The Power That Remains

John 19:16–30

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• they took Jesus, and carrying the cross himself
• “It is finished.”
• and bowing his head, he handed over the spirit

Applying the Word to My Life:
Every now and then God provides a good reminder that being stubborn isn’t the greatest way to live and grow in my life. I remember one time at work I was trying to remove an access point from a wall. It was mounted securely, and I threw everything I could think of at it. I twisted, pulled, slid, and pushed. I tried every kind of force I could imagine. Eventually I hit the point where I knew that if I pushed any harder, I was going to damage the wall while trying to remove the device. Then I noticed a tiny opening with no label on it. Out of frustration more than confidence, I slipped a small screwdriver into the hole, felt a catch release, and the whole thing came off with almost no effort.

We do something like that so many times in our lives. I can get my mind fixed on what I want to achieve or protect, and then I start chasing whatever seems like it will give me control over the outcome. I push harder. I grip tighter. I throw more effort at the situation because I am convinced that if I can just force things enough, life will finally line up the way I want. But a lot of the time, that kind of striving is just more force aimed at the wrong point.

The Passion is one of the clearest examples of this continued push toward the illusion of control. The people around Jesus are all reaching for power in the forms the world understands best. The Pharisees have religious authority. Pilate has political authority. The crowd has force and momentum. They all look powerful, and they all use that power to drive Jesus toward death and silence Him forever. From the outside, it seems like the people with power are deciding everything.

And yet, in the middle of all that worldly power, Christ calls out “It is finished” and expires. If those words are an admission of defeat, then the world has won—but we know that isn’t the case. So what do they mean? If everything is completed, then what future is left—what was the point of all this suffering?

Yesterday we saw that Jesus did not turn the Cross into a sacrifice by making the violence less evil or pretending the suffering was not real. He changed its meaning by joining His will completely to the Father’s. What they meant as murder became, in His hands, a sacrifice of love.

Today that sacrifice reveals what real power looks like. Not the power to control everything around Him, but the power to receive the worst the world can do without surrendering the meaning of the moment to it. Once I see that His sacrifice is the power, “It is finished” no longer sounds like collapse. It sounds like victory.

The worldly power around Him can affect what happens, but it can’t touch what it means. The meaning of it all has already been decided in Him, and it is fixed for all time when He takes His last breath. What looked like the triumph of worldly power becomes the place where worldly power is finally shown for how weak it really is.

The people around Jesus are all chasing the kinds of power the world knows how to recognize—authority, pressure, force, survival, control. They can arrest Him, condemn Him, shame Him, and kill Him. But Christ reveals a different kind of power entirely. He does not claim it by overpowering anyone. He claims it by sacrificing Himself in love. That is the point. His power over the meaning of the moment does not stand apart from the sacrifice; it comes through it. Because He gives Himself completely to the Father here, the world can no longer decide what this death means. The sacrifice is the power.

I spend so much of my energy grasping for powers that cannot last—control, comfort, security, freedom from pain, freedom from loss. But Christ shows me that true power is closer than I think. It is right in front of me whenever I am willing to unite my will to His and act in love. That does not make me the redeemer of the world. But it does mean that the hard things in my life do not have to remain empty. When I stop grasping and start offering, when I stop demanding control and start giving my yes, the meaning of the moment begins to change. That is the deeper power Christ opens to us. That is the quiet power of a Christian life.

The powers of this world fade. The power of sacrifice remains.

My Response for Today:
Today, I will notice one place where I am grasping for control and instead try to place it into Christ’s hands in love.