Adoration of the Cross

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. 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.

It is finished.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

What is the first account of God finishing a project in the Church’s scriptures? The creation poem at the beginning of Genesis where God’s creation week is completed with the creation of humanity. Or is it completed? Both in the Hebrew and the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew poem, the creation of everything before human beings is a command, “Light, be;” “Waters, let the dry land appear!” But the creation of human beings is an action that God undertakes and is uncompleted. It is a future action. “We will make a human.” Perhaps, Jesus’s words from the Cross are the final completion of this great unfinished project. The creation of the first truly human one. The first human to be fully made in God’s image.

This does not mean that every human being who lived before Jesus wasn’t human or wasn’t made in the image of God for two reasons. They are human but there is room yet to grow into the full stature of being human. They are made in the image of God but there is room yet to grow into the full stature of the image of God. We are human but when God’s work is complete in us, we will see that we were now only human in part. Secondly, Jesus is the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Somehow, the event of the Cross of Jesus, through which God completes his project of making a human being in his image, this event is before all of history. Jesus is the first human being and everyone else follows him. What does it mean that somehow the death of Jesus is the completion of this great project? Is death somehow a birth? Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter to the church in Rome written before his martyrdom, writes to the Church telling them that birth-pangs are upon him, urging them not to hold him back from his death as it is through this and in following the passion of our Lord that he will be made, he says, truly human. Through death he, like Christ, is made truly human.

What does this mean for us? Paul writes that the sting of death is sin. The sting of death is sin, not the sting of sin is death. The sting of death is sin. Our own awareness of our mortality and the projects we enter into to overcome our mortality, the way we we treat one another as objects to futher our own vision of God’s will, this is sin, the sting of death, the fear that we don’t matter and will come to nothing in the end, the clambering over one another we do to somehow matter. But in Christ, death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting? Jesus has turned Death into a birth and through our faith in this victory we realise that death is not the end and that we do matter. We matter enough to God for him to enter into our death. We matter without our projects of immortality. It is finished. In the words of Pontius Pilate, “Behold the man.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.