It is Done

Bread and Wine Reading: "It is Done", Watchman Nee

Scripture Reading: John 19: 28-30
After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

We shudder at the sound of the final words of Jesus on the cross: “It is finished.” In our minds, there seems in them an all-too-certain finality, an utter hopelessness, an ultimate loss of control. They are hard words for us. Was Jesus admitting failure and surrender? Was Jesus declaring a hopeless departure from what he really had intended to do in his ministry? Was Jesus too exhausted to go on? What do we do now?

That is the problem for many of us. We think that it is now our turn, that we have to somehow take over for what Jesus could not finish, that it is now up to us to save the world. But Watchmen Nee said that “Christianity begins not with a big ‘do’, but with a big ‘done’. We begin our Christian life by depending not upon our own doing but upon what Christ has done…What happened to him happened also to us. All the experiences he met, we too have met in him.” In other words, “It is finished.”

Nee contends that “God is waiting till you cease to do…When you cease doing, then God will begin.” That is hard for us hard-working Western Christians. In all truthfulness, we still emerged from the Protestant Reformation with a faith in our own doing, a faith in the works of, perhaps, proving our faith to others, to God, and to ourselves. On some level, we still want to help ourselves, to do something to make sure that God is pleased with us. And yet…we are drowning—drowning in work, drowning in our home lives, drowning in our relationships, drowning in trying to be someone that we are not. Watchmen Nee asks, though: “Have you ever tried to save a drowning man? The trouble,” he continues, “is that his fear prevents him from entrusting himself to you…Either you must knock him unconscious and then drag him to the shore, or else you must leave him to struggle and shout until his strength gives way before you go to his rescue. If you try to save him while he has any strength left, he will clutch at you in his terror and drag you under, and both he and you will be lost. God is waiting for your store of strength to be utterly exhausted before [God] can deliver you…[God] has done it all!”

So, what are we supposed to do? Nothing. God has done it all. Did you miss what was said? “It is finished.” Jesus did not utter that HE was finished; Jesus declared that IT was finished. In other words, the work here is done. In his book, Thank God It’s Friday, Bishop William Willimon likens it to the same word that Michelangelo uttered when he put his last touch of paint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: “It is finished.”

“And God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”(Genesis 1: 31)

Discussion Questions:
1.) In what ways do you depend upon your own doing in your faith journey?
2.) What are those things that you feel you should be doing as a Christian? For what reasons should you do them?
3.) What would it mean for you to cease doing? What would it mean instead for you to become instead?

So go forth toward the Cross, knowing that it has already been done!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli