The Evangelist gives great significance to the words of my first text,
as is shown by his statement in a previous verse: 'Jesus, knowing that
all things were now accomplished, said, I thirst,' and then--'It is
finished.' That is to say, there is something in that dying voice a
great deal deeper and more wonderful than the ordinary human utterance
with which a dying man might say, 'It is all over now. I have done,'
for this utterance came from the consciousness that all things had been
accomplished by Him, and that He had done His life's work.
Now, there, taking the words even in their most superficial sense, we
come upon the strange peculiarity which marks off the life of Jesus
Christ from every other life that was ever lived. There are no loose
ends left, no unfinished tasks drop from His nerveless hands, to be
taken up and carried on by others. His life is a rounded whole, with
everything accomplished that had been endeavoured, and everything done
that had been commanded. 'His hands have laid the foundation; His hands
shall also finish.' He alone of the sons of men, in the deepest sense,
completed His task, and left nothing for successors. The rest of us are
taken away when we have reared a course or two of the structure, the
dream of building which brightened our youth. The pen drops from
paralysed hands in the middle of a sentence, and a fragment of a book
is left. The painter's brush falls with his palette at the foot of his
easel, and but the outline of what he conceived is on the canvas. All
of us leave tasks half done, and have to go away before the work is
completed. The half-polished columns that lie at Baalbec are but a
symbol of the imperfection of every human life. But this Man said, 'It
is finished,' and 'gave up the ghost.' Now, if we ponder on what lies
in that consciousness of completion, I think we find, mainly, three
things.
Christ rendered a complete obedience. All through His life we see Him,
hearing with the inward ear the solemn voice of the Father, and
responding to it with that 'I must' which runs through all His days,
from the earliest dawning of consciousness, when He startled His mother
with 'I must be about My Father's business,' until the very last
moments. In that obedience to the all-present necessity which He
cheerfully embraced and perfectly discharged, there was no flaw. He
alone of men looks back upon a life in which His clear consciousness
detected neither transgression nor imperfection. In the midst of His
career He could front His enemies with 'Which of you convinceth Me of
sin?' and no man then, and no man in all the generations that have
elapsed since--though some have been blind enough to try it, and
malicious enough to utter their attempts,--has been able to answer the
challenge. In the midst of His career He said, 'I do always the things
that please Him'; and nobody then or since has been able to lay his
finger upon an act of His in which, either by excess or defect, or
contrariety, the will of God has not been fully represented. At the
beginning of His career He said, in answer to the Baptist's
remonstrance, 'It becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,' and at the
end of His career He looked back, and knowing that He had thus done
what became Him--namely, fulfilled it all--He said, 'It is finished!'
The utterance further expresses Christ's consciousness of having
completed the revelation of God. Jesus Christ has made known the
Father, and the generations since have added nothing to His revelation.
The very people, to-day, that turn away from Christianity, in the name
of higher conceptions of the divine nature, owe their conceptions of it
to the Christ from whom they turn. Not in broken syllables; not 'at
sundry times and in divers manners,' but with the one perfect,
full-toned name of God on His lips, and vocal in His life, He has
declared the Father unto us. In the course of His career He said, 'He
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'; and, looking back on His life
of manifestation of God, He proclaimed, 'It is finished!' And the world
has since, with all its thinking, added nothing to the name which
Christ has declared.
The utterance farther expresses His consciousness of having made a
completed, atoning Sacrifice. Remember that the words of my first text
followed that awful cry that came from the darkness, and as by one
lightning flash, show us the waves and billows rolling over His head.
'My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?' In that infinitely
pathetic and profound utterance, to the interpretation of which our
powers go but a little way, Jesus Christ blends together, in the most
marvellous fashion, desolation and trust, the consciousness that God is
His God, and the consciousness that He is bereft of the light of His
presence. Brethren! I know of no explanation of these words which does
justice to both the elements that are intertwined so intimately in
them, except the old one, which listens to Him as they come from His
quivering lip, and says, 'The Lord hath made to meet on Him the
iniquity of us all.'
Ah, brethren! unless there was something a great deal more than the
physical shrinking from physical death in that piteous cry, Jesus
Christ did not die nearly as bravely as many a poor, trembling woman
who, at the stake or the block, has owed her fortitude to Him. Many a
blood-stained criminal has gone out of life with less tremor than that
which, unless you take the explanation that Scripture suggests of the
cry, marred the last hours of Jesus Christ. Having drained the cup, He
held it up inverted when He said 'It is finished!' and not a drop
trickled down the edge. He drank it that we might never need to drink
it; and so His dying voice proclaimed that 'by one offering for sin for
ever,' He 'obtained eternal redemption' for us.
II. Now, secondly, note the work which began from the Cross. Between my
two texts lie untold centuries, and the whole development of the
consequences of Christ's death, like some great valley stretching
between twin mountain-peaks on either side, which from some points of
view will be foreshortened and invisible, but when gazed down upon, is
seen to stretch widely leagues broad, from mountain ridge to mountain
ridge. So my two texts, by the fact that millenniums have to interpose
between the time when 'It is finished!' is spoken, and the time when
'It is done!' can be proclaimed from the Throne, imply that the
interval is filled by a continuous work of our Lord's, which began at
the moment when the work on the Cross ended.
