God's Plan Fulfilled

March 30, 2018

Maundy Thursday

Last night in what is surely the most soul-rattling liturgy of the Christian year, we commemorated the Last Supper our Lord Jesus ate with his disciples, a moment of heightened awareness with the closest of friends on the night before he was handed over to suffering and death. It was the Passover meal with its strong note of deliverance and freedom when such dreams seemed far removed from the nightmare that approched. Here at St James, once Holy Communion had ended, the clergy stripped the sanctuary, and removed the fair linens; the choir chanted My God, my God why have you forsaken me?; the Dean removed the blessed Sacrament to an Altar of Repose; the lights went out, the organ went down, and the congregation left in the kind of silence that speaks of desolation. Those who were her—certainly got a glimpse of what it was like for those who were there — when they crucified our Lord, and nailed him to the tree, and pierced him in the side. As far as commemorations, go, we really captured the meaning of Jesus’ agony, and got the message of his precious death.

Or did we? Hearing the Passion today as it is recorded in the Gospel of John, I’m not so sure we did. From the Evangelist John’s vantage point (and he differs from Matthew, Luke and Mark), the crucifixion and the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross is not so much a scene of bloody agony and relentless suffering; despondency and desolation are not bywords in this Gospel account.

Taking my cue from a gospel commentator named William Barclay, let me suggest a different tack as we take in the Passion of Jesus according to St John. In the fourth Gospel, Jesus doesn’t cry out My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me. Rather, his very last words are It is finished. Our Lord has completed his mission in this world, the work to which the Father had assigned him, and he now says It is finished. God’s plan of salvation has been fulfilled through the graces of an obedient Son, and that Son now declares within the hearing of all who care to listen It is finished.

Now if you anything at all about reading the Gospel of John, you know we sometimes have to turn his words upside down, and read them inside out in order to get at their meaning. The Jesus pictured here and the one St John knew and loved is the one who lived in this world, but was never attached to this world. Those who listened to his teachings and watched his behaviors discovered amazing truths emanating from this man—truths that often came in the form of surprising flip-flops and reversals.

For instance, as I mentioned last night, if you want to be upwardly mobile in the kingdom-come, then take a towel, bend over, and wash a foot. If you want to go up up up and away on the proverbial ladder of success, then the way to get there is to go down to the level marked “foot”, then heed instructions to wash it. If you want to really get a life in the realm of God, then lose the one that’s not working for you. And if you want to get your needs met, then for God’s sake start ministering to the needs of others.

So when our Lord cries out It is finished, we are invited to hear these words upside down, and to begin an understanding that “It’s only just begun”—for him, for us. What appears to be a cry of defeat is more like a victory shout. Grace is set loose in the world, and we happen to be the recipients of it—unearned, unmerited, unexpected. For sure and for certain, that’s no cause for weeping or rending your garments or grinding your teeth. May well be a reason for feeling pretty good. Small wonder we call this Friday good. It is finished.

Perhaps the strongest words on grace that I’ve come across in a long time came from a young Reformed Church minister who recently returned to his congregation after a long hospitalization and a grizzly bout with cancer. On the Sunday after getting home, his sermon focused on the Grace that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, that power from above activated on the Cross. The young pastor remarked how grace is such a scandal to most of us. How much it goes against the modern grain because it says that there is nothing I can ever DO to get myself right with God, but that God has made himself right me through the blood shed on Calvary. And how that is such an enormously difficult thing to believe, because it seems to good to be true. 

In his battle with terminal cancer, the clergyman in this story got the message. He said: “It’s been wonderful work to stand here in this pulpit and preach grace to people like you. On many occasions I’ve stood in the pulpit, and talked about war, and sexuality, and divorce. I talked about death before I knew what death really was. And I tried to bring the Gospel of Grace to those areas where I preached. I said that God goes to people in trouble, that God receives people in trouble, that God is a God who gets into trouble because of his grace. I said that our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

“I said all those things, and I meant them. But that was before my own mortality stared me in the face. So now I have a silly thing to admit: I don’t think I ever realized the shocking and radical nature of God’s grace—even as I preached it. And the reason I didn’t get it where grace is concerned, I think, is that I assumed I still have about forty years left. Forty years to unlearn my bad habits. Forty years to let my sins thin down and blow away. Forty years to be good to animals, and pick up my neighbors’ mail for them when they are on vacation. Forty years to get good. But that’s not how it’s going to be. Now I have months, not years. And now I have to meet my creator who is also my judge—I have to meet God sooner, not later. I haven’t enough time to undo my wrongs, not enough time to straighten out what’s crooked, not enough time to clean up my life, not enough time to get good. And that scares me silly. So now, for the first time, I have to preach the Cross of Jesus and the grace that pours from it, and know what I’m talking about. I have to preach grace, and not only believe it, but rest on it, depend on it, and stake my life on it.”

Jesus’ work is finished. God’s plan of salvation has been fulfilled. The strife is o’ever; the battle won. And you and I have only just begun. Begun to live fully and abundantly and courageously because we now understand something of the holy truth that says there is nothing I can ever DO to get myself right with God, but that God has made himself right with me through Jesus. That God in Jesus is doing for me what I can never do for myself. That the Cross of Christ is just about the best news imaginable. If you walk out of this Church today in a state of despair with head bowed and spirit crushed, you didn’t listen to St. John’s sermon. It is finished is a victory shout; it is not a cry of defeat. And the victory is that of Jesus and of all of us here who are members in good standing of that crucified and soon-to-be risen Body.