XI "IT IS FINISHED" JOHN xix. 30 THESE words were uttered nineteen hundred years ago by a man on a cross at Jerusalem,—a man whom a lawless and fanatical mob had arrested, and after a mock trial, under the eyes of a feeble and time-serving governor more fearful of losing popularity than of spilling innocent blood, had carried, with every circumstance of brutal cruelty and barbarous licence, to the place of execution, and there, amidst the insulting sneers of the wretched bystanders, nailed to the cursed tree. More than once the Crucified One had spoken from the Cross; and these were the last words He uttered. "Knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, He said, I thirst. When Jesus, therefore, had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished: and He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost." There is a certain mysterious fulness in these words. The Sufferer does not say what is finished; it is something filling His mind and heart, something that has filled His mind and heart for long, some great familiar thing which He does not need to name, something the end of which has come at last—an end hard to reach and greatly wished for; and He both describes this great thing, and expresses His relief at its completion when He says, "It is finished." Now, though it be one great thing to which Christ refers when He says, It is finished, a thing which He elsewhere speaks of as His work, as the work given Him to do,-we must, in order to understand it at all, take it to pieces and look at its parts separately, and, indeed, on this occasion at only a very few of them, and these perhaps not of the deepest meaning. And, first, His death agonies are finished. Were this an ordinary death of an ordinary man and nothing more, would it not speak very significantly to us? It is not a thing, Death, that we have no concern with; it is before us all: "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment"; and as the old tyrant asked some of his slaves to kill themselves, to show him how to die, we see here a death scene, which we might well covet as our own. He was a young man this, to have to die, the blood being yet full and firm in His veins. The world was very fresh and lovely to Him; no man had ever such an eye for the freshness of nature and the warm realities and vigour of life as He had. He hardly ever spoke, but He spoke of something real and living: "Consider the lilies of the field." He had often gazed on the flowers; and they were not only beautiful in His |