4-03-2026  Good Friday

“HIS DYING BREATH”

Text: John 19:28-40

Friday April 3, 2026 – Good Friday

Trinity – Creston

       Grace, mercy, and peace is yours from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

       Our text for this Good Friday is from the Passion History that was just proclaimed.

Let Us Pray: Dearest Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to remind us that you gave yourself for the many (Us that is). Amen.

Dear Fellow Redeemed in Christ:

After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 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,” and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. (John 19:28–30)

Jesus was at work for us throughout His life and ministry. Everything He did, He did for you. His incarnation and birth, His Baptism and bloody sweat, His betrayal and rejection, and now—even now—His very death on the beloved, shameful cross. As we heard in the hymn:

5. For us by wickedness betrayed,

For us, in crown of thorns arrayed,

He bore the shameful cross and death;

For us He gave His dying breath.

Imagine that scene in your mind’s eye. Imagine the scene where Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Mary, is suspended on the cross, dying, saying with His last breath, tetelestai, or in English, “It is finished.” [Brief pause.] That completion, that finishing, that fulfillment was the pivotal point in the history of the world. It was at that point when God’s divine plan for us and for our salvation came to a culmination. Tetelestai: “It is finished.”

If, as we heard at the beginning of this sermon series, the essence of God is love and mercy, then this death, this giving up of His spirit, is the greatest act of love there has ever been. This love is not mere sentimentality.

It is not a feeling that comes and goes, that passes with the whim of our emotions. No, this love—this agape—this selfless, unconditional love is wholly unlike any other love that the world has ever known.

We get glimpses of it from time to time: the love of a mother for her infant child, the bond of friendship between soldiers at war, the love of a husband and wife after fifty years or more of holy matrimony.

All of these are images, echoes, if you will, of the love that Jesus has given and shown to us on the cross. Or, as Jesus Himself said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Why is it so difficult for us to imagine this self-giving love, this sacrifice of the ages?

It might be because this sacrifice is so foreign to us. We live in an age where sacrifice is passe, where the notion of giving something up is almost laughable. Why should I have to sacrifice any part of my life for you or anyone else?

The notion of self-sacrifice for the sake of someone else was built into us in creation. God made us to live and give of ourselves for the good of the world and everyone around us. And when we lost that impulse, that drive to be there for someone else no matter what, we lost the very essence of what it means to be human and the very essence of what it means to be divine.

Jesus, the one who is both God and man, both divine and human, brings us back together. He is the one who connects God and man as one. And that reconnection, that reconciliation between God and man, well, it came at a terrible price.

So it is that the very Word made flesh, who breathed life into all things, that Jesus breathed His last breath. It is as if the world stopped, and everything that was uncertain and unclear suddenly came into sharp focus. We can hardly imagine such a time, such a moment. But here it is, right before our very eyes.

How will you meditate on this moment? Will you resolve to do better? Will you make God a promise that this time you really mean it? He knows that there is nothing you can do, nothing you can even offer Him that is even close to the worth of His holy, precious blood and innocent suffering and death.

Dr. Luther reminds us why Jesus did all of this for us in the Small Catechism. He says,

That I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. (Small Catechism, Creed, Second Article)

Jesus breathed His last on the cross so that you may be and live and serve. You are His own, His beloved, His precious one. You live under Him, for He is your King who has died for you. Serve Him not because you must, but because you are free from the shackles of sin and Satan and death forever.

Tetelestai: “It is finished.” This is the day when we commemorate that our Lord’s work to redeem us is finished. It is also the day we commemorate that He did it all for us. Not for someone else. For us here, now, in this place.

    So look around and see God’s hand at work, giving life where there was none and giving hope where it was all but lost. For us, He gave His dying breath so that we might live forever with Him. Amen.

The peace of God…….Amen.