More Than You Can Imagine

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

John 19:28-30; Luke 23:44-49

March 31/April 1, 2012 (Palm Sunday) • Portage First UMC

INTRO VIDEO WEEK 6

When all is said and done, when the rest of the crowd has walked back down the hill, a group of women remain standing near the cross (Luke 23:49). It has been quite a week for them, as many of them had come with Jesus and his disciples to Jerusalem for the Passover, and just five days ago, they had taken part in a parade down the side of the Mount of Olives they thought was Jesus’ inauguration parade. They thought he was coming to Jerusalem to become a king, and so they had made quite a fuss over him, waving palm branches and singing and laying down their cloaks for his donkey to walk on. On that day, they never imagined this day would come…certainly not so quickly. They knew he had upset many different people and groups throughout the week, but they couldn’t imagine he had made them mad enough they would want to kill him. And, of course, they knew it wasn’t just the events of this week that had led to this awful, brutal death. It was the whole of his preaching, teaching, and healing that had led to this moment. Yet, in that moment, they couldn’t begin to understand all he was doing on that cross.

Nor can we, fully, even all these centuries later. We have been looking closely at the final words Jesus uttered from the cross during this Lenten season, trying not only to understand how they relate to his purpose on the cross but also what they can mean in our lives today. Today, we come to the final two words from the cross, two words we’re going to take together because it’s likely they were spoken rather closely together. These last two final words come at the very end of Jesus’ life, after he has spent a brutal six hours hanging between heaven and earth (and even though six hours in such a state seems unimaginable to you and me, many crucified men lasted much longer, more hours, sometimes days. The reason the break the legs of the other two is to speed their death, to make it so they can’t breathe anymore —John 19:31-33.). At the end of that time of darkness, Jesus, John says, knew that every Scripture promise had been fulfilled, and that’s when, with a loud cry, he called out, “It is finished” (John 19:28).

Now, there are a lot of ways that cry can be understood. Some hear it as a cry of relief, the sigh of a man whose suffering is almost over. “Thankfully, it is finished.” Others hear it as a cry of defeat, as if Jesus has given up and realizes that what he’s done has been a waste of time. I think most of us know that cry from time to time. Bishop Will Willmon tells about a study he did on clergy burnout some years ago, and how the number one aspect of church ministry that caused clergy to quit was the fact that it was never finished. There was always one more sermon, one more hospital visit, one more meeting that needed to be taken care of, and it sometimes begins to feel fruitless. “I envy housepainters,” one person told him. “They can actually see the results of their work” (Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday, pg. 62). And so people give up because they feel useless. Is that the way Jesus felt on the cross? It could be heard that way—as a surrender, as “I give up.” Maybe some who were on the ground that day chose to hear it that way. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. John alone records the words Jesus said at this point; the other three Gospels simply tell us Jesus let out a loud shout (Barclay, The Gospel of John Volume 2, pg. 258). In Greek (the language the Gospel was written in) and in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), the phrase “It is finished” is one word (Hamilton, Final Words, pg. 104). Remember how I’ve been saying the words from the cross get shorter as we go along because it gets harder to breathe? Jesus summons up all of his energy and he shouts one word: “Finished!” Finished! The word he used means everything has been accomplished; it was actually the same word you would write on a bill when everything had been settled up (Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two, pg. 131). The work was done, the payment was made and everything was completed. It’s not a defeated cry; it’s a cry of victory. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled (cf. Hauerwas). Finished!

What, then, did Jesus “finish” on the cross? One of the themes we’ve repeated through this series is that Jesus’ life mission was summed up in Luke 19:10: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” All through his ministry—his preaching, his teaching, his healing—he’s been seeking the lost, especially the ones no one else wanted anything to do with. Now, on the cross, he’s doing the work needed to save the lost, to save us from our sins. You’ve probably heard that before, that Jesus died to save us from our sins, but how does that work? How does his suffering and death save us from our sins? It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s not one I feel like I have all figured out. There are a lot of theories as to how, exactly, Jesus’ death on the cross accomplishes or finishes our salvation. You gather ten theologians together and you’ll probably get fifteen answers as to how that happens. Sometimes we talk about Jesus being a substitute for us—he died our death. Other times we talk about him being an offering—that he gave his life to make things right with God the Father, to “atone” for our sins. Or we talk about how, since he was raised, he is the final victory over death, or an example of self-sacrifice for us, or a demonstration of God’s love for humanity. And some pastors and Bible teachers and theologians will go to the wall and even write you off as unChristian if you don’t agree with their particular theory of the cross, but every one of those theories has Biblical support. I don’t think there’s any one theory that fully describes what Jesus is doing on the cross, and if God were to explain it to us in depth, I think it would be more than we could understand. There is more than we can imagine happening on that cross in those six hours, but one thing is for sure: when Jesus says, “It is finished,” whatever it was he needed to do to be able to save us from our sins, he has done. That’s why he came. That’s why he went to the cross. Adam Hamilton describes what happens there as “poetry lived out in human flesh” (107). Just like every time we read a poem, we see things differently—every time we look at the cross, we see perhaps something new, something different, usually exactly what we need at that point in our life. Because, as Richard Neuhaus points out, Jesus said “It is finished,” but it was not over (qtd. in Hauerwas). God is still at work, saving the world.

