April 2, 2010
Good Friday (Years A, B, C)
Isaiah 52:13-53::12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25;
John: 18:1-19:42
It is finished.
According to the gospeler John, those were the last words that Jesus said before he gave up his spirit, “It is finished.”
And so it seemed that day. So it seems to us as we hear this story again. It is finished.
The teaching, the friendships, the betrayal, the persecution, the cruelty, the crazy interpretations he gave of scripture and the law, the eating with prostitutes and tax collectors, the no point to them stories, the unclear instructions, those rag tag fisher folk he hung with, the miracles, the healing, the silly talk of kingdoms and paradise . . . . the human life, the breath, the mockery, the lies, the smug self satisfaction of the captors, the faithful women. . . . It is finished – all of it.
If we were to end this story now tonight, right here, with this reading, with the “it is finished” and Jesus in the grave, then our faith story would be very different. If we had heard Jesus say, “It is finished,” and believed it, where would we be this night?
Certainly not here!
But, because we know by faith that this is not a finished story, rather, if we are more accurate, it is the beginning of our faith story, and tonight we are here. If it had been finished, then the only people who would have told this story would be the Romans and the chief priests and Pharisees. They would have said that they had found the trouble maker and taken care of him. The scape goat was thrown over the cliff. The one who caused all the dissension and threatened the natural order of things, the unholy one, had been eliminated; and God had seen to it that they had won, the righteous Romans and religious had won out.
It would have been finished if only they had told it. It would be a closed chapter in an uncomfortable, unhappy time. They would have moved on and as the victors would not even have taken note of it the next day, let alone the next week or the next century. But it was not finished, at least not by Godly standards, only by mortal standards, human standards, their standards.
For human beings usually see victory as a sign of “God’s choosing,” of being the righteous ones, the winners, be it Red Sox pennants, sibling rivalry, elections or wars. From the time humans became human they have believed that God is on the side of the victors. And when the history of those wars – and ball games – even family histories – or elections, are passed down and told to generations following, the ones who won get to tell the story. To the victor belongs the spoils. And in the case of most victories, the spoils are the right to tell the story their way.
So what happened with Jesus? Why didn’t the victors tell the story and make it stick? I would like to suggest it is because “it was not finished.” It was not finished on the cross. It is still not finished. The government/religious leaders should have been telling the story, that’s true; but the story took on a life of its own. Granted the victors had control of the story, the story of the failure and doom of Jesus, and that story was controlled well by the victors, pretty resoundingly, for about two hundred years. But all the while, the underground, headed by that band of rag tag fisher folk, their friends, and friends of friends, and the group of women who waited and watched, those unlikely suspects kept telling the story a different way. They changed that story of finished defeat and failure, and told it as a story of new life and new beginning and resurrection. They told a different story from the “media” or the published reports of the government; and what they told changed the lives of those who dared to believe it.
The unfinished story gave people the courage to believe that all the failures in their lives could be transformed by God’s Grace because this story was – this one life was!
Their finished failures were transformed into their beginning triumphs.
“It is finished,” Jesus said, and they thought he meant his life. But, of course, they were wrong. What was finished was the power structure that marginalized the outcast and gave wealth and power to one group of people over the other. What was finished was an old paradigm for order and social tidiness. What was finished was an understanding of God as exclusionary. What was finished was the long held understanding that material blessings were a sign of God’s grace. What was finished was the old value system.
What was not finished was life and love and forgiveness and grace. These values usurped the mortal values that the victors treasured. These things Jesus taught, lived, died, and rose again for, usurped all the values the Romans and the chief priest were touting that day. These lessons learned were the impetus for the rag tag fisher folk to be able to get the word out. They were stronger than all the power brokers and triumphant story tellers and their power and mortal trappings of wealth.
It took Jesus dying on the cross: tortured, mutilated, mocked, belittled, disgraced, shamed . . . it took Jesus to fail at their game, Jesus, to show us all that what is truly finished is sin and death.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd