‘It is finished!’ (John19:30)

God is the Creator of all; He is the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega. When God finished His work of creation in the beginning, He saw that it was good. (Gen 2:1-2) John has already reflected this work in the beginning of his gospel, describing Jesus as the Word who speaks salvation into existence. Now ‘knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled’ (John 19:28), Jesus receives the drink and cries out, ‘It is finished!’ A good salvation work has been completed: there is nothing left to do. Jesus has finished the work the Father gave Him to do. He can now bow His head and give up His spirit. The once-for-all sacrifice for sin has been completed (see Hebrews 9:26, 10:12).

It is extremely difficult for us to accept that there is, in the words of the hymn, ‘nothing left for us to do, for Jesus did it all.’ We are people who like to be in control, who feel that salvation must be earned. Even when we theoretically accept that only Jesus was spotless and sinless and therefore salvation can be found in no other name, we tend to want to add to our salvation through our own good works. The New Testament was written, in part, to remind us that all the ‘Jesus-and’ philosophies just don’t work. We don’t need anything else. As Eugene Peterson says, ‘”It is finished” deletes the hyphens.’ (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 260)

Good Friday, the day when we remember the most unjust, cruel death imaginable, is forever to be cherished and loved by Christians, for it is the day when our salvation was finished. To be sure, we are still being saved and perfected: but, as the writer to the Hebrews reminds us, ‘by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.’ (Hebrews 10:14) There really is nothing left for us to do except accept the salvation offered to us and offer our lives back to God in faithful obedience. Though the disciples at the cross could not possibly have understood all that Jesus meant by this last victorious cry before death (and the paradox inherent in that situation so often goes over our heads as it probably did theirs), we wait in anticipation for Easter Sunday, knowing that God accepted that final sacrifice and our salvation is secure.

Easter is a very special time in the Christian calendar, for we celebrate at this time the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here, we’re at the very heart of the gospel, looking into how our salvation was actually purchased for us and it’s vital that we remain centred and rooted in this redemptive act.

To focus our attention on Easter, we are holding some special services this weekend. Three of these involve the film based on Matthew’s Gospel by the Visual Bible Society. With words taken directly from the NIV (hence the length of the film and the reason we have decided to show this over three sessions), this film rendition of the life and death of Jesus stars Richard Kiley as Matthew and Bruce Marhiano as Jesus and will help us to enter into the story in a new way. The first session will be on Good Friday at 7 p.m., with the remaining two sessions shown on Saturday 4th April at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.

On Saturday, we will be holding our coffee morning as usual from 10 a.m. until 12 noon, but in the morning, Christians from all local churches will also be joining together for the ‘March of Hope’ around Goldthorpe. Come and sing God’s praises and give out Easter leaflets and Easter eggs to local residents! We will be leaving GPCC at 10.15 a.m. and the march starts from the parish church on Lockwood Road at 10.30 a.m. After the march and coffee morning, there will be a church lunch at 12 noon, so if you want to eat before the film, come along and join with us!

On Easter Sunday, we will be holding a communion service starting at 10.30 a.m. and the evening service will be a family service starting at 6 p.m. Come along to take part in a range of fun activities (and win Easter eggs!), but most of all, to celebrate that Jesus is alive!

‘I thirst.’ (John 19:28)

In Greek, this one-word cry of Jesus expresses something of the physical agony He suffered on the cross. Jesus was, we must remember, fully human; He is the Word made flesh (John 1:14) and as a human being, He suffered the physical pain and horror of crucifixion, one of the most cruel forms of execution ever known. This cry is a reminder that our ordinary physical needs must be included in prayer. Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread (Matt 6:11) and we have to acknowledge that we have these ordinary, everyday needs which must not be removed from our spiritual life. To attempt to do so is to live a life that is not fully whole,a life that is not integrated but compartmentalised falsely into ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’, divided into ‘secular’ and ‘sacred.’

