Isaiah puts it clearly: We are all sinners. The Bible continually reminds us of that. One way or another we all turn away from the law, which, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "has only a shadow of the good things to come." Yet even now, having known Jesus, who is not the shadow but the "true form," we continue to go astray. We turn away from God. That's the essence of sin -- separation and alienation from God. Separation and alienation from Love itself.

We know the reality of our sin -- of our estrangement from God -- when we feel unloved, unlovable, and even unable to love. In those moments of emptiness and despair we feel that God is absent because we have turned away from God.

Jesus is the only human who has not at some time or other turned away from God. The only human without sin. The Gospel of John tells us in many different ways how Jesus lived his entire life in the presence of God the Father. "I and the Father are one" Jesus tells us. There was no separation or alienation.

But today, in the midst of Jesus' physical agony on the cross, we hear also his spiritual agony: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he cries. Those are the words Mark recorded. But any good Jew like Jesus or his followers would know those words are "shorthand" for the rest of the Psalm he was quoting. Jesus hangs on the cross feeling the spiritual alienation of the Psalm: "Why, my God, are you "so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the day time, but you do not answer."

Jesus is feels separated from God. Though he never turned away from his Father, at this moment on the cross, Jesus is experiencing sin. Jesus, who never sinned, has for our sake "become sin." This is the moment when Jesus takes on our sin.

In that moment of forsakenness, the incarnation becomes complete. In that moment Jesus really knows how we feel -- how it feels to be without God. God the Son experiences separation from God the Father. God whose essence is loving unity in this moment shares our brokenness.

In this God-forsaken moment, God is truly human -- God is one of us. The incarnation is complete. In the Gospel we read today, it is expressed in Jesus final cry: "It is finished." The Greek word used here ("Tetelestai") means "brought to completion, " "fulfilled," or "made perfect." Jesus has done what he was sent to do. He has become fully human.

But look again at the psalm that Jesus speaks. There's more there than forsakenness and alienation. The psalm continues: "Yet you are the Holy One ... I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born." Even in the midst of the alienation and feeling of abandonment by God God is there.

We feel may unloved, unlovable, and unable to love. We separate ourselves from God. We experience God's absence. Yet all the while, the Holy One is there, surrounding us in the midst of our own agony.

That is the Good Friday message that is behind this completion of Jesus work. Jesus cries "It is finished" because in him, in his broken and dying body, God has embraced our human alienation. And God is still God -- unifying love embracing alienation.

The Son is fully one with us -- even to feeling abandoned by the Father. At the same time, the Son is fully one with the Father. At that moment on the cross when Jesus lives simultaneously in agonizing abandonment and in perfect union with God we too are completed, made perfect. In the words of today's epistle: "And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. . . For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified."

It is our sin to turn away from Love and find ourselves in the spiritual agony of absolute alienation from God. But even then God does not turn away from us. God comes to be one of us even in our sin.

God has felt our deepest suffering. God has felt our agonizing loneliness and our sin. And God has not turned away from us.

We are there:

• In the Eucharist we wave palms of thanksgiving.
• In the Eucharist we face the stony silence of abandonment and death.
• In the Eucharist, we know the stone is rolled away.

And, here and now, facing the mystery of the cross on our journey toward Easter, we join with the secret praises of the stone, as