"It is finished" means that Jesus had accomplished all that God's mission had sent him to do. It did not merely mean that his life was over like, "I'm finished". It was a statement of achievement of purpose - God's purpose to deal with sin and guilt, to defeat all the powers of evil, to bring about the reconciliation of enemies, to defeat death itself, and to accomplish the reconciliation and liberation of the whole creation.

What is so striking in the book of Jeremiah is how many times it is impossible to distinguish between the words of Jeremiah and the words of God, when deep feelings are being expressed. That is probably intentional. The prophet not only speaks what God says, he also feels what God feels. The tears of the prophet are the tears of God.

The Jews believed they were the nation God had chosen among all the nations. And they were. But that did not give them immunity to God's judgment. Like the nations, they too would feel God's wrath if they refused to live in God's ways. Furthermore, God could deal with other nations in mercy as well as judgment. Jeremiah was full of surprises, as against the popular religious assumptions of his day. That's perhaps why some people, when they encountered Jesus, thought he was very like Jeremiah. He turned things upside down.

It's important, though, that there are not "four gospels." There is only one gospel: the good news of what God has done through Christ to save the world. But we read that one gospel in four complementary accounts: The gospel, according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John.

There are four accounts of the gospel itself! The momentous events of the conception, birth, life, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth are too vast to be adequately viewed from one angle alone. Just as we need several points of view to "see" a person's face, so we need these varied emphases and angles to gain the full perspective of all God wants us to understand.

We tend to speak of sin in very personal and individual terms. Jeremiah does not downplay that, but he also sees how a whole society can be bound up in the tentacles of sin, in the assumptions that everybody around you makes, about how it becomes easier to sin than not to, and how we can become so confused and contradictory in our reactions, when sin is pointed out.

The church was made for mission-God's mission