It Is Finished
It is
finished. He is dead. You may test it any way you like: hold a feather under his
nose, press your finger against the big vein in his neck, stick a spear into his
heart. He is dead. The struggle is over, and the last words he said were, "It is
finished."
That is one of those pungent, final-sounding sentences we have
heard so often that we actually think we know what it means, but the third
person, impersonal pronoun remains problematic. Why use a word like that unless
you want to leave a little mystery around what "it" really is? It is finished,
but what is it, exactly?
Well, the dying, for one thing. There was no
lethal injection in Jesus' day. There was no attempt to make execution less
painful at all, since that would have ruined its use as a deterrent. Under the
Romans, crucifixion was reserved for the lower classes, especially slaves
accused of robbery or rebellion. The whole point was to make it hurt as much as
possible, and everyone agreed that death by crucifixion was the worst. Seneca, a
Roman statesman who witnessed some first century executions, wrote that he saw
crucifixions of many different types. Some were crucified upside down, he said,
while others were impaled through their private parts. Some were nailed to their
crosses while others were tied. Josephus, a first century historian, called it
"the most wretched of deaths."
Jesus probably died right side up, since
all four gospel writers agree that there was a sign above his head. That being
the case, he probably also died of suffocation, as his arms gave out and his
lungs collapsed under the weight of his sinking body. Blood loss is another
possibility. Heartbreak is a third. Whatever finally killed him, it came as a
friend and not as an enemy. Death is not painful. It is the dying that
hurts.
Another thing that was finished was the project he had begun, way
back when he first saw what kind of explosion it would take to break through the
thick rock around the human heart. Teaching would not do it. Neither would
prayer or the laying on of hands. If he was going to get through, he had to use
something stronger than all of those, and he had to stake his own life on its
success. Otherwise why should anyone believe him?
Self-annihilating love
was the dynamite he chose. "No one has greater love than this," he said on the
last night of his life, "to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15.13).
Having explained this to his friends, he then left the room to go do it. Less
than twenty-four hours later, it was finished.
Whether or not he intended
it, he finished something else while he was at it. He finished off the religious
system that he opposed—not the Judaism of the people but the Judaism of the
temple—the careful division between clean and unclean; the posturing clergy who
pretended to know which was which; the whole idea that a lamb, or a goat, or a
calf was an acceptable substitute for a surrendered human heart. The prophets
had challenged it all long before Jesus did, but he received no better hearing
than they.
At the same hour that he died, the parade of Passover animals
into the Temple began. For the rest of the afternoon, their owners slaughtered
them while priests caught the blood and poured it on the altar. Outside in the
courtyard, the corpses were skinned and cleaned according to the law of Moses
while Levites sang psalms of praises to God.
So there were two bloody
places in Jerusalem that day—Golgotha and the Temple—both attended by powerful
religious people who believed they were doing God's will. Please hear me. This
is not about Jews. This is about powerful people in any religious tradition who
believe they are doing God's will. Wherever you encounter them, in whatever time
or place, it is best to keep your back to the wall. Power and religion are a
lethal mix.
When it was all over on Golgotha, some realized for the
first time who the scapegoat had been, and the system that put him to death was
doomed. Because he would not respond to their tactics, their tactics were
exposed. Because he would not honor their values, their values were revealed.
The system did not exist to protect God. The system existed to protect the
system. Jesus was the last lamb of God who would die for the people.
So
that was finished too. At least one of the reasons Jesus was killed was to
prevent a Jewish revolt, but thirty something years later the revolt happened
anyway. The Romans turned on the Jews. Jerusalem was destroyed, and Temple
Judaism was over forever.
There was one more thing that was finished that
day, and that was the separation between Jesus and God. In John's gospel the
distance was mostly physical and it was only temporary, but when Jesus gave up
his spirit, he was not thirsty anymore. He dove back into the stream of living
water from which he had sprung and swam all the way home.
Those whom he
left behind saw nothing but his corpse. He was not a teacher anymore. He had
become a teaching instead—a window into the depths of God that some could see
through and some could not. Those who held out hope for a strong God, a fierce
God, a God who would brook no injustice—they looked upon a scene where God was
not, while those whose feet Jesus had washed, whose faces he had touched, whose
open mouths he had fed as if they were little birds—they looked upon a scene in
which God had died for love of them.
He had put his own body between them
and those who meant to do them harm. He had demolished the rock around their
hearts. He had shown them a dangerous new way to live.
It was dark by the
time they got him down and found a place to lay him. It was the Sabbath, his
turn to rest. His part was over. His work was done.
Copyright ©2000 Barbara Brown Taylor
This homily was delivered at the Lenten Noonday Preaching Series at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, on April 21, 2000. An earlier version of this sermon appeared in Home By Another Way (Cowley 1999).