Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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This is the day we’re unable to look away.
Every other day of the year, it’s easier to keep the cross at a comfortable theological distance. To treat it as metaphor, or symbol, or just the unfortunate middle section of a story that ends well on Sunday. We’re very good at this. I mean, we’ve had two thousand years of practice!
But tonight the Church walks us right up to it and says: look.
Not at some abstract theology or atonement theory. Look... at a man. At this man — the one in whom, John has been insisting from the first chapter, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell — hanging on a Roman instrument of torture, in the dark, outside the city walls, abandoned.
This is how low God’s love stoops. This is where God’s love goes.
Not to the mountaintop. Or the throne room. Here. Into the furthest, coldest, most godforsaken corner of the human experience. And the word godforsaken isn’t hyperbole tonight. Jesus will go to the place where God is nowhere to be seen... and he will go there as God... so that there is no longer any such place.
Every prison of the human heart that has ever whispered “God, you are too far gone” — he has been there before you.
Every darkness that has ever said, “No one could love this, no one could reach this” — he has descended into it, all the way down, without an escape plan.
This is not a transaction. Not a legal settlement between an angry deity and a wayward creation. This is a desperate act of love conducted at the cost of everything. It’s messy. It doesn’t make sense. It’s absurd, really. This is what it looks like when Love refuses to leave anyone behind, even in the places love has no business being.
John’s passion narrative is strange that way. Jesus, even here, is somehow in control. He carries his own cross. He speaks from the cross with authority. He says it is finished. Not “it’s over” like a resignation. But finished, completed, accomplished. The Greek word used here is tetelestai. It’s a craftsman’s word. The word you say when the work is done and done right.
So... What is finished?
The descent. The reach. The full traversal of every distance between God and humanity: every wound, every shame, every secret thing you have never said out loud... covered. Entered. Redeemed.
You do not have to have it together to stand at the foot of this cross. In fact, having it together is probably the one thing that will keep you from understanding what’s happening here. This is a place for the undone. The worn out. The ones who’ve tried and failed and tried again and know, somewhere in their bones, that they cannot save themselves.
Jesus knew that too. About you. Me. And all of us.
And he came anyway. All the way down. All the way in.
It is finished.
And the love is just beginning.