"It is Finished"

"It is Finished" (Good Friday - March 21, 2008)

On  the cross Jesus said “it is finished”. In Greek it is one word, tetelestai, meaning completed, perfected, finished. Nothing more can be done. In John’s gospel, it is Christ’s last word on the cross. As in everything in John’s gospel, there are at least two meanings, one on the surface and one deeper down, the one the gospel writer wants us to get. “It is finished” on the surface is about Jesus’ life. But we know deeper down it is his work which is finished, once and for all, as the letter to the Hebrews says. “I  must do the  work of  Him who sent me,” he said.

The Scottish theologian John Baillie, whose Diary of Private Prayer is still in print and has been a model for many such private prayer books since, wrote: “The essence of the Christian gospel is that the demands of the law under which we were held have already been fulfilled for us by Him. When Christ died on Calvary, the sacrifice we could not offer was offered for us, the debt we could not pay was paid for us. The Christian good news is that all that is demanded of us has already been accomplished for us – was forever accomplished when Jesus Christ, as He died, said ‘It is finished.’”

The preacher C. T. Spurgeon used to tell of one of his fellow ministers who went to the house of a poor old woman with a contribution to pay the rent. He knocked and knocked but there was no answer, and finally he went away. Afterwards, the old woman told him, “I heard the knocking but I thought it was the man come to ask for the rent.”

The bad news is the rent must be paid. Atonement must  be made. Atonement is not a common word you hear in ordinary conversation, but lately it  has been everywhere: in a popular movie, in the words of a now former governor of the state. The rent must be paid. The good news of the Christian gospel is the rent has been paid.  He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

There are different metaphors by which we understand the atonement of Christ, such as a legal system or a battle field or other images,  but at bottom they all go back to the grace of God in Jesus Christ, doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves, in order to win us back to God. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” wrote St. Paul to the Corinthians. That is the key.  As John Baillie’s brother, Donald, wrote in his wonderful book, God Was in Christ: “in discoursing of the love that was shown in the Cross of Christ the New Testament is never able to stop short of tracing it up-stream to the eternal love of God dealing sacrificially with the sins of the world.”  The rent has been paid.

This doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to do. Far from it. It does mean we are freed  from guilt, freed from a never ending set of rules and regulations to which so much of religion seems addicted, freed from thinking there is something for us to do to win God over to us and make God think favorably of us – freed from all of that and much more, and freed from judgmentalism – “I’ve paid the rent and you haven’t.”  “You shall know the truth,” said  Jesus, “and the truth will set you free.” Those were the words written in Persian over the door of the Presbyterian mission school I taught at in Iran for three years.  The truth is in Christ there is enormous freedom.

But not the freedom to just do whatever we want, or to take advantage of people, or to want only our own way. Instead, it is the freedom to respond in love and gratitude to what God has done for us. As Christ was “the man for others,” in Bonhoeffer’s memorable phrase, so we are now free to be people for others, free from constant self-preoccupation, free from constant striving to be better than others, free from envy and free from greed, free instead to give more of ourselves to the world about us, and to Christ’s body, which is the Church, and free to live hopefully – note the correct use of the adverb – and not in despair. And free to tell others of the good news of God in Jesus Christ and let them in on the secret. All of that and more is the joy of the cross.

“Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”