From John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On Christmas Day he was born and some thirty years later he died. There are two principal ways in which it is possible to tell his story. One is to tell it as the greatest, the most bitter and ironic of all human tragedies, a tragedy which sums up all tragedies. To understand what I mean, you must think your way back from Good Friday, the day he died, to Christmas, the day he was born.
Whatever you choose to make of the legends that have grown up around his birth — the angels appearing to the shepherds and singing their great hymn of joy, the magi and the star — however you want to interpret these stories, the jubilation and the mystery that the gospel writers were trying to convey by them is clear enough, and there is not one of you who in one way or another doesn’t respond to it. Think of what this church, any church, is like at Christmas — there’s an excitement, a kind of wild hopefulness and gladness in the air that makes it different from any other time of the year.
No matter how cynical or unreligious you may think of yourself as being, you can’t escape the feeling then that something extraordinary and beautiful and glad is breaking into the world. You read your news with stories of international intrigue, political unrest, a virus outbreak in China, yet on the birthday of this child who died so long ago you get the feeling, despite all evidence to the contrary, that at last somehow there will be peace on earth and good will among all people.
You get a sort of intensified version of the feeling you have whenever a child is born: that here is a new life still unacquainted with grief and compromise; here perhaps is the child who will grow tall and strong and save the world because that is what we’re all waiting for — someone to save the world, someone who will bind up the wounds, who will set things straight again. And we think these things about this child because we view his birth from the perspective of his whole life, and we see him as the one who of all people might have actually had the wisdom, the gentleness and the power to do the job. And this is what he set out to do — to save the world.
But then jump from Christmas to Good Friday and think of how he died, this child — deserted by his friends, mocked by his enemies, strung up on a cross between two insurrectionists. If ever we want indication that love is powerless in a world of envy and fear, that goodness is inevitably overcome by evil, that belief in God is a tragic absurdity, then here, we are tempted to say, it is. And telling the story this way you can take his last words of all, as John reports them, the words he spoke just as he was dying, and make them the almost unbearably pathetic epilogue to the whole thing. “It is finished.”
Finished, defeated, done with, and nothing to show for it but a few broken hearts. I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that it is always possible that this is the truth of it, and I believe there is no Christian anywhere who has not had moments of fearing that it is, even Jesus himself whose last words according to Matthew and Mark were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
And now, if you’ve been listening to me at all, you’ll expect me to tell you the other way of interpreting this story. But I would rather leave it as a question for you to answer for yourselves because in the long run it is only your own answer that you’ll really hear. If the story of Jesus of Nazareth does not mean that life is an absurd tragedy; if it is not the story of a good man who believed that he was the anointed one of God only to realize in the last moments of his life that there was no God; if this is not what the story means, then what does it mean?
“It is finished,” he said, and let me suggest just two things about those words.
First, humankind’s work is finished. In crucifying this uniquely innocent man, someone who claimed nothing for himself but refused every chance for power that was given him, who was motivated entirely by his love for God and for us — in destroying him, we have really done our worst, and in the cross we are confronted by the ultimate expression of our folly, our self-destroying selfishness, our sin. If there is a God to judge us, then here is where God’s judgment must fall — where we took the purest ever to arise among us and killed him because his goodness was more than we could bear.
And secondly and lastly, the work of God is finished. Finished not in the sense of being ended because it is never ended, but in the sense of being complete. Here in the death of Jesus, God has spoken his final word about himself and his relationship to us, and it is a word which Jesus spoke to his disciples on the night when he was betrayed, last night: “Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.