Now it has very often been the case, as I take leave to think, that the
interpretation of the former of these two texts has been of such a kind
as to distort the perspective of Christian truth, and to obscure the
fact of that continuous work of our Lord's. Therefore it may not be out
of place if, in a sentence or two, I recall to you the plain teaching
of the New Testament upon this matter. 'It is finished!' Yes; and as
the lower course of some great building is but the foundation for the
higher, when 'finished' it is but begun. The work which, in one aspect,
is the close, in another aspect is the commencement of Christ's further
activity. What did He say Himself, when He was here with His disciples?
'I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.' What was the
last word that came fluttering down, like an olive leaf, into the
bosoms of the men as they stood with uplifted faces gazing upon Him as
He disappeared? 'Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages.'
What is the keynote of the book which carries on the story of the
Gospels in the history of the militant Church? 'The former treatise
have I made... of all that Jesus _began_ both to do and to teach, until
the day in which He was taken up'--and, being taken up, continued, in a
new form, both the doing and the teaching. Thus that book, misnamed the
Acts of the Apostles, sets Him forth as the Worker of all the progress
of the Church. Who is it that 'adds to the Church daily such as were
being saved?' The Lord. Who is it that opened the hearts of the hearers
to the message? The Lord. Who is it that flings wide the prison-gates
when His persecuted servants are in chains? The Lord. Who is it that
bids one man attach himself to the chariot of the eunuch of Ethiopia,
and another man go and bear witness in Rome? The Lord. Through the
whole of that book there runs the keynote, as its dominant thought,
that men are but the instruments, and the hand that wields them is
Christ's, and that He who wrought the finished work that culminated on
Calvary is operating a continuous work through the ages from His Throne.
Take that last book of Scripture, which opens with a view of the
ascended Christ 'walking in the midst of the seven candlesticks, and
holding the stars in His right hand;' which further draws aside the
curtains of the heavenly sanctuary, and lets us see 'the Lamb in the
midst of the Throne,' opening the seven seals--that is to say, setting
loose for their progress through the world the forces that make the
history of humanity, and which culminates in the vision of the final
battle in which the Incarnate Word of God goes forth to victory, with
all the armies of heaven following Him. Are not its whole spirit and
message that Jesus Christ, the Lamb who is the Antagonist of the Beast,
is working through all the history of the world, and will work till its
kingdoms are 'become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ?'
Now, that continuous operation of Jesus Christ in the midst of men is
not to be weakened down to the mere continued influence of the truths
which He proclaimed, or the Gospel which He brought. There is something
a great deal more than the diminishing vibrations of a force long since
set in operation, and slowly ceasing to act. Dead teachers do still
'rule our spirits from their urns'; but it is no dead Christ who, by
the influence of what He did when He was living, sways the world and
comforts His Church; it is a living Christ who to-day is working in His
people, by His Spirit. Further, He works on the world through His
people by the Word; they plant and water, He 'gives the increase.' And
He is working in the world, for His Church and for the world, by His
wielding of all power that is given to Him, in heaven and on earth. So
that the work that is done upon earth He doeth it all Himself; and
Christian people unduly limit the sphere of Christ's operations when
they look back only to the Cross, and talk about a 'finished work'
there, and forget that that finished work there is but the vestibule of
the continuous work that is being done to-day.
Christian people! The present work of Christ needs working servants. We
are here in order to carry on His work. The Apostle ventured to say
that he was appointed 'to fill up that which is behind of the
sufferings of Christ'; we may well venture to say that we are here
mainly to apply to the world the benefits resulting from the finished
work upon the Cross. The accomplishment of redemption, and the
realisation of the accomplished redemption, are two wholly different
things. Christ has done the one. He says to us, 'You are honoured to
help Me to do the other.' According to the accurate rendering of a
great saying of the Old Testament, 'Take no rest, and give Him no rest,
till He establish and make Jerusalem a praise in the earth, Christ's
work is finished; there is nothing for us to do with it but trust it.
Christ's work is going on; come to His help. Ye are fellow-labourers
with and to the Incarnate Truth.
III. I need not say more than a word about the third thought, suggested
by these texts--viz., the completion of the work which began on the
Cross.
'It is done!' That lies, no man knows how far, ahead of us. As surely
as astronomers tell us that all this universe is hastening towards a
central point, so surely 'that far-off divine event' is that 'to which
the whole creation moves.' It is the blaze of light which fills the
distant end of the dim vista of human history. Its elements are in part
summed up in the context--the tabernacle of God with men, the perfected
fellowship of the human with the divine, the housing of men in the very
home and heart of God; 'a new heaven and a new earth,' a renovated
universe; the removal of all evil, suffering, sorrow, sin, and tears.
These things are to be, and shall be, when He says 'It is done!'
Brethren! nothing else than such an issue can be the end of Creation,
for nothing else than such is the purpose of God for man, and God is
not going to be beaten by the world and the devil. Nothing else than
such can be the issue of the Cross; for 'He shall see of the travail of
His soul, and shall be satisfied,' and Christ is not going to labour in
vain, and spend His life, and give His breath and His blood for nought.
Nothing but the work finished on the Cross guarantees the coming of
that perfected issue. I know not where else there is hope for mankind,
looking on the history of humanity, except in that great message, that
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has come, has died, lives for ever, and
is the world's King and Lord.
So for ourselves, in regard to the one part of the work, let us listen
to Him saying 'It is finished!' abandon all attempts to eke it out by
additions of our own, and cast ourselves on the finished Revelation,
the finished Obedience, the finished Atonement, made once for all on
the Cross. But as for the continuous work going on through the ages,
let us cast ourselves into it with earnestness, self-sacrifice,
consecration, and continuity, for we are fellow-workers with Christ,
and Christ will work in, with, and for us if we will work for Him.