It is Finished

Sometime around 1968, I learned about germs in school. They can be found in dirt and most of all, in the very pinnacle of depravity: poop. So, I began to wash my hands... a lot. I washed and washed, but I am a producer of human excreta, and so is everyone I know. So, it felt as if I was never finished. I was driven to cleanliness and then to the doctor, for my hands were red, raw, cracked and bleeding — open wounds susceptible to germs! I had been better off with no knowledge of “germs” and “not germs.” The doctor looked at my hands and said, “Stop (Shabat in Hebrew)! Stop washing your hands.” They hurt like hell, but it was hard as hell to stop.

I clearly remember the day that I walked out of my parents’ bathroom, looked up at my father, and with a ring of victory in my voice, I said, “Daddy, Daddy, guess what! I went #2... AND I didn’t even wash my hands!” He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Oh buddy, I am so proud of you!”

My hands healed, but I still struggled with lingering “poo-phobia” and neurosis.

Is God neurotic? Read Old Testament law regarding bodily discharges and ritual washings, and you might begin to think so. In Deuteronomy 23, He gives Israel detailed instructions on how to poop outside the camp, for He walks in the camp. Hebrews 9:22, “In fact, the Law requires that nearly everything be cleansed by blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin.”

It’s strange to think of blood as a cleansing agent. But that is exactly what it is... in a body. Did you know that your body, your bag of dust, is almost an entirely different bag of dust than it was 10 years ago. Every time you use the toilet, you’re flushing yourself (your old self) goodbye. That could make a person anal-retentive, or on second thought, it might set them free.

Blood washes the body of death and sin. Sin is evil in us. Knowledge of Good and evil is called the Law. People first gained knowledge of good and evil at a tree in a garden on the Sixth Day of Creation... and immediately became very neurotic. At Mt. Sinai, God wrote the Law in stone and instituted the Sacrificial system to cleanse people of their sin. But even with all that blood (the blood of bulls, sheep, goats, and birds), nobody could get clean. Maybe there’s an even deeper problem in our flesh. No offense, but your body of flesh eats life (which is other bodies of flesh) and excretes death, which is a pretty good description of sin. So of course, the harder we try to clean ourselves with ourselves, the dirtier we get, for the problem is ourselves. We are each alone and unclean in a “body of sin and death.” So maybe I was really onto something in second grade, washing and washing and never finished, as if I (me, myself) was unfinished.

May 2, 1507: A young German priest was officiating at his first communion while dreadfully aware that he was unclean. He got to the portion where he was to say, “We offer unto thee the living, the true eternal God,” and he was terror stricken. For the experience, he had a word: Anfechtung. It describes the sense of anxiety, despair, and shame, which he felt before God. He desperately tried to rid himself of anfechtung, but the harder he tried, the worse it got. His name was Martin Luther.

Many academics think Luther was mentally ill. In college, I had to do a paper on the psycho-historian Erik Erikson and his thesis that Luther was “anal-retentive.” According to Erikson, the Protestant Reformation is the result of bad potty training, Luther’s desire to please his dad, and a quality “anal release” (that’s a poop) in the Wittenburg Tower privy. I mocked his thesis at the time, but potty training is quite stressful.

I once spied on my son talking to his Bambi doll with tears in his eyes. “I can’t go pee-pee in the potty, Bambi. Can you go pee-pee in the potty?” Once after an accident at Wal-Mart, which of course he tried to hide, I kind of blew up at him. He looked up at me with those big, beautiful eyes, now filled with anfecthung, and said, “But Daddy, you’re still proud of me, right?” I hate anfechtung. It separates me from the people I love.

Well, Martin Luther did need some sort of “release,” on or before some sort of “throne.” He claimed to have found it in reading Romans 1:7 on the privy in 1515. And yet, his own reformation started in 1513, studying and teaching the Psalms. When he read Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” he suddenly realized that Jesus was bearing and wearing his anfechtung as he hung on the cross. And Jesus didn’t just quote the first line; John indicates that he prayed the whole Psalm, ending with “It is finished.”

John 19:16, “So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha.”

The early church believed that this was the place of Adam’s skull and that Jesus was crucified directly over the skull, such that the Cross — the tree of death and knowledge — turned into the Tree of Life as the Life in the blood dripped down through the ground and upon the skull of Adam. “For As in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive.”

John 19:23-24, “When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.’ This was to fulfill the Scripture which says, ‘They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.’”

