James Tissot, What Our Lord Saw from the Cross
Every year, on Good Friday, the Belle Vernon Area Ministerium hosts a seven-last-words service. The service lasts three hours and each pastor offers a sermon on each of Jesus' seven last words. It's quite an event. Some people come for the entire service, while many others stay for a sermon or two.
John 19:30
When Jesus had received the wine, he
said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Sermon
Good afternoon! It’s good to be with you today. As many of
you know, I’m the Interim Pastor at Rehoboth Church. In the Presbyterian
tradition, when a pastor retires after a long pastorate, the congregation is
not allowed to go out and hire their next pastor right away. Instead, the
congregation is required to call an interim pastor who will guide them through
the transition process. That process requires a great deal of soul searching.
The congregation is asked to figure out who they are and who God is calling
them to be. A good metaphor for this process can be found in Holy Week and
Easter.
The process begins with an extended version of Palm Sunday.
First, the pastor who is leaving or retiring is celebrated; the congregation
remembers the good times and the shared journey. Next, the congregation
welcomes the new interim pastor: there’s a reception after church, or maybe a
potluck supper. Everyone is happy to meet the new minister.
But Palm Sunday doesn’t last. The interim pastor prepares
the congregation for the difficult work of transition, just as Jesus prepared
the disciples for life without him. Then the interim pastor starts asking
really difficult questions about the mission of the congregation, its vision
for ministry, its finances, etc. The pastor puts the congregation on trial; the
congregation has to bury some of its past, so that it might be born to
something new. The congregation also has to sit in that space of loss—but only
until a new pastor is called and the congregation is reborn.
The metaphor isn’t perfect. Neither the old pastor nor the
new pastor is Jesus, nor is the interim pastor Pontius Pilate. Still, it’s a
useful way to frame the process. It’s also useful for how we look at all our
congregations today, whether or not they’re changing leaders.
The truth is, all Christian churches in the United States
are in an interim period. Church used to hold a place of prominence in our
society that it no longer seems to hold. We see fewer people in the pews and we
live in a state of nostalgia for the way church used to be. The churches of our
past were Palm Sunday. Our glory days are behind us. That brings us to Good
Friday.
Jesus’ words, “It is finished,” come at the conclusion of
the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of John. When we hear these words in
English, we think of the ending of a story or even a sporting event. That’s not
exactly what the Greek text of this story means. The Lutheran scholar, Karoline
Lewis writes:
The verb used here teleo has the sense of everything being
brought to its intended goal, or that everything has been completed. It is not
finished in the sense of coming to an end, but that the end point, the telos, has been reached. Said from the
cross, “it” … is the incarnation, Jesus’ earthly ministry.[1]
What Lewis is saying is
that Jesus’ story wasn’t completed on that cross. Nor was Jesus’ work finished
on that cross.
The work of building God’s kingdom here on Earth is left to
us. That’s a huge job! And it feels like the work gets harder with each passing
year. We don’t have as many people in the pews or as much money in the
collection plate as we used to. The people who are in church are older or
busier than they used to be.
We are tired and sometimes we get discouraged. When we are
tired and discouraged, we give in to temptation and we blame others for our
predicament. We love to blame youth sports or the secular culture. We want to
blame all the people who raised their kids outside of church.
If we want to be more realistic, we can look to crazy work
schedules. A lot of people work on Sundays. A lot of people take their work
home with them on evenings and weekends. Still others work 60-70 hours during
the rest of the week. They want to sleep on Sunday mornings!
To blame the decline of the Church on external forces is to
miss the point of this story. Jesus did not die because of the power of the
Roman Empire or the compromises of the Jewish religious authorities. In the
Gospel of John, Jesus died because he handed himself over to the authorities.
Jesus is always in control. Caesar doesn’t have the last word, nor does Pilate.
Jesus is in control. We need to remember that.
Where we are in decline it is because we handed over the
things that gave us life; we handed over love and relationship, we handed over
time. We are the ones who allowed church to become one activity among may,
something we did for an hour on Sunday. We have also chosen to work longer
hours, so that we can earn more money to buy more stuff. We also encourage our
children or grandchildren to play every sport and join every activity, no
matter how much time and energy we invest in getting them to practices or games
or lessons or rehearsals. We participate in the secular culture as much as the
people who don’t come to worship. Blaming the culture is not the answer.
The Gospel of John shows God in direct relationship with
humanity through the presence of Jesus, the Word of God, made flesh. Jesus is
the embodiment of God’s love in the world. For God so loved the world that
Jesus was sent into the world for everyone’s sake, including those people who
put Jesus on trial and crucified him.
We are on trial in this story, too. After Jesus says, “It
is finished,” we are told that Jesus, “bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” The Greek verb that
is translated as “gave up” also means “hands over;” it’s the same verb that’s
used when Judas “hands over” Jesus. At the same time that Jesus hands the work
of building God’s kingdom over to us, he also hands his spirit over to us.
Friends, we have been given the Holy Spirit. We can sit in
our buildings, wringing our hands and talking about the good old days, or we
can get outside of our walls and do Christ’s work in the world. To do that, we
have to die. We have to die to our past, and that’s a great thing! If the
Church is to be reborn, then we have to believe in the resurrection. We have to
die in order to be born anew! This is what it means to be an Easter people! Thanks
be to God. Amen.
[1]
Karoline Lewis. John: Fortress Biblical
Preaching Commentaries. Minneapolis: Fortress Press (2014), p. 230.
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