Sermon For Good Friday Service

Finished

A Homily For Good Friday: "It Is Finished"

John 18:1-19:42 (Csb)

We come to this service carrying something we do not often carry into church: the full weight of a story we already know the ending of. And yet that familiarity does not make it easier. If anything, it makes it harder. Because the Gospel of John does not let us rush past what happened. It slows everything down. It names the garden, the torches, the charcoal fire, the soldiers, the thorns, the nails, the title nailed above his head, the seamless robe, the sponge soaked in sour wine. John is a careful, deliberate witness. He wants us to see it. All of it.

So on this Good Friday, I want us to stay inside this text together. Not to analyze it from a safe distance, but to let it do what it was written to do: to show us who Jesus is, what he has accomplished, and what that accomplishment asks of us.

The Central Claim Of The Cross

The homiletical center of this long and extraordinary passage is a single sentence. It comes near the end, in chapter nineteen, verse thirty. Jesus, having received the sour wine, says: "It is finished." And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Three words in English. One word in the Greek that John was drawing from. Tetelestai. A word used in the ancient world to mean a debt fully paid, a task brought to its completion, a transaction sealed. John wants us to understand that what happened on that cross was not a defeat. It was an accomplishment. Something was finished there that could not have been finished any other way.

That is the claim this homily will follow. The cross of Jesus Christ is the place where costly love, completed salvation, and the honest grief of this world all meet. And it is the place where, even now, hope is born.

What The Text Shows Us

John's account of the passion is unlike the other Gospels in a number of ways. One of the most striking is how sovereign Jesus appears throughout. When the soldiers and officers arrive in the garden to arrest him, Jesus steps forward and asks them: "Who is it you're looking for?" They say, "Jesus of Nazareth." He says, "I am he." And they draw back and fall to the ground. This is not a man being swept away by events beyond his control. This is a man who, as John has told us from the beginning of his Gospel, is the Word made flesh, the one through whom all things were made. He is not stumbling toward the cross. He is walking toward it, eyes open, knowing exactly what it will cost him.

And yet the cost is real. John does not soften it. The soldiers mock him. They press a crown of thorns onto his head and put a purple robe on him and say, "Hail, king of the Jews," and they slap him. Pilate, a Roman governor with the full power of the empire behind him, cannot find a charge against him and yet hands him over anyway, because the crowd's pressure is more immediate to him than the truth. Jesus carries his own cross. He is crucified between two others, as though he were one of them. The soldiers divide his garments and cast lots for his tunic. He is given sour wine on a sponge lifted on a hyssop branch.

That detail about the hyssop branch is worth pausing over. In the book of Exodus, hyssop was the instrument used to apply the blood of the Passover lamb to the doorposts of the Israelite homes, so that the angel of death would pass over them. John knows exactly what he is doing when he includes that detail. He is saying: look at who is dying here. Look at what this death means. This is the Lamb of God, the one John the Baptist pointed to at the very beginning of this Gospel, the one who takes away the sin of the world.

The Cost Of This Love

There is something in the passion narrative that I think we pass over too quickly, and it is this: the cross was not a clean or abstract transaction. It was a specific, physical, deeply personal act of love. Jesus was not simply performing a theological function. He was suffering. He was thirsty. He was watching his mother stand at the foot of the cross, and in the middle of his own agony, he looked at her and looked at the beloved disciple and said, "Woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "Here is your mother." Even in his dying, he was caring for the people he loved.

That is a remarkable thing. It tells us something about the character of the God who saves us. This is not a distant deity performing a transaction from a safe remove. This is God in the flesh, entering fully into the worst that human suffering can offer, and doing so out of love. Not love as sentiment. Love as costly, deliberate, irreversible commitment.

Paul will later write that God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. John shows us what that demonstration actually looked like. It looked like a garden arrest in the dark. It looked like a Roman flogging. It looked like a crown of thorns. It looked like a cross on a hill called the Place of the Skull. Love, in its fullest expression, is not comfortable. It is finished only when it has given everything.