John is quoting Psalm 22:18. He assumes that we already know what Matthew and Mark convey. Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1, which was also the title of the Psalm on the cross (They used no numbering system to reference psalms in Jesus’ day.) Psalm 22:1-18 is a gut-wrenching account of crucifixion from the perspective of the crucified. In verse 19, the crucified begins to cry out to God for salvation and God answers him in the most astounding way, verses 27 to the end. “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord... before him shall bow all who go down to the dust... Posterity will come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.” In other words, posterity will say, “It is finished.”

John 19:28, “After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished [tetelestai], said (to fulfill [teliothe] the Scripture), “I thirst.” [This is Psalm 69 and fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about the Vineyard named Israel, which yielded sour grapes, would be cut down to a stump, and eventually fill the world with fruit.] A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished [tetelestai],’ and he bowed his head and gave [delivered] up his spirit (That’s the Holy Spirit).’”

“Tetelestai: It is finished,” said Jesus. What is “It”?

1) “It” is Sacrifice . . . (for sin). Luther realized that if the Lamb of God took away “the sin of the world,” there was no more sin to be taken away. He couldn’t earn grace with a good confession, for every good confession was earned by God with Grace through faith. And, “It is finished.”

“This is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly heart in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness,” wrote Luther. The Reformation began with Luther, but Luther didn’t believe it was over. And he wondered if God could justify some with faith even after the body died. Then he wrote, “Who would doubt his ability to do that?” The Reformation isn’t over.

Jesus is the Passover and the Sacrifice for Sin, the Sin offering. Hebrews chapters 7,9, and 10 tell us that Jesus was sacrificed “once for all.” Chapter 13 tells us that He was “the sin offering,” but then implores us to offer more sacrifices — sacrifices of praise and good deeds offered from glad and generous hearts. The Day of Atonement taught the Jews that their sacrifices didn’t work, for all their actual sin had been placed on a goat wandering around in the wilderness — a sin offering that hadn’t been sacrificed, the Scapegoat. Jesus is the Scapegoat that comes in from the wilderness to sacrifice our sin to God as well as His Spirit that rises in and through us as an offering of worship and Good Deeds. “Behold the Lamb of God” that takes away the sin of the world and becomes our righteousness. Faith is Righteousness. He was sacrificed once and for all people and all spacetime.

2.) “It” is “all.” He just said so. “Knowing that all was now finished... He said, ‘It is finished.’” 3.) “It” is “all” creation, and that includes all time (chronos) and space. 4.) “It” is “all” that is unfinished NOW finished. Do you feel finished? 5.) “It” is an illusion. If the Word of God says to you, “It (which means all) is finished,” and you say, “I’m not finished,” one of you is living in reality and one is having a bad dream. “Awake O sleeper and arise from the dead and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. 3:14). He will give you Faith.

6.) “It” is the Judgment and Justice of God. We fall asleep at the Tree of Knowledge. We wake at the Cross. And we become one at the Tree of Life in the New Jerusalem (Its leaves are for “the healing of the nations.”) “Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days,” said Jesus.

7.) “It” is death, the death of death which is life. Life is an endless communion of sacrificial Love in one temple, the Body of Christ. One Life in One Body... I think that means no stink and no poop.

Thirty-nine years ago, I became a daddy, and it pretty much cured me of all “poo-phobia.” Jonathan was our first, but the law (threats of punishment and promises of reward) just wasn’t working. My wife obtained a book, Potty Training in One Day, and because I have the same plumbing as my son, she left me alone with Jon to carry out the instructions. When Jon had an “accident,” I was to put the accident in the potty, then make him sit on the potty anyway, in order to show him that hiding the poo is futile.

Jon had the accident. I stood him before the throne. I pulled down his underwear and turned to get some paper to grab the deed that he had done. I turned around just in time to see him look both ways, bend down, and grab the physical expression of his “body of sin and death,” then hurl it at the toilet. It bounced off the lid lifted against the tank and fell into the bowl. Two points! He turned and looked at me, his eyes filled with light, as if to say “Daddy, I did it! Aren’t you proud of me?” ...as he took his dirty little hand and began wiping it repeatedly across his clean white t-shirt. “Aren’t you proud of me?” And I was; I still am. I got just what I wanted. My son — no longer hiding from me, covered in filth, but full of faith. And I thought “It is finished: tetelestai.”

Last Sunday after preaching, as we were singing, my wife leaned over and said, “I just heard the Lord say... te-tel-estai? Does that mean anything to you?” I feel called to preach and love to preach but often feel totally neurotic having done so. Susan doesn’t know Greek, didn’t know the text for this week, or what I was going to say. “Does that mean anything to you?” she asked. I said, “Oh yes!” It literally means everything to me... AND now I know just who I am: A child of God, standing before the throne, wiping ‘scubala’ on my shirt, as I delight in the Love of God, my Father.” It’s good to be us.