Unfinished Business

Scripture: John 19:28-30

I do not know whether the Christian faith raises any little questions. But I know it raises some very big ones. One of those questions, of course, is whether God exists. Many years ago, I had the privilege of studying with the great theologian Hans Kung. At the end of the class I asked him to sign my copy of his vast eight-hundred-and-forty-page book entitled Does God Exist? He turned to the opening page, signed his name, and then under the title wrote a single word. The word was: “Yes!” This saved me a lot of reading.

The season of Lent draws our attention to another of those very big questions: Why did Jesus die? What is the meaning, the significance, of the Passion? How did it change things? One day, when I was taking seminary courses in Detroit, I was informed that a committee from the board of ordained ministry wanted to meet for fifteen minutes with each of the Methodist students enrolled at the school. I dutifully appeared, crossing paths with the student who had just finished talking with them. “Don’t worry,” she said, “no tough questions.” I went in, sat down, and smiled at the chair of the committee, who leaned back slowly and said “So tell us; why did Jesus die?” I’m afraid I responded by blurting out “You have got to be kidding.”

It’s not that we don’t have an answer to the question. In fact, we have lots of answers, and many of us subscribe to more than one of them. Indeed, those answers have consumed substantial amounts of ink and energy in several branches of theology, including the branch called soteriology. Soteriology takes its name from the Greek word soter (meaning “savior” or “deliverer”) and explores the saving work – the “salvific” work – of Jesus Christ. Over the last two thousand years, the answers to this question offered by soteriology have focused on a variety of themes.

In the early church, the significance of the death of Jesus was understood largely by reference to sacrifice. Some versions of this understanding portrayed the death of Jesus as a sacrifice by God – as an act of boundless love and grace, in which God gave over His only son to take on the sins of the world and, through his blood, to cleanse us of them. We see this theme in the ninth chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, it runs very deep in our thinking, and it probably sounds familiar to you. Other versions of this theme, however, portrayed the Passion of Jesus as a sacrifice to God – as an act of appeasement necessary to assuage an angry God and preserve us from wrath and annihilation. As biblical scholar Jeffrey Hopper observes, “In this unfortunate shift, God is acted upon and changed rather than humans.”

In recent years, some theologians – influenced by the work of anthropologist and cultural historian Rene Girard – have moved away from an interpretation of the Passion that focuses on the theme of sacrifice. Girard readily acknowledges that “the Passion is presented to us in the Gospels as an act that brings salvation to humanity. But,” he continues, “it is in no way presented as a sacrifice.” To the contrary, Girard argues, thinking of the Passion as a sacrifice is not consistent with the image of God presented in the Gospels – a God “who is alien to all violence.” Jesus died, Girard therefore concludes, not as a sacrifice but in order to end sacrifice; he says “[t]his is the essential theme, repeated time and time again of Jesus’ preaching: reconciliation with God can take place unreservedly and with no sacrificial intermediary through the rules of the kingdom.” “Go and learn what this means,” Jesus declares in the ninth chapter of Matthew: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”

In the course of Christian history themes other than that of sacrifice have also emerged. In his recent book Tokens of Trust, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams elegantly summarizes some of those other images in these words: "Jesus’ death is a ransom, paid to our kidnappers (the powers of destruction); it is a punishment that we deserve, voluntarily borne by another, who is innocent; it is even a triumphant nailing up of a cancelled invoice." These images, of a ransom given over to Satan or a debt made good with God, help explain why our passage for today has occasionally been translated using the words: “It is paid.” Or, as an old hymn puts it, “Jesus paid it all.”

The Greek verb at issue here – rendered variously as “paid,” “done,” or “finished” – is teleo and it appears only twice in the Gospel of John. Of course, it appears in verse 30 of chapter 19, where Jesus declares “It is finished.” But, interestingly, it also appears immediately before this passage, in verse 28 of chapter 19, where the scripture refers to the fact that Jesus has “accomplished” everything that was needed. In the same vein, John sometimes uses a different but closely related Greek word in describing how Jesus “completed” God’s work. In sum, when Jesus says “It is finished” he is not simply crying out that his life has ended. Rather, he is declaring that something has come to completion: something important; something defining in the relationship between humankind and God; something planned and prescribed in the divine order of events.

But what is that something? And how does all this help us with our big question: Why did Jesus die? In the end, the question of why Jesus died is more question than I can fully answer. But I take some consolation in the fact that it may be more question than can be fully answered. Recognizing this, Rowan Williams offers the following guidance: “It’s important to be aware of all these images and to try and see why they are used; [it is] equally important, though, not to treat them as if they were theories that explain why Jesus died.” He continues: “Our theories about all this are likely to be convoluted and unsatisfactory; but all we need to know is that whatever it took – and takes – for us to be set free from our destructive and deceitful traps has been done [through the death of Jesus].” It is paid; it is done; it is completed; it is finished.

And it is not just finished in some abstract and theoretical sense. It is finished in a real, true, and experiential sense. It is finished for each of us, singly, individually, and personally. The refrain of a contemporary song puts it this way: “You did it all for me; you gave your only son; you’d do it all again if I were the only one.”

It is finished, indeed – and yet, and yet it is not over. In our thinking about the Passion, and about Jesus’s words “It is finished,” we must not confuse completeness with closure. It is, after all, possible for something to be magnificent, inspiring, and complete in itself – and the Passion has all these qualities – but for it also to leave some matters open. Many famous examples of this exist in art: the sketches of Michelangelo are complete and perfect in themselves – but they invite the observer to imagine how they might look with the additions of color and dimension; some symphonies of Mahler and Schubert are complete and perfect in themselves – even though they have only two movements, rather than the traditional greater number, and invite the listener to dream of the music that might fill those left unwritten; literary anthologies often contain fragments of works that authors never developed into full epic poems or novels – fragments that are complete and perfect in themselves but that also invite the reader to muse over the endless possibilities of where the story might go next.

But we don’t need to use analogies to describe the difference between completeness and closure. All we need to do is to look at the text itself. For the text reminds us that after Jesus declares “It is finished” we see the unfolding of still more of God’s important and amazing work. The Gospel of John makes this perfectly plain. Think of it – after Jesus utters these words, the following things happen: Jesus rises from the dead. (John 20:9). Two angels appear to Mary Magdalene to console her. (John 20:12) Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene to send a message to his disciples. (John 20:17) Jesus comes to the disciples and breathes the Holy Spirit on them. (John 20:19) Jesus returns to the disciples to answer the doubts of Thomas. (John 20:26-27) Jesus shows himself again to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. (John 21:1) Jesus commands Peter to feed and tend his sheep. (John 21:15-17) And the Gospel of John concludes with these words about God’s ongoing work through Christ: “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) As long as there is suffering and sin on earth – in other words, as long as there is an earth and we inhabit it – God will have work to do – work that takes its meaning from the suffering of Jesus Christ. In one of his essays, Pascal captured this starkly but beautifully when he said “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world.”

More than twenty years ago, a great theologian did me a true service. Through a simple gesture, he helped me understand that the big questions of our faith have eight-hundred-and-forty page answers – and also one word answers. Does God Exist? Yes. Well, I am no theologian, great or otherwise. But even I can understand how that lesson applies to the big questions of our faith implicit in Jesus’ words “It is finished.”

Did Jesus die so we might be saved? Yes. Did Jesus’s death make complete some essential part of God’s design? Yes. Does God continue to work in this world? Yes. Is Jesus still present with us, loving us, striving with us, suffering for us? Yes. And what about our role in all of this? Do we have work to do? Do we have unfinished business? Oh yes, yes, yes.

Amen.