March 29, 2020 “Triumph” – John 19:30

John 19:30
“Triumph”
March 29, 2020 – Fifth Sunday in Lent

My wife Beth tells me about growing up in St. Louis during the construction of its famous Gateway Arch, downtown on the waterfront of the Mississippi River. She and every school child in the city wrote their names on slips of paper which were buried in the foundation under one side of that monument. Everyone watched the progress of construction for over two years, with the great legs on either side growing steadily toward each other. Construction was incredibly precise. Just a fraction of an inch deviation and the whole project would fail if the legs could not be joined accurately.

It was all completed on October 28, 1965, when Beth was 11 years old. The final piece of the arch was slipped into place as people cheered and boats on the river blew their horns. It was finished. Long after, on one of my first visits with Beth’s family in St. Louis, I rode up the noisy, ratcheting tramway inside and stood in the windowed gallery at the top to look down at the river and the buildings of that beautiful old city.

I don’t know exactly what was said on October 28, 1965 in St. Louis, as that final section of the arch was put in place between the great legs. But I’m sure it was multiple variations on those words “It is finished.” “It’s done.” “It’s complete.” “What an accomplishment!” “We did it!” However you put it, that stunning “Gateway to the West” was finished and still stands there proudly.

When Jesus cried “It is finished,” from the Cross, one might imagine it did not have quite the triumphant ring of the last day of the building the Arch in St. Louis. Here was a man who had been tortured and abused all night, now hanging bruised and bloody from a rough wooden construction much cruder than a shining steel arc across the sky. He was in agony, laboring to breathe. Last week we heard how His physical thirst must have been overwhelming. So when today we listen to Him say, “It is finished,” it would be easy to imagine all He means is “It’s over.” He’s come to the end. The pain, the suffering, the mockery are all done. He was about to die and be finished with it all.

It was a crude wood implement of execution, not much higher than it needed to be to keep His feet off the ground, on which Jesus hung and said “It is finished.” Yet those two rough boards loom higher and larger above the world than even the Gateway Arch, higher than all the great buildings and monuments of earth. The Cross casts a shadow—and a light—across the earth that reaches farther and touches more eyes than any other structure into which a nail has been driven, or a seam welded. What was finished there on that long ago Friday remains standing as the greatest accomplishment our world has ever seen.

I’ve said this for the last two Sundays. Today’s sixth saying from the Cross, is anything but despair. Its meaning is ambiguous in English, but not in the Greek original of the New Testament. To be “finished” in English can mean simply to have come to an end, to be over and done with in some final way. We say of a person with a terminal illness, “She’s finished,” or, as may also be on our minds right now, of a failed business, “It’s finished.” We wonder when all this staying at home and social distancing will be “finished,” that is, done with. In other words, the meaning of “finished” in English is often just an “end,” a closing, a stopping of something.

Once again, like “I thirst,” “It is finished” is just one word in Greek, tetelestai. That word does not and cannot mean an ending. It has the other meaning of “finished” in English, the meaning we mean we say that Arch in St. Louis was finished. It was “completed.” It was “culminated.” There is a note of triumph and celebration about it, like those cheers and boat horns on the Mississippi 55 yeas ago.

As we come now to the fifth Sunday in Lent, the third Sunday on which we will not have gathered physically in one place worship, we turn to the sixth last word of Jesus from the Cross. In John 19:30 it follows right after last week’s fifth word, “I thirst.” From Luke 23:46 we may discern that in the same verse John also alludes to but does not quote the seventh and final last word, when Jesus commended His Spirit to God the Father.

This sixth word is not an ending. It means a completion, an accomplishment, even a perfection of something. It’s what an artist declares after the final brush stroke on a painting or a carpenter exclaims after having driven the last nail in a new house. A mother could say it after she gave birth. Jesus was not bemoaning the end of His life. He was celebrating the fact that the work He came to do was accomplished. He had triumphed.

Of course, to many people then and to many people now, it does not look like a triumph, like the completion of anything. It looks like what it still very much was, a death. That bowed head with thorns pressed into it is not the sort of thing one would picture as victory. It looks, for all the world, like defeat.

That’s just the thing. It was for all the world. Jesus dying on the Cross was God’s great accomplishment for you and for me and for the whole world. The trial, the trouble, the tribulation of the Son of God is His triumph over all the pain and sorrow the world can dish out. The Cross rises higher than any other structure because the Cross dared and achieved more than anything else ever built on earth.

