Good Friday

When Jesus had received the wine, he said “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

“It is finished.”  What, exactly, is finished?  “It” could refer to any number of things that are finished as Jesus is about to give up his spirit.

The suffering of Jesus on the cross is now finished, yet the suffering of the body of Christ, the community of Christian believers, is not yet finished, and will not be finished until Christ comes again.

The earthly ministry and mission of Jesus of Nazareth now is finished.  Yet the mission of Jesus continues – the mission of bringing light in the midst of darkness, the mission of making the kingdom of God present, the mission of mutual love and service for others is not yet finished, and will not be finished until Christ comes again.

The earthly life of the human being Jesus of Nazareth is now finished.  And yet resurrection is still to come – and the life of resurrection, for Jesus and for you and for me, will not ever be finished.

The story that John tells in his gospel begins at the very beginning, with creation itself.  John chapter 1, starting with verse 1:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”

John stresses to us that Jesus, the Word who became flesh, was with God at the beginning, indeed has been God from the beginning.  It is through Jesus the eternal Word of God that all things came into being, from the word of God that said “Let there be light,” to the word of God that said, “Let us create human beings in our image,” this is the same Word of God that took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, that lived and breathed and suffered and died, the same Word that continues to speak to us in the Spirit as the good news is spoken and told and shared.

The book of Genesis begins with the story of the creative and creating Word of God over six days of creation.  And then it says, in Genesis chapter 2, starting with verse 1:  Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.  And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work God had done.

In the beginning God spent a whole week creating the world, and on the sixth day – on Friday – God capped off creation by making human beings in the image of God and charging them – charging us – with the care of all of God’s good creation.  It was, shall we say, the first good Friday, and God saw that it was very good.  And thus it was finished – God’s work of creation was finished, as Friday turned to evening, and God finished the work of creation with a Saturday of rest.  And then, as Saturday night turned to Sunday, the good creation of God begins its work, in the garden that God made for those first humans.

On another Friday afternoon, probably the one that our later calendars would retrospectively call the seventh of April in the year 30 C.E., the Word of God made flesh said, “It is finished.”  And as that Friday was turning to evening, the flesh of the Word of God was laid to rest.  Laid to rest in a tomb located – where else? – in a garden.  And when Saturday, the Sabbath, the day of rest turned into Sunday, that garden becomes the birthplace of God’s new creation.

On that Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb looking for a dead body.  Looking for the remains of a human life lived according to the law of the first creation, not yet realizing that the first day of a just-finished new creation had dawned.  As John tells the story, as we’ll read in the Easter Vigil tomorrow night, Mary does not find the body of Jesus, but sees a man she thinks is a gardener.  She sees a human being who looks like someone there to tend the garden, to care for the garden God has planted, and the thing is – she is not wrong.  She finds the one who is alive and who is doing what human beings were always created to do – to tend to God’s good creation with love.  And when he calls her name, she understands.

When Jesus says on the cross, “It is finished,” what is finished?  John wants us to see that it is nothing less than Creation itself that is now finished:  God first makes the heavens and the earth and all living things and human beings in the divine image, creates them out of nothing.  And then God enters the creation itself, taking flesh and blood, submitting to the empty powers of nothingness that still rule over the world and rising again to inaugurate the new creation that lasts forever.

We continue to live in the first creation, still subject to death, still subject to fear, still subject to the empty powers of nothingness that oppose God.  But if we have the faith to see it, we can glimpse in, with, and under the first creation the fulness of the new creation that God has now finished, that is now underway all around us, if only we have the faith to see it.

If all we saw was the first creation, we see Jesus die a painful and humiliating death on a cross.  With the eyes of faith, however, we are invited to see a loving God finishing the creation of a good world, a world of love and reconciliation and forgiveness and grace.

If all we saw was the first creation, we would see a spear thrust into a dead body, with blood and water spilling out, a gory confirmation of the triumph of death.  With the eyes of faith we are invited to see the water of baptism that raises us to new life, the blood of the new covenant shed for us for the forgiveness of sins, the body broken and given to us that we may have life.

If all we saw was the first creation, we would see only Jesus dead on a cross, one of a countless multitude of innocent victims of the power of empire and false gods and human violence.  There would be nothing good about that.  

But with the eyes of faith Friday the seventh of April in the year 30 C.E. was a very good Friday.  With the eyes of faith Friday the second of April in the year 2021 C.E. is a very good Friday. For God’s work of creation now is finished, and we are called and invited to live in it, to care and to tend for it, to enjoy it and the God who made it and who made us all to share in divine life.  And with the eyes of faith, we can be grateful for all the work that God has done, and is doing even now in us, transforming all of creation into the garden of abundant life without end.