Luke tells us, then, that the “curtain of the temple was torn in two” (23:45). It’s an odd detail, but one that would have made perfect sense to those first-century readers. The curtain he’s talking about is the one that marked off the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Holy of Holies was said to be the place where God himself dwelt, and no one was allowed in that space except the High Priest, and him only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the day he came to offer sacrifice for all the people’s sins (Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, pg. 288). In fact, if you go up on the Temple Mount today, where the Muslim Dome of the Rock sits, there is a small area marked off that is the archaeologists’ best guess as to where the Holy of Holies was. It’s marked off so no one accidentally steps in that place—because no one was allowed into God’s holy presence without extensive preparation. In Jesus’ day, the Holy of Holies was marked off by a curtain that may have been as much as foot thick and sixty feet tall. It was made of blue, purple and red yarn and would have been raised by other priests when it was time for the High Priest to enter. Then they would raise it again when he was ready to come out. No one else was allowed inside the most holy place (Hamilton 110; Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 257). But Luke says, just before Jesus died, the curtain was torn in two. Mark includes the detail that it was torn from top to bottom (15:38). This thick, heavy, tall curtain was torn, starting at the top—sixty feet in the air! Mark wants us to know it wasn’t a human hand that tore the curtain. When Jesus finished his work, sins were forgiven and direct access to God was granted. The curtain was no longer needed. We can now come directly to God and ask for forgiveness; we no longer need a priest to intercede for us. Pastors are not priests; in fact, the New Testament refers to all of us as priests (1 Peter 2:9), lifting each other up in prayer (James 5:16). The curtain is torn; the way is open for everyone.

And now, since it was finished, Jesus has one last word. You may remember two weeks ago we talked about how, during that darkness and the silence, Jesus was praying the psalms. We heard him pray Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But we know that wasn’t the only psalm he was praying, because at the very end, Jesus prays another psalm—Psalm 31. Out loud, he prays verse 5: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” Except Jesus adds one word to his prayer: “Father—into your hands I commit my spirit” (23:46). There is a tradition that says this verse was the one taught by Jewish mothers to their children to pray just before going to sleep every night. It was sort of the first century Jewish version of, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Picture Mary, every night, sitting with Jesus by his bedside, praying Psalm 31:5: “Into your hands I commit my spirit; deliver me, Lord, my faithful God” (cf. Barclay Luke 288; Hamilton 113). Couple that with the word John uses to describe Jesus’ death. John says, “With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (19:30). The word translated “bowed his head” is a sleep word. It refers to settling your head back on a pillow, ready for rest (Barclay John 258). This was no violent death at the end, no gasping for a final rush of air. This is the picture of a child, giving in to sleep, trusting his Father that everything would be okay on the other side. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (23:46). After the brutality and the ugliness of the last six hours, Jesus quietly entrusts everything he is to his heavenly Father.