What did the Cross achieve, we might ask? Even as Christians, we might wonder, with an old racquetball friend of mine and so many others, what God was doing in the torture and murder of a man He called His own “beloved Son.” What did that ugly, brutal execution accomplish? Why was it necessary? We may be able to give some small answer to that first question, about what it accomplished. The second question, like so many other “Why”s we ask, remains a bit of a mystery.

The fancy theological word for what the Cross accomplished is atonement. It’s a word we often take to be some sort of act of contrition or repentance. When you hurt another person you may try to atone for it by apologizing or doing something kind for them, or by trying to fix what you wrecked.

When I was in college my sister brought home from France and gave to me a little ceramic statue of a gargoyle like those on the roofs of cathedrals in Europe. When our oldest daughter Susan was a few years old she was playing with it and dropped and broke it to smithereens, beyond repair. She felt bad about it long after I’d forgotten it. So when she had a chance in school years later to do ceramics, she crafted and glazed a new gargoyle for me. It’s not anything like the old one, not really a replacement at all. But now that humble attempt to atone for her childish mistake is more precious to me than that original figure from a French souvenir stand ever was.

Susan’s attempt to replace my broken statue is precious because it’s a visible sign of her love for me, of our precious relationship as father and daughter. That’s the kind of thing the Cross did. It’s not so much about “atoning” for our sins in the sense that Jesus paid some sort of penalty or took a punishment which we deserved. Those things are in some sense true, though there’s a whole lot more to say about it and many mistakes to avoid. But the main thing Jesus dying on the Cross does is heal the relationship between God and us. That’s just what the roots of the word “atonement” suggest. The Cross was God’s way to reach out to us and make us “at-one” with Him. It was “at-one-ment.”

The architects and engineers and construction workers who built the Gateway Arch worked hard and long to get two equal legs to meet perfectly in the middle. On the Cross, God was working even harder to bring perfectly together two unequal legs, to bridge and heal the gap between human beings and Himself. But He did it. That’s what the Cross accomplished. Jesus dying on the Cross brought God and humanity together. It’s a project that will stand forever.

God was working at that project of bringing us together with Him from the moment Jesus was born. It’s not just the Cross. It’s the whole life of Jesus. It is Jesus in whom God and human being became one, one holy Person, Son of God and Son of Man. It was a Thursday when the last piece of the Arch ins St. Louis was raised into place. It was a Friday when the last piece of God’s plan to bring us back into relationship with Him was raised into place over a hill outside Jerusalem.

There was enormous pressure on that last piece of the Gateway Arch. The weight of the legs was pushing them together at the end and huge rigging held them a couple feet apart. To fit in that last 8 foot wide section, enormous jacks were used to push the legs out eight and half feet apart so that final piece could slide into place. The mechanical stress and forces involved must have been incredible. The stress and forces at work on the Cross as Jesus spread out His arms to draw us together with God were even more incredible. And it was completely beyond what a human being alone could do.

People died all the time on crosses back then. It was a standard method of capital punishment and, like hangings used to be in this country, a bit of a spectator sport. Crowds turned out to watch people be crucified. There were probably other innocent or pretty good people who were executed on a cross. Many Christians later died that way.

So it wasn’t just that there needed to be an innocent victim to atone for our sins, a kind of scapegoat to take the penalty for us. As we know all too well there are plenty of innocent victims of other people’s sins in this world. Some of those dying of coronavirus right now are doing so because of other people’s mistakes or carelessness about being ready for a pandemic or failing to take cautions about social distancing seriously. No, there was more needed than an innocent victim on that Cross. We have always had lots of those.

In one of the great mysteries of our faith, what was needed was for God to be the innocent victim who died. For humanity and God, for heaven and earth, to be brought together, God had to do the awesome and terrible work of taking on for Himself everything it means to be human, including death. It’s like what it would be if, instead of a last section of stainless steel, the chief engineer for the Arch project put himself between those huge legs and held them together and in place with his own outstretched arms. That would have been impossible. But God did all that and more when Jesus died on the Cross.

What God wanted on the Cross was bring you and me together with Him. In and through Jesus Christ, God wants you to know His love and for you to love Him. That’s the point of everything that happened there. That’s the plan and project that was finished as Jesus died, your atonement, your salvation, my salvation, the salvation of the whole world for anyone who will turn and look at that Cross and believe.

