It is finished!

Please note: The following sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.

We could be tempted to conclude that these words of Jesus say:

--that his agony is ended,

--that the hatred, pain, and the heart broken with sorrow is set aside,

--that he is saluting death as so many other persons have done before and since,

--that he is saying goodbye to life, tired as he is.

But there is much more going on with those three little words than that.

The word finished would be better understood as completed.

Jesus words are the cry of a worker whose task is done,

--of a soldier whose mission is concluded,

--of a Savior whose work is accomplished.

One of the great sorrows of our lives is that we cannot say that something is finished in quite that same way.

There are so many things that we would like to do, but cannot.

We are shadowed by a sense of incompleteness;

there are so many loose ends and frayed edges in all that we do.

When we say It is finished, what we mean is that is as good as we can do now,

--or, what can you expect?

Death leaves so many things unsaid and undone for us.

But Jesus really does complete things, for us.

He carries out his life of faithfulness fully and completely all the way to death.

All of the preaching and teaching and wonders and signs point to this center of things:

that Jesus is the Son of God,

who as a real, live man,

experiences every sorrow and pain that we can know,

including the utter abandonment of death...

so that when he speaks,

it is not as one far removed from our lives, a smart-aleck expert dispensing advice without really knowing the situation.

Instead, he is intimately acquainted with all of it.

And because of his faithfulness,

God has raised him from death,

thereby making his words true words, and his promises true promises.

It is as if we are looking at things today with two different eyes.

Some here today probably know better than others how difficult things can be when one has the use of only one eye.

It is difficult to judge distances, where things are spatially, when one has the use of only one eye.

There are often fumbles and spills.

With two eyes, things go much easier.

In John's presentation of the Passion of our Lord, we are seeing things with two eyes:

--with the eye of the world, we see the increasing darkness and gloom, the overwhelming loneliness, the pain, the suffering, the death.

--But with the other eye, the eye of faith, we begin to see this day as Jesus' victory, not his defeat.

--The cross is his throne, not just a place of execution.

This event from which the disciples flee shall instead become their very gathering place when Jesus' words will be borne out:

And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all people to myself.

With one eye, the eye of the world's kind of realism, we see only the shadows of death and our own failings and shortcomings.

But with the other eye, the eye of faith's realism, we see in those shadows the form of one who is not overwhelmed by death,

who is victorious over it in death and resurrection.

And so we are finally able to look at our own lives with this stereo-vision.

We see and know the effects of sin, how sin mis-shapes, undoes, and unravels us.

The wages of sin is death, St. Paul reminds us.

Every day since our baptism, we have been dying to that one way of living.

But with our other eye that we have been opening since the day of our Baptism, we see a rising to a new way of life, made possible by Christ's enthronement in cross and resurrection.

We've made use of the funeral service so very many times.

That service is so powerful precisely because it effectively uses this stereo-vision.

In its lessons and prayers, we look squarely at the situation, and with our eye of worldly realism see and know pain, loss, and separation.

But with our other eye of the wisdom of faith, we know and anticipate our being re-made.

St. Paul says: When we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by Baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised form the dead by the glory fo the Father, we too might live a new life.

It is finished.

The world is ready too soon to write us off, just as it tried to do with Christ on that cross on Calvary.

“You're done for” the world claims.

“No, all is completed,” Jesus replies.

Let both eyes be opened today,

so that each of us

can see and trust and believe

that Christ is crowned Lord and Savior here on the cross.

It is completed. Amen.

[The sermon especially reflects the thought and insights of O. P. Kretzmann, Robert Kysar, and Walter Burghardt.]

It is finished!

St. Mark's Lutheran Church