Finished

Scripture: Good Friday, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last night Jesus transformed the Passover meal from a reliving of the Old Covenant to the foundation of the New. He raised the flat bread and the cup of blessing, and declared that from now on these would be His own Body and Blood, broken and shed for all peoples. But before the fourth and final cup of the ritual Passover meal, He abruptly stood up from the table and strode out of the house, out of the city, down through the craggy gash of the Kidron Valley cemetery, and up the Mount of Olives.

His Apostles follow Him, but exhausted from the week’s excitement and stress they prove unable to keep themselves awake, as our Lord goes off by Himself to pray. In Gethsemane, the garden of the olive press, Jesus accepts the cup that He must drink as the will of His Father in Heaven. But of what cup does He speak? Judas, knowing that Jesus prefers to teach and pray from the Mount of Olives, leads the Temple guard to our Lord by night, and betrays Him with a kiss. Jesus forbids the remaining Apostles to raise the sword in His defense, and they scatter into the darkness. No matter. The guards have Him for whom they have come.

They have to make this quick. They have to make it quiet. Jesus has been hailed as king by the pilgrim throng swamping Jerusalem for the Passover. The people may protect Him. So by night the guards take Him to no less than three authorities: the Temple priests, the tetrarch Herod Antipas (son of the great Herod who tried to kill Jesus as a child), and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Local authorities want this Jesus done away with because of supposed blasphemy—forgiving sins and proclaiming God’s Kingdom, which only God Himself may do. The Romans could care less about Jewish religious disputes, but Caesar will tolerate no rival kings. The Jews are rebellious enough as it is. Nervous of an uprising, Pilate sentences Jesus to death for treason against Rome. Yet he washes his hands of the entire affair, knowing the conviction to be a sham.

They take their time. Crucifixion is meant to be a spectacle of suffering and humiliation. In truth, it’s a game, complete with a board and little playing pieces. They roll dice to see when they will flog Him, crown Him with thorns, give to Him a mock royal robe. Little do they know that they are inadvertently fulfilling the Scriptures. Little do they know that their sarcastic coronation crowns the true King of Kings.

He carries the wood of His own sacrifice, as Isaac carried his. He is raised up for the world to see, as Moses raised up the serpent in the wilderness. They cast lots for His clothing, as the Psalmist predicted. He is dying faster than expected. That may be due to the flogging, which is often lethal in and of itself. It may be due to the weight of the Cross falling upon Him, rupturing the peritoneal lining around His heart, which is even now filling with fluid. Usually Crucifixion kills by asphyxiation: the nails are driven through nerve centers in the hands and feet, so that it is agony to take pressure off the hands by placing weight upon the feet, and vice versa. You dance until you cannot hold yourself up anymore, and then the weight of your own body suffocates you. It can take days.

But Jesus feels death coming and says simply, “I thirst.” Earlier He had rejected a painkilling drug, but now He accepts sour wine held up to His lips via a sponge on a stick. He drinks. “It is finished,” He says. And dies. What was finished? Why, the Passover. That sponge held the fourth and final cup, the cup of the Messianic age, about which He had prayed in Gethsemane. All of His Passion—the betrayal, arrest, trial, beatings, torture, Crucifixion, mocking—this was all part of the Passover, the sacrifice of the one true Lamb of God: born in Bethlehem, like all Passover lambs, to die in Jerusalem.

He is pierced with a spear to make certain He has died. Out flow blood and water—peritoneal fluid, perhaps—which subsequent generations will recognize as the holy Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. An earthquake cracks the rock of Golgotha, stretching right into the Temple’s Holy of Holies, where the curtain veiling God’s presence is torn asunder. It is evening now, the sunset fast approaching. At sundown it will be the Sabbath, when no work is allowed, and to keep these men on crosses would be to incite a riot. The thieves on either side of Jesus have their legs broken with an iron rod, so as to speed along their demise. The Centurion confesses Jesus as the Son of God.

They have little time to anoint His Body properly. The sun is setting too quickly for that. So they rush Him to a rich man’s tomb—a freshly carved artificial cave, in which no one had yet been lain—and they seal it with a stone. Guards are posted to discourage any grave robbers or religious fanatics. There is a great panic. The darkened sky, the ominous quake, the crack that split both the crucifixion site and the Temple—this has all been too much. Never again will Golgotha carry crosses. The site will be covered over to frustrate Jesus’ followers.

According to the Talmud, a yearly miracle would occur at the Temple on the Day of Atonement—a red thread would publically turn white—to show that God had accepted the Temple sacrifices and forgiven His people their sins. That miracle would never occur again. Because of “unwarranted hatred,” the Talmud says.

Less than a week ago Jesus was proclaimed the King of Israel, heir to the throne of David, the Messiah and the Son of God. Now He is battered, torn, pierced, dead, and buried. And there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t even prepare His Body properly, because it is the Sabbath. And besides that, the Apostles are shocked and terrified, scattered and ashamed. Judas hangs himself for what he has done. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

Christ has died. What more can be said? We await Sunday morning to anoint our dead.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.