How did it work? Why did it have to be that way? I can make a whole lot of theological noises to try and answer such questions. The Bible itself gives us lots of images. It talks about offering a sacrifice, about setting slaves free, about a change in citizenship, about adoption into a family, about winning a great victory, about drinking living water, about dry bones being raised up again. All those pictures are helpful and even precious. But the project, the point of it all is for us to be one with God, to bring us into eternal relationship with Him, to let us enjoy and love Him forever. That’s what Jesus meant when He said “It is finished.”

The amazing thing is that God gives you a choice. It’s a real relationship with you that Jesus died for. It’s real love He wants. And real love is free. So you get to choose. Will you turn to the Cross and accept His love for you, or will you go it alone, trying to fix your mistakes and sin by yourself, trying to put yourself in the gap and getting smashed in the process?

I’ve been so blessed by reading Richard John Neuhaus’s book Death on a Friday Afternoon. As he talks about Jesus’ sixth word from the Cross he tells us that St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York is right across the street from the Rockefeller Center. In front of the Rockefeller Center stands a huge statue of the mythical Titan Atlas, holding up the world on his shoulders. Then Neuhaus relates how on Good Friday the doors of the cathedral are held open, so one can stand on the street and look into the cathedral, down the aisle and see the great cross there on the altar. Look in one direction and you see a symbol of human achievement, of us bowed down trying to bear the weight of our own lives. Turn and look in the other direction and you see the symbol of what God has done for us, bearing upon and in His own body all the weight of our sin and foolishness. The only question is which direction we, which direction you, are going to look?

In these times when the weight of the world seems quite heavy, when death seems so very near—we hear or read the numbers every day, my wife’s brother may be one of those numbers soon—which way will we look? We do not have to carry it all. Jesus has done it for us. It’s accomplished already. It is finished.

Yet as Neuhaus says there in that book, “‘It is finished,’ but it’s not over.” The Arch in St. Louis is deserted right now, but it stands there waiting for the day tourists come to ride up and look out again once coronavirus restrictions are lifted. Even more, the Cross always stands, waiting for anyone to turn toward it and see the love of God in the dying form of Jesus our Savior.

And remember that Jesus cried out “It is finished!” while He was still in agony, while He was still suffering, while He was still dying. His accomplishment, His triumph came right there in the middle of it all. He did not say “It is finished” when He woke up on Easter morning and walked out of the tomb. He did not say “It is finished” to Peter or to Mary on that bright Sunday morning we are going celebrate in a couple weeks. No, He said “It is finished!” as the sky grew dark, and His pain grew unbearable, and as He prepared to achingly exhale His last breath. It was finished even when all that was not over.

“When will this be over?” is the question many of us are asking. No one really knows. It is pretty clear that any talk of things reopening, especially setting a date for it, is premature. The numbers of coronavirus cases keeps rising in every state, along with the count of those who have died. You can check for yourself how many it is here in Oregon this morning. It’s not over. But neither is the triumph of Jesus Christ. His triumph is not over even in the middle of and alongside us in our worst moments of pain or fear or sin. The Cross stands there forever saying, “It is finished. I have done everything already. Be at peace.”

In our reading from Romans 8:6, Paul said that to set our minds on the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ is “life and peace.” That is what Jesus accomplished for us. It’s not over yet, and not just because we have to wait for the end of our suffering. It’s not over because there is more to come. We heard or read Ezekiel tell us about that valley full of dry bones raised to life. When Jesus had finished everything He came to do there on the Cross, God raised up His bones to life again. Through Jesus He promised to do that for you and me. It is finished, but it’s not over, not by a long shot. That’s why we may live in peace and in hope and even in courage, in spite of all that’s happening around us and even to us.

There is another way the accomplishment of Jesus is not over. What Jesus did keeps going on in the lives of those who follow Him. You may have heard the story about the 72-year-old priest in Italy who came down with coronavirus. Don Giuseppe Berardelli had suffered respiratory problems even before the virus appeared, so the people of his parish had earlier bought him a respirator. But when Berardelli fell sick with coronavirus, he turned his respirator over to a younger patient whom he didn’t know and had never met. Berardelli died this two weeks ago today, Sunday. There could be no public funeral in these times, but the people of the city of Caserta, Italy stood on their balconies that Monday and applauded him.

In John 15:13, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” That is what Jesus did, what He accomplished. And He is still accomplishing that in the lives and even in the deaths of those who love and trust Him. We trust in a Lord and Savior who has done it all, who has triumphed even in death and ultimately over death. So we need not fear. We need not dread the future. We need only trust in His love and do what we can to love as He loved. His great work of love for us is finished, but it will never be over.

Amen.