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S. Good Friday.26 John 19:17-30

‘…he said, ‘FINISHED!’, and he bowed his head and gave up the spirit.’

I told you two weeks ago that Jesus did Lazarus a big favor, letting him die. Last week, to address your skepticism on that, I reminded you that only death destroys sin, so unless we die we can never get rid of sin. As Jesus said last week; “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

I have even better news today. Jesus has done all the dying that needs to be done to destroy sin forever for the whole word, as he says today “FINISHED!”. Sin is finished—totally! Death is finished—forever! The devil and hell are finished. All that is behind us because by his death Jesus totally demolished death, sin, hell, for everyone!

That is why this is Good Friday, not Bad Friday, not Sad Friday! OK, we strip the altar and skip the fancy surplice and stoles and paraments and chanting. But not because we’re sad. But because we want to know nothing today but Jesus Christ and him crucified. We want the cross alone today (and every day, really 😉 to be our theology. Everything else is icing on the cake, including, quite honestly, Easter Sunday but we’ll talk about that on Sunday…

Today we want no one but the Crucified One to be our LORD and God and Savior. We want to contemplate nothing except this one word last word of Jesus (in Greek it’s just one word τετελεσται—“finished” so that’s how I’ve translated it for you. You’re welcome! 😉

And a word about the word τετελεσται: “finished” is a good translation, my preferred. But the noun form is τελος the Greek word that means “end” or “goal” or “final destination” what you are aiming for, what your whole life is a quest for, the pirate’s buried treasure on which you can live forever.

So it’s “finished” in the sense of “mission accomplished”, “goal achieved” “end of the road reached”. It’s “finished” in the sense of “yes, we found the holy grail, your Majesty”, “or “actually we did find the fountain of eternal youth”.

And it’s only because Jesus has finished his great mission of redeeming the whole world by destroying death forever by his death on the cross (the way I think of it is that Jesus tricked the devil. He stepped into the bear-trap the devil had laid, into death and hell, thinking it would destroy even God. But, being God!, it was the trap itself that got broke, clamping down on God his own self. Sin, death, and hell—these collectively are the devil’s trap. By God’s death, the trap is broken and all of us who are caught in it are free to go! That’s how I picture Jesus’ death on the cross…;-)

If the mission impossible of destroying sin, death, and hell had not been done by Jesus once for all, then death would be the ultimate disaster for us, separating us from God forever, dooming us to the devil’s lair as his slaves.

I have this sneaky feeling, again, from looking at your faces when I talk about this stuff and the questions you ask in bible class that many of you (or all of you some of the time and some of you all of the time, to be more precise 😉 that you suspect I exaggerate when I say that Jesus’ death has completely destroyed, sin, death, and hell—that it can’t be that easy, or that one man dying on the cross (even if he was God’s Son!) can’t really do all of that for everyone—that this is simply too good to be true and because you haven’t really heard it before, or not very clearly from other pastors that it’s just a nutty idea that I have… 🙁

Well, I know it sounds nutty (it did to me too, for a long time!). And I’m sorry that it is not clearly and widely proclaimed from very many of the pulpits of Christendom. But that’s because of that so-called “Enlightenment” shhtuff, that stupid rationalism that thinks if it doesn’t make sense to high faulting’ intellectuals, that it can’t really be true…

That’s what my old teacher Paul Holmer called “the myth of intellectualism” the conviction that, if human reason can’t wrap its head around the notion, it can’t really be true. I’m forever in Holmer’s (and Frei’s, Stroup’s, and Feuerhahn’s) debt for freeing me from that really stupid idea! But most of Christendom remains enslaved to it, which is why Stroup told me if I wanted to hear the real Gospel preached, I’d probably have to do it myself. So, here I am! ready to “rock you like a hurricane!”. Sorry, couldn’t help that. Sermon has to be fun for me, especially on Good Friday, to be fun for you. And it really is Good, this Friday—awesome, so fun, so freeing!

Since intellectuals can’t wrap their heads around the idea that God could really be a man without losing ONE BIT of his deity(!) and could actually die (because for intellectuals, God can’t die!) most people—especially theologians!—don’t think Jesus really is God, so they just don’t believe his death (as God’s own dying!) has really FINISHED sin, death, and hell forever, for everyone! They think there’s SOMETHING more you and I must do, to finish the job. So, death totally defeats them.…

Idiots…

Murray Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969, and a journalist asked if he’d say, like Newton, that if he’d seen further than others, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants? Gell-Mann said, “No; if I’ve seen further than others it’s because I’m surrounded by midgets.” Sounds like the author of “Humility and How I Achieved It” 😉

Anyway, because Jesus really is God!, his death has FINISHED off sin, death, and hell. His mission (impossible!) to redeem the whole world has been accomplished! Nothing for us to do but REJOICE! and party with Jesus!

When death comes for you and for me (as it will!) there’s nothing to fear. You think you’ll die alone? Well, you can, if you insist on doing everything all by yourself!

But ….you could die with Jesus (you already did in Baptism!) and, as David discovered in Psalm 139, Jesus will make even the darkness of hell light for you—make it light and life and joy and Heaven!

Since we hardly believe that (just like we’re hardly sorry for our sins!) Jesus has to let us die with him and experience it ourselves. And, as soon as your heart stops and the spirit departs, you’ll open your eyes in heaven and… see! FINALLY, you’ll see Jesus, as he is, and awake in his likeness!

And then the party really starts—the Banquet Feast of Heaven with no ends to its joys. It starts actually here, now, TODAY! at the Table where you get a taste of the body broken and the blood shed that FINISHED off sin, death, and hell, for you, for me, forever!—so that Peace, surpassing all understanding, will guard your heart and mind forever, in Christ Jesus. Amen.