Sermon Tone Analysis

Debt is paid/it is accomplished

The Christian is called to affirm the completeness and sufficiency of that sacrifice by trusting in it constantly and by exhibiting the peace and confidence which are the fruit of such a trust.

Our often strained and frenetic forms of Christian life are witness to how much we need to affirm again with Jesus, ‘It is accomplished!’

It is finished!

Jesus had accomplished the work that the Father had sent Him to do.

He has borne the punishment that His people deserved as the sacrificial Lamb dying in their stead.

There is nothing more to add to the work Jesus did on the cross.

Anyone who says differently should be confronted with these three words, It is finished (literally, “it has been completed; the debt is paid”).

Jes purpose - reveal the father’s will

With his death his obedience was completed

His passion to do his Father’s will, and thereby to bring glory to him, here reaches its triumphant conclusion as he gives up his life at the Father’s command.

In doing so he becomes the great model for all who would live the life God purposed for us, a life of complete obedience.

That God should purpose this terrible deed as the means of dealing with the sin of the world tells us, as nothing else ever could, that these sins matter terribly to God.

his work - obedient to death

his heart - laid down his life on his own accord.

bowed head.

even to his death, He was in control of the timing

john 10:18 “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.

I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.

This charge I have received from my Father.””

Jesus had said that no one takes his life from him but that he lays it down of his own accord (10:18), and his death is indeed described as a voluntary act: he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (v.

30).

The order of Jesus’ actions is important (Chrysostom In John 85.3).

John does not say that Jesus died and then his head slumped over, but rather that he bowed his head, an attitude of submission, and then gave over (paredōken) his spirit.

“At his own free will, he with a word dismissed from him his spirit, anticipating the executioner’s work” (Tertullian Apology 21).

The very form of his death continues to reveal him as the obedient Son, the key theme regarding his identity throughout his ministry.

As the obedient Son, submissive to the Father, he fulfills the type of the true King, confirming the message of the sign over his head.

Jesus, the obedient agent of God, died in a spirit of reverence with the bowed (klinas) head.

In contrast with the fact that throughout the Death Story Jesus had been repeatedly “delivered,” first from Judas, the “deliverer,” then to Annas and Caiaphas, then to Pilate, and finally to the soldiers to be crucified, at this point Jesus delivered his spirit.

For his readers John was illustrating in bold letters that even what seems to be tragedy was still not out of God’s control.

For John the point of the story is not just that Jesus was killed but that he died in accordance with God’s appointed hour.

Passover lamb - without blemish

This recalled the slaughter of the Passover lambs in Egypt and the smearing of their blood with the hyssop plant on the lintels of their houses, by which the people’s escape from judgment and their liberation from bondage were won.

So Jesus comes, as God’s own Lamb, without blemish or broken bone (33) in the perfection of his obedience, and there at Calvary, in the presence of the hyssop plant (29), he offers freely the one ‘full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the world’.

As he cries, ‘It is finished,’ and gives himself up for death, the knife falls, and all the sacrifices of the ages are gathered up and rendered obsolete for ever.

Because he has died, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, for all who have come and trusted in the virtue of that sacrifice there is ‘no longer any sacrifice for sin’ (Heb.

10:18).

But this is no cry of defeat; nor is it merely an announcement of imminent death (though it is not less than that).

The verb teleō from which this form derives denotes the carrying out of a task, and in religious contexts bears the overtone of fulfilling one’s religious obligations.

No-one took his life from him; he had the authority to lay it down of his own accord (10:17, 18), the culminating act of filial obedience (8:29; 14:31).

The suggestion that this means he handed over the Holy Spirit to his followers is contradicted by the flow of the argument in ch.

20.

And then, because nothing now remained that still required to be done before He died, as if He, who had power to lay down His life and to take it up again, had at length completed all for whose completion He was waiting, “He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost.”