(Passion Sermon.)
TEXT: JOHN xix. 30. “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished.”
THESE greatest and most glorious of the last words -*- of our Saviour on the cross come immediately after those which are apparently of the least significance and importance. The Lord said, “I thirst;” then the moistened sponge was handed to Him; and when He had received the soothing, though not pleasant draught, He cried, “It is finished.” And we must not break the connection of these two sayings, for the apostle has joined them most closely by placing just before his report of them the words, “When Jesus saw that all things were now finished, that the Scripture might be accomplished.” Now if the former is the least important of the Saviour’s last words, seeing that, considered in itself, it concerns merely the satisfying of a bodily need; the latter is indisputably the greatest of all those words; it is the saying which has always been, as it were, the anchor for the faith of Christians; the word in which this truth is perfectly proved and made glorious to them; that according to the divine counsel, salvation could be won for men in no other way than this; that He who was sent into the world for their salvation should be obedient even to the death of the cross. But if we direct our attention to this great word alone, we are overpowered by the infinity of the subject, and we have reason to be glad that the very apostle who has preserved this word for us has also left us a key to it, which gives our thoughts a more definite direction. Such a key we find in those preceding words, “When Jesus saw that all things were finished, that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, He said, I thirst.” John knew that the soul of the Saviour. was engaged in thus comparing all that had so far befallen Him, with the divine promises, as they were uttered through the whole series of revelations in the written word of God; and as He thus set promise and fulfilment side by side, and so became conscious in a human way of the completion of the divine purpose, He cried, “It is finished.”
Of course at that moment everything was not yet finished. As our redemption from sin and our justification before God must go together; so also it was necessary that He who needed to die there for our sin should be raised again for our justification. As the fact that the disciples saw the Father only in Him, was connected with this, that when He left the world He returned to the Father; so also the fact that He loved the disciples implied that He could not leave them orphans, but must send them another Comforter who should abide with them, and after them with us also; even the Spirit of truth. But the spiritual eye of the Saviour saw everything finished in the sacred moment of His death; and for this reason that moment is the central point of our faith. For by His obedience unto death He obtained for us the life-giving Spirit; in that He suffered, He has been crowned with glory and honour. Therefore if in the moment of His death He could say, in this sense, “It is finished,” He must have regarded His death in that infinite connection which begins with the first promise given to fallen man concerning the seed of the woman, and reaches forward into that eternity in which He will bring to the Father all those whom the Father has given Him, that they may share in the praise and glory with which He has been crowned. All this is no doubt perfectly true; but let us return to the definite direction that the apostle gives us, and confine ourselves to considering this word chiefly as the final look at a past life; and let us, especially in the first place, see in it as the Saviour did, the accomplishment of His destiny during this earthly life; and secondly, apply the great word of the Lord, as our heart constrains us to do, to ourselves.
I. As the Saviour said so often during His life that the Son of Man did nothing of Himself, but did the things that He saw with the Father, and spoke the words that He heard from Him; we must naturally suppose that He was constantly engaged in the profoundest meditation on the ways of God; and that, raised as He was above all human weakness of mind, it was so still, even in these last painful hours of His life; and thus all words relating to Himself in the Divine revelations of the Old Testament were present to His soul. We have already had an example of this in His earlier words on the cross; when even the pains and weakness that He had to endure recalled to His remembrance words of holy Scripture, and He applied one and another of them to- His own circumstances. But certainly we should ill understand Him, if we believed that it was these personal details in which He found everything finished that the Scriptures might be fulfilled. That He was hanging there on the cross, surrounded by the powerful enemies who had brought about His death; that His bones were consumed and His tongue clave to His jaws; that He saw His clothes shared among the soldiers and lots cast for His coat; the contemplation of separate incidents like these, and the comparing of them with the words of the Psalm, might indeed to a certain extent, and perhaps more than would have been the case with another, turn away the attention of the suffering Saviour from the torturing sense of physical pain; but to occupy entirely His soul, that was ever bent on greater things, was what those outward details could not do; nor was it those things on account of which He cried with such satisfaction, “It is finished.”