And so the Son of God dies. Inexplicable, unexplainable, incomprehensible—the author of life is killed on a cross made by his own creation. Having done what he came to do, Jesus entrusts his spirit to the Father. So what do we do with that? Of all the final words, these are perhaps the most perplexing, because there is deep mystery here, which is why our inclination is to hurry on to Easter and not linger at the cross. But we need to stay here. We need this Holy Week to be able to absorb all that has happened. When we jump from the celebration of the palm parade to the celebration of the empty tomb, we miss something—something significant, because what Jesus did on the cross is the culmination of everything he came to do. Jesus came to seek and save us, and on that cross, somehow mysteriously, wondrously, beautifully, he did exactly that. When Jesus says, “It is finished,” he reminds us that he is the one who does all the work in our salvation. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. At that moment, “God has finished what only God could finish” (Hauerwas). There is nothing we can do, which is hard for we purpose-driven, vision-oriented, task-centered people. We believe you decide on an outcome, draw up a list of things to do to accomplish that outcome, make sure it lines up with your vision, and then do everything you can to finish the task. That’s why it’s so easy for us to think we can work our way to heaven, to earn our salvation. I’ve heard people say they just hope they do enough good deeds, that in the end their good outweighs the bad. And these aren’t necessarily worldly people. A lot of them are church people. But, folks, it doesn’t work that way. If it did, that would mean Jesus only did part of the work on the cross and God the Father expects us to get the rest of the way on our own. Jesus didn’t say, “It’s almost finished.” He didn’t say, “Well, I did as much as I could.” From the top of the cross, in the midst of incredible pain and suffering, he shouted, “Finished!” And so Bishop Willimon issues this call: “Listen to this, oh ye purpose-driven, upwardly mobile, goal-setting high achievers. He has done what we could not do. Because we could not get up to God, God climbed down to us, got down on our level, and here, in the bloody, unjust crucifixion, we have at last descended to our level. God has finished what God began. It is finished. What now is to be done by us? Nothing” (65).

Now, we set goals and we live out of a purpose statement here at the church, but that’s not so we can earn our salvation. What we do in our Christian life is a response to God’s great gift, a “working out” of our salvation (cf. Philippians 2:12), a living out of our faith. We feed the hungry, visit the sick, heal the lame, take care of the children, sit with the dying—not to earn God’s love but to respond to it. Everything that needed to be done was done on the cross. Finished. We only have to accept it, and let him do the work in us.

Thirteen years ago, as some of you know, I had heart surgery to repair a malformed aortic valve. It was a birth defect that the doctors had been monitoring since I was in high school, and the time finally came to have it fixed. So I went to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and I allowed a doctor to put me under anesthesia, open my chest, and do what he knew how to do—repair my heart. I could not do it myself. No amount of exercise, right diet or any other kind of activity would have fixed my heart. Even if I had the skills, even if I were a surgeon, I couldn’t open my own heart and fix it. I had to place myself in the hands of another person who would do what was needed to be done, and then after a time, declare that the surgery was finished. The defect had been repaired. Now, after the surgery, there were things I had to do to work out my healing. I had to walk for so many minutes a day. I had to take medication. I had to make sure I didn’t do certain things, like pick up anything heavier than a gallon of milk. That was hard. Christopher was just 3½ and he still liked to be held at that point. But if I was serious about my healing, I had to do certain things and not do others. And yet, there was still really nothing I could do to accomplish my own healing. What needed to be done, the surgeon had done. It was finished. What I did was a response to that work. The same is true of our salvation. Everything we need was accomplished on the cross. What we do is our way of working out our salvation, responding in gratitude to what Jesus has done.

And so, like Jesus, all we can do, ultimately, is trust. When it was finished, Jesus trusted. He gave up his spirit. He gave himself into the hands of the only one who is ultimately trustworthy. People will disappoint us. People will hurt us. People will use us for their own purposes, sometimes even if they don’t intend to. The only one who will never leave us nor forsake us (cf. Hebrews 13:5) is the one to whom Jesus entrusted his spirit. His final word from the cross is a challenge to us. Dr. Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “By giving himself up and commending his spirit to the Father, Jesus invites and enables us to give ourselves up and become ‘united with him in a death like his’ (Romans 6:5)” (Hauerwas). Or, perhaps put more simply, can we trust Jesus the way he trusted his Father?

The letter to the Hebrews says, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). Actually, the King James Version is a better translation here, because instead of the word “dreadful,” the KJV uses the word “fearful.” The Greek word is phoberos, which you can hear is the basis of our word “phobia,” fear. But the writer doesn’t imply an irrational fear, like we think of when we hear “phobia.” Rather, the author says it’s a logical, rational reaction to putting ourselves in God’s hands. Nearly three centuries ago, a New England preacher named Jonathan Edwards set off a revival by preaching on that text, reminding his hearers that the only thing separating us from hell is the hand of God, and while you can certainly hear that message in that verse, I think there’s another way to see it as well. It’s a fearful thing to fall into God’s hands simply because you never know what he might do with us (Willimon 72). When we choose to trust God, we’re never quite sure where he’s going to lead us or what he might ask us to give up. Can we trust that what God will do and the places he will lead us are good, or for our benefit? Perhaps, if we’re going to be able to trust God, we need a reminder of just who he is, and I know of no better reminder or celebration of who Jesus, our Lord and Savior, is, than this clip from a sermon by an African-American pastor, Dr. S. M. Lockridge. Take a listen.

