It is Finished

 





​It is finished. (St.John xix. 30)
 
Our journey on this Good Friday involves coming to the knowledge of Christ and to the knowledge of ourselves. Our eyes are beginning to be opened to the light that creates new life.  In Christ we find God’s deepest desire for us. In Christ we find not only the thirst of one man for his Maker, but the thirst of God’s Son for the salvation of all human beings. Our eyes are opened to Christ’s love for us even as he is suffering and dying. He never forgets us. We are permanently fixed in the heart of Christ Jesus. Jesus is the light that loves and makes new life. Love has many dimensions. It is passion; He is the Passion of God made flesh. He is God’s Passion for our salvation. And yet also He will become our new Passion for God rediscovered, and our Passion for others’ salvation. He is Sympathy made flesh, God’s sympathy for our condition and predicament. He will become our new Sympathy, through Him, for so many others. He is the Forgiveness of Sins made flesh, God’s forgiveness of our sins, and will become a new and liberating power of Forgiveness in our own lives. He is Yearning made flesh, God’s yearning for our friendship and company. He will become our yearning for Him and then for others discovery of His Love.  He is about to die and he remembers us. His thirst for God is his thirst for man. 

Jesus is the Love of God and the Love of Man in a simultaneous unity of un-selfed in-othering. Let us just pause for a moment here and think about this. He is Love as in-othering; He lives in and for the other, first God and then every other man. He is Love as un-selfed. He has emptied Himself of Himself, that He might welcome in the Father to meet new sons and daughters within his nature, in his name, as members of his new Body that He is forming. He is the Love of God and the Love of Man coming together. As for Himself, He doesn’t much care. The point, His point, the labor and work of His life is to bring others together- His Father and all human beings. His role is to arrange the meeting, to enable the encounter. True enough, it is only through Himself, but the point is that it can only be through Himself precisely because He has lost himself. He would stand only to get in the way. Who He is, is by definition the Word made flesh- the Father’s Word as man and in human flesh. He provides the space and He is the meeting room. Is He essential? Absolutely. But should He become self-consciously significant, the work and labor collapses. The self-less self of the Saviour is the spiritual reality that allows God’s love to save man’s life once again. Within Jesus Christ, God’s desire and man’s desire can meet again forming one seamless whole that can never be torn apart. There are no longer two worlds and two loves. There is one world about to be recreated, to be seen and experienced once again in God and for God. God and man are united in the heart of Jesus Christ. That one love, which man has tried to tear apart, finds its meeting place in the heart and soul of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is our salvation. His entire earthly visitation revealed to man the longing of God for reconciliation with his people. We must come to know ourselves in him. This is a coming to self-knowledge. 

Today we come to know that the mission of Christ finished and accomplished. But we realize also that we ourselves are finished. What is finished? We are finished. The truth is naked before our very eyes. What is finished? Our pride is finished. Our sin is finished. The end of sin is death. Our sin has brought about the death of Christ. But even in this death, the death of Christ, man’s self-willed alienation from God is revealed as what has no power and no future. Life in isolation and alienation from God is illusorily satisfying, temporarily pleasing, and wholly incomplete. Life in isolation from God is death. In the death of Christ what is finished is the illusion that we have any power, that we have any meaning outside of the presence and nearness of God. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not even death. Not even our killing of Christ. Nothing can separate us from God at all. For God is near to us. He quenches our thirst. He overcomes our rejection of him, our hatred of him, our killing of him. We have left sin behind us today. Father forgive them for they know not what they do. This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise. Woman behold thy son, son behold thy mother. My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me? I thirst.We have been carried through death, from death and are about to enter into life. Our sin is finished. Death is about to be conquered. It is finished.

It is finished. What this means is that Christ Jesus has gone where we could not go. Christ Jesus has endured what we could never endure. He has taken on and felt the curse of His own judgment, the punishment of his own law, the justice of His own measurement. He is, in a word, consistent with Himself. He does not subject His own creatures to anything that he Himself cannot endure. Do not do unto others anything that you would not have them do unto you (St. Luke vi. 31), He meant. And He lived it. This does not make it any the less painful, horrifying and sad. But at the end of the day, it shows us that he is the center of all reality- the light thatbeareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.(1 Cor xiii.7), in order to make new life. 

Let us end with the words of the 18thcentury country gentleman mystic, Mr. William Law, who had been called to King’s Cliffe to minister to a certain Mrs. Hutchinson and her sister Miss Hester Gibbon. The curious trio lived on for twenty one years studying God’s Word and ministering the Lord Jesus to all they met. Mr. Law wrote these words about the crucifixion:
Our Lord’s agony was his entrance into the last eternal terrors of the lost soul, into the real horrors of that dreadful death which man unredeemed must have died into when he left this world. We are therefore not to consider our Lord’s death upon the Cross as only the death of that mortal body which was nailed to it, but we are to look upon Him with wounded hearts, as fixed and fastened in the state of that twofold death, which was due to our fallen nature, out of which he could not come, till he could say, It is finished. 
 
Amen.

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