Pastor Muri's message from Sunday (part 1)
John chapter 19. We’ve been working our way through the gospel of John. As we get to John chapters 18 and 19, we’re dealing with some pretty heavy material. Just to introduce the thought and get us thinking along the lines of what we’re looking at this morning, let me say this. Politicians, philosophers and, yes, preachers, and all manner of speech givers.... Sometimes people say after a sermon has been preached, they tell the preacher, “I liked your speech.” And something just kind of goes cold inside when you think of a sermon as a speech. But in a technical sense of the word, I guess, it is a speech. But speech givers have a tendency to aim for significance by long and eloquent words. When in fact, in most cases, the messages that really grip and the things that have long-lasting effect are usually those short, simple and weighty words, sometimes found in the midst of a longer message or speech, but nonetheless, the shorter message.
Now if you think I’m setting you up for a short sermon this morning, think again. But Julius Caesar, for instance, when he had prevailed over the king of Osperus and he was to send his report back to the Roman Senate.... The generals who sent the reports back to the Roman Senate, usually wrote long and embellished reports that were designed to make them look like very, very, very smart and capable generals. Julius Caesar wrote back in 47 B.C. after this particular battle, to the Senate he said, “Veni vedi vici.” In other words, “I came. I saw. I conquered.”
Winston Churchill, on October 29, 1941, in the midst of war said to the students at Harrow School, he got up and he gave this speech to the class at Harrow school: “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. Never give up. Never give up.” And he sat down.
William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, in 1910, was becoming more and more of an invalid. His eyesight was failing and he was not in very good health at the time of the annual convention. He was not able to attend the in London and so some of his friends suggested that he send a telegram to the convention and he did. And it read like this: “Dear delegates of the Salvation Army convention. Others. Signed General Booth.”
On October 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., gave a long and eloquent and rallying speech. But the four words that stand out from that and have inspired many since are the words: “I have a dream.”
Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987, stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Germany and at the Brandenburg Gate in West Germany, he delivered a speech that was 2,703 words but of those 2,703 words that he gave in West Germany, but in the hearing of East Germany, just on the other side of the wall, were those words that became immortalized: “Tear down this wall.”
I think you get the point.
But frankly, no more powerful words, no more distilling and historic and momentous, world-changing, life-turning-upside-down kind of words were ever spoken in all of human history than the words from Jesus on the cross as He was dying, when He said in a victory shout with triumph: “It is finished!”
Two thousand years later, we’re asking the logical question, as we listen to those words, as we read them in John 19 and verse 30, if we read the words of Jesus in this chronology of events on the cross -- Jesus says triumphantly, “It is finished” -- we're asking ourselves the question, as many generations have since then, what is finished? What did Jesus finish at that moment?
And maybe you’re saying, “Well, that’s a no-brainer. If you understand the content of the Gospels, you understand the answer to that question.”
But I want to challenge you to think with me this morning that, frankly, there is not a single person in this room this morning who fully comprehends the answer to that question. [end of track 1, 5:01] In fact no one here has really come to grips fully with the implications of those words.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that great preacher of the 19th century, said this about those words. He said, “It would need all the other words that ever were spoken or ever can be spoken to explain this one word. It is altogether immeasurable. It is high. I cannot attain to it. It is deep. I cannot fathom it.”
It is finished. As we search the New Testament scriptures to try to get an understanding of what did Jesus mean and what actually was finished when Jesus cried that cry of shout, that victory, tetelestai, one Greek word, which is the most profound message ever spoken at all times, requiring all the words that ever have been spoken and all the words that could be spoken to unpack the meaning of this single statement of Christ, the incarnate Son of God, hanging on a Roman cross in Palestine, when He said that, what did He mean? As we look at the scriptures, even the book that we’ve been in for the last many months, the Gospel of John, we notice that Jesus was here to do a specific task, that He was on assignment, He was on a mission from God the Father.
John 4, verse 34: “My food,” He says, “is to do the will of Him that sent me and to accomplish [tetelestai] His task.”
John 5:36: “The works that the Father has given me to accomplish [tetelestai], the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.”
John 9 and verse 4, He said to His disciples: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; [the] night is coming, when no [man] can work.”
John 10 and verse 25: “The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me.”
And in John 17, in that great high-priestly prayer, in verse 4 Jesus prayed: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished [tetelestai] the work that you gave me to do.”
So what is the work that Jesus accomplished? What is it that He finished when He was on the cross that day? Was it simply the work that involved His humiliation? Was it just simply the incarnational aspect of His leaving heaven and becoming a man, pressing Himself into human flesh and being born in a manager in Bethlehem and living a life of physical humiliation and suffering 30 years of humanity, including rejection and ridicule and hatred and unbelief and disdain and now crucifixion at the hands of his own people? If that alone is what Jesus finished, then His death would have amounted to nothing more than a tragic waste, a noble cause gone awry, a good and great man cut down in His prime. But there’s much, much more to what Jesus finished when He said, “It is finished.”