Throughout history, people have wanted to separate the physical from the spiritual. Heretics have separated the two natures of Christ, either believing He was fully God but could not possibly have embraced the physical indignities of being human or believing He was fully man but not fully God. So often, we struggle to understand even how we can be both ‘spirit’ and ‘body’, let alone how Jesus could be both God and Man. As such, we cannot escape from our bodies (however hard we try) and we cannot ignore our spirits (however hard we try.) In the book of Hebrews, we are repeatedly reminded that we have a great High Priest who understands our suffering because He Himself has suffered (Hebrews 2:10, 2:18, 4:16, 13:12). This cry of Jesus from the cross helps us to glimpse that suffering and to understand that He is able to help us when we are tempted, when we suffer, when we reach the end of ourselves. We do not suffer alone, for He has suffered on our behalf.

‘Woman, here is your son…’ ‘Here is your mother.’ (John 19:26-27)

Death is never merely an abstraction, something to be studied philosophically or with academic interest only. Death touches each one of us at some point in our lives. Those we love and care for are taken from us. We grieve, weep and mourn their loss. We do not study Jesus’s death simply from an academic or theological perspective only either. His death matters to us because it is the means of our salvation; we cannot simply gaze and be unmoved.

Jesus thinks of his mother and his beloved friend at the cross. He knows that His death will have an impact on them. No man is an island and everyone’s death impacts someone else. In thinking of His mother, Jesus not only demonstrates selflessness even in the midst of personal agony; He shows us how interconnected our lives are. We neither live to ourselves nor die to ourselves. We belong not only to God but to each other. We have a duty of care to other people. As Eugene Peterson says, ‘With these words, Jesus made His mother and His disciple mutual participants in all that is involved in His death: abandonment, forsakenness, the hope of heaven, atonement, sacrifice, pain, salvation. And, it goes without saying, resurrection… All of Jesus’ words and actions, from this moment, enter the arena of everyday domesticity to be worked out and practiced precisely there.’ (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 255)

In the midst of all the eternal, world-changing action of Calvary, Jesus cares for the ordinary lives of the people He loves. We can never, John reminds us later, love God without loving people as well (see 1 John 3:11-18). This is a lesson he learned first-hand from Jesus.

As we prepare to celebrate Easter, we are forced to contemplate that the events of this Holy Week were all part of God’s perfect plan, even though things seemed to be going so wrong for Jesus and His disciples. Col 1:19  reveals what God was doing through the betrayal of human beings, the plotting of church and secular leaders, the cowardice of Jesus’s disciples and the baying of the crowds:

God’s plan involved reconciling all things to Himself through Christ – all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven – using the cross as His method: ‘by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross.’ As our Bible studies on 1 Cor 1 have been showing, this method seemed utterly bizarre and incongruous to all people at the time and continues to astound and stumble many today. Nonetheless, the Cross is God’s method of reconciling us to Himself and we have to accept that no other means of salvation is possible.

When life does not go according to our plans, when we feel that we have reached a dead end and can go no further, the Cross reminds us that God works in the most unusual and unexpected ways. We may be downcast, but we are never actually cast down, for He is able to lift us up out of the blind alleys and can make a way where there is no way. Because of the Cross, we have hope.

‘Father, into Your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)

Jesus has clearly moved from the place of dereliction and forsakenness to the place of childlike trust and simplicity. This is a prayer of security prayed in the most horrendous of circumstances. Many of us find it difficult to pray this prayer in the ordinary circumstances of life, often struggling with surrender and submission to the Father’s will even when everything is going well. But Jesus demonstrates for us how to pray even when we are in distress and pain, for we must constantly develop that childlike faith and trust (Matt 18:3, Matt 11:25).

Our lives and times are in God’s hands. (Ps 31:15) He is our Maker, the One who created us and knows us. (Ps 139:1-18) Nothing happens to us without His foreknowledge and permission (see Job 1.) The more we meditate on these truths, the more we are able to surrender to God’s will for our lives, for we know that He is for us and that nothing can separate us from His love. (Rom 8:28-39) Secure in this knowledge, we can commit our lives and deaths to His hands.

Eugene Peterson reminds us ‘this is not a prayer we hold in reserve for our deathbed, a prayer of reluctant relinquishment as we give up the ghost. We pray it when we get out of bed each morning, alive yet another day, ready to go to work painting a house, teaching a class of kindergartners, surgically removing a cancerous breast… planting a field of barley.’ (‘The Word Made Flesh’, P 253) Jesus could pray this as He was about to die because He had prayed this every day of His life. That is the level of trust we too must acquire, and it only comes as we become like little children and place our lives in God’s hands.