Completed Salvation

Now here is where we must be careful, and honest, and precise about what the text is actually claiming.

When Jesus says "It is finished," he is not saying that the Christian life is easy from here, or that suffering will end, or that the world will immediately become a better place. The disciples will still grieve. The world will still be broken. Injustice will still be real. We are not promised immunity from any of that.

What is finished is the work of atonement. The debt of human sin, the separation between humanity and God, the condemnation that stood against us: that is what is finished. The writer of Hebrews will later explain that the high priest entered the Holy of Holies year after year with the blood of animals, but that Christ entered once for all with his own blood, securing an eternal redemption. John is saying the same thing in narrative form. This sacrifice does not need to be repeated. It does not need to be supplemented. It is complete.

That is a word of extraordinary grace for a congregation gathered on Good Friday. Whatever you have done, whatever you carry, whatever you fear has placed you beyond the reach of God's mercy: the cross says otherwise. It is finished means there is nothing left for you to add to your own salvation. The work is done. The price is paid. The door is open.

Grief Is Allowed Here

I want to say something that I think the liturgy of Good Friday already knows, but that we sometimes forget: grief is allowed here. It is appropriate here. The women who followed Jesus from Galilee stood at a distance and watched. His mother stood at the foot of the cross. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus came and took his body and wrapped it in linen cloths with spices and laid it in a new tomb in a garden. These are acts of mourning. They are not failures of faith. They are the honest human response to genuine loss.

We do not serve a God who demands that we perform happiness in the face of sorrow. The Psalms do not do that. The prophets do not do that. And John's Gospel does not do that. The disciples on Good Friday did not know what Sunday was going to bring. They only knew what Friday had taken from them. And their grief was real and it was right.

If you come to this service carrying grief, you are in the right place. If the weight of loss, or illness, or broken relationships, or the darkness of the world has followed you into this sanctuary, you are in the right place. This is the day the Church has set aside to sit with the full weight of what the cross cost, and not to rush past it toward the resurrection before we have truly felt it.

Good Friday is called good not because it was painless, but because of what it accomplished. The grief is real. The cost was real. And the love that bore that cost was, and is, real.

The Hope That Lives Inside This Day

And yet. And yet John cannot tell this story without hope bleeding through the edges of it. He notes that the tomb where Jesus was laid was in a garden. The arrest happened in a garden. The crucifixion happened outside the city. The burial was in a new tomb, one in which no one had yet been laid. John is a writer who pays attention to these things, and he wants us to pay attention too. Something is being prepared. Something is not yet finished, even though the work of salvation is.

The Church will gather again on Sunday. We know that. But today we do not rush there. Today we stand at the foot of the cross and we receive what is given here: the knowledge that God did not look at the cost of saving us and turn away. He looked at the cost and said yes. He walked into the garden. He stood before Pilate. He carried the cross. He said, from the cross, "I am thirsty," and they gave him sour wine, and then he said, "It is finished," and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

He gave it up. John is careful about that. No one took it from him. He gave it up. For you. For the person sitting next to you. For the world that mocked him and crucified him and did not know what it was doing.

That is the love at the center of this day. Costly. Completed. And, even now, calling us to receive it.

Come to this Table, if you are baptized and prepared, and receive what he has given. Come and remember that the one who said "It is finished" is the same one who will say, on the third day, "Do not be afraid." But for now, let Friday be Friday. Let the weight of it settle. Let the love of it reach you.

It is finished. And that changes everything.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. John 18:1-19:42.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. Good Friday liturgy, pp. 276-282.

Raymond E. Brown. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave. 2 vols. Anchor Bible Reference Library. Doubleday, 1994.

D. A. Carson. The Gospel According to John. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Eerdmans, 1991.

N. T. Wright. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion. HarperOne, 2016.

Fleming Rutledge. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Eerdmans, 2015.