing it), with Jesus, become something extraordinary. 

Jesus finishes, accomplishes, completes something tonight. It leads me to ask: When Jesus is proclaiming that “it is finished,” what is the “it”? What has been brought to completion or what has been accomplished in Jesus’ dying moment on the cross? On one hand, a simple/ obvious answer might be: “Jesus’ life; Jesus gives up his own spirit and with it his life.” Maybe Jesus’ opponents were hoping that “It is finished” meant that Jesus was finally out of their way, no longer a nuisance, no longer a threat to their power and their way of life. That was exactly what the crucifixion of Jesus was supposed to do: bring a potential problem to its end, quell a growing movement.  Maybe for the crowds (and even those who remained with Jesus), these words brought relief; the suffering, the gore, the horror of a crucifixion is finally finished, and now we can lay our friend and our teacher to rest. “It is over.”

While to some that may have been their experience of this last word of Jesus, I believe that there’s something more to Jesus’ word to us this evening. “It is finished.” The “it” has to be deeper than that. The Gospel of John portrays Jesus’ crucifixion so differently from the other gospels. Just two weeks ago, we heard Pastor Lori Beach preach a wonderful, moving sermon on “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” - as told in the Gospel of Matthew. In that text, we can hear the anguish in Jesus’ voice from the cross. In comparison to the other Gospels, Jesus’ final word in the Gospel of John seems a bit anticlimactic. There’s no tearing of the temple curtain. There’s no earthquake with the raising of people from the dead (as in Matthew).

Here, in John, Jesus takes a sip of sour wine, and simply proclaims “It is finished,” “Then he bowed his head and gave up (or handed over) his spirit.” Here, in John, Jesus seems calm and collected - and most importantly, completely in control of what was happening to him. Only Jesus gets to decide when “it” is finished, and only then, does Jesus decide to give up his spirit and die. Jan Rippentrop, a pastor and preaching professor, in reflecting on Jesus’ word, “It is finished,” she remarks, that the actions of Jesus on the cross, “are the actions of one in control of a new future.” 

Jesus’ death brings about a new future in relationship with the one who created us and the whole world. It connects us  to God’s creative and redemptive work that God has been doing since the very beginning. It grafts us into the love of God, into the people of God. In John’s telling of Jesus’ crucifixion, Jesus becomes the Paschal lamb who was slain, crucified at the time that the lambs would be brought for sacrifice in preparation for the passover meal. In doing so, John reaches back into God’s history of saving work among the people of Israel, bringing us back to the passage we read from Exodus just a few moments ago. God has always been bringing about redemption and salvation for God’s people. God’s desire for God’s people has always been life abundant and liberation from all that enslaves us. God’s love for God’s people has always been there. In Jesus, God reaches out into the world yet again, entrusting Jesus with this work of salvation and redemption, which extends not just to our Jewish siblings, but to all of humanity and to the whole world that God so loves. 

To show the love of God for the world, God dares, in Jesus, to become like us. The Gospel of John opens with one of my favorite passages in the New Testament. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…  And the Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-5, 14). Jesus came into the world to dwell among us, to pitch a tent among us - the divine becoming incarnate, becoming flesh, identifying so closely with us - in the depths of our humanity -in our life (and all that comes with it) and as well as in our death. In Jesus, God godself experiences the vulnerability of human life, both the joys and the pains of human life, both community and the loneliness the of a human life, and the death of a human life. What kind of God would do such a thing?

 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may
not perish but may have eternal life.” The kind of God made known in Jesus is the kind of God who would do such a thing. This, for the Gospel of John is Jesus’ mission - this is “it”, to make God’s love for the world known as Jesus pitches a tent among us. Jesus tells us that there’s no greater love than to lay one’s life down for their friends. It is a love without limits. It is the love of God that comes to us, dwells with us and for us. It is a love that risks suffering and death so that nothing can any longer be a barrier between God and God’s beloved humanity. On the cross, Jesus makes something so ordinary - love - extraordinary. This mission is accomplished, brought to completion, made ultimately known to us on the cross, for it is here on the cross that God’s love for humanity is made most visible.

We proclaim a God, in Jesus, that pitches God’s tent among us. We proclaim a God, in Jesus, that risks absolutely everything to be made known to us, to be in relationship with us, to love us. So that nothing - not even our denials (like Peter), or our doubts (like Thomas), nor our sins, nor our sufferings, nor our even own deaths - can stand in the way of the life and the love given by God through Jesus. This is accomplished once and for all as Jesus gives up his spirit on the cross. As we start to turn toward Holy Week and the cross, it is my prayer that through the love of God we’ve found in Jesus, we can stand in the shadow of the cross, trusting that it is here, in our weakness, in our vulnerability, in our dying, that God risks meeting us. It is here that the love of God is shown as something extraordinary. It is here that “it is finished.”
Amen.