Video - “That’s My King!”

Jesus is more than we can imagine, and what he’s done for us on the cross is also more than we can imagine. And because of that, we can choose to trust him. We can trust that God is good and will sustain us through everything the world throws at us. Moses reminded the people long ago, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27). I love that image! Even in the darkness, God can be trusted because Jesus already took the worst the world can give and he entrusted himself to his heavenly Father even then.

So I visit in the hospital, and there have been times when several of you are facing serious illnesses. And I dare to ask God for healing, but we also pray, “Into your hands, we commit our spirits.” We trust God whether he chooses to heal the way we want him to or not. And I talk with people whose marriages are struggling. One night, a couple came to the parsonage at the church we were serving at the time, and their marriage was in trouble. He had been abusive, and he knew he had hurt her in so many ways. And while we hoped for healing in the relationship, we also prayed that night, “Into your hands, Father.” We trust you. I sat with Joan, whose oldest daughter was a prodigal, far from the faith, and whose second daughter had physical and mental challenges. Joan and her husband had sought to serve God in another culture, and things had not worked out, so they came home, broken, beaten up and wondering what was next. As Joan faced the challenges of two of her daughters and her own broken dreams, she came to a point where she was at the end of her own resources. And we prayed, “Father, into your hands we commit Joan and her family.” We believed God for healing, even if it didn’t come the way we wanted. Can we trust God in the dark places? Can we trust him when everything around us lies shattered, broken, in pieces? Jesus did. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” What he prayed at bedtime as a child, he now prayed at the end of his life, and it had never meant more to him that it did on the top of that cross as he bowed his head and died.

Because, ultimately, that prayer is a call to trust God even in death. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, talked about the ways God’s grace works in our lives. We most often talk about prevenient grace (the grace that works in our life even before we’re aware of God), justifying grace or saving grace, and sanctifying grace (the power we’re given to live the Christian life). But Wesley also talked about glorifying grace, the strength God gives us to face, as he said it, a “happy death.” It was said, in early days, that “Methodists die well,” and that was because of the peace and joy with which those early Methodists faced their homegoing (Willimon 75-76). It’s said that the truest test of what a person believes is whether or not it can sustain you in the face of death. And that’s true not only for the person facing eternity but for those who surround him or her. On a few occasions, I have been privileged to be invited into that holy place where a person is moving from this world to the next. On one occasion, I sat with a family late into the night as their father and husband struggled to breathe. People drifted in and out, and somewhere around 1 a.m., I watched as he took a last, peaceful breath and did not move again. His wife was sitting right by him, and while there were tears, the first thing she did was look into my eyes and say, “Shouldn’t we pray now?” Indeed, we should. He was home. He had committed his spirit to God, to his heavenly father, and all was well. Can we trust God like that?

And so, we enter this final week, this Holy Week. As I said a bit ago, if you jump from today’s celebration to next weekend’s celebration, you will miss something. I’m not just talking about the wonderful services we have planned. There is something profoundly spiritual that comes from walking with Jesus to the cross this week. We’ve spent the last six weeks gazing up at the cross, and we’ve seen in many ways how these final words continue to intersect with our own lives. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Where are you in your journey of forgiveness? “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Who are the least of these you’ve been called to love? “Behold your son!” How are you honoring your family? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Are you continuing to pray, even in the darkness? “I thirst.” What are you thirsty for? “It is finished.” Can you trust Jesus to do all the work in saving you? “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” And we end where we began—in prayer to the heavenly Father. This is a good week to ponder those words again, and to spend time hearing from Jesus. Walking with him to the cross is a good way to do that. One of the things I noticed while reading the Steve Jobs biography is how, when something important needed to be discussed or communicated, Jobs would take people on a walk. Jesus often does the same thing, and this week he calls us to walk with him, to learn from him, to go to the Upper Room and eat with him, to go to the cross and stand by him. I invite you, brothers and sisters, into a holy week as we hear again the greatest news in all of history. Will you stand with Jesus at the cross this week? Next to the cross, after all, there is more than you can imagine—he has finished the work, and it’s all for you. You can trust him. Let’s pray.