When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, “It is finished.”  This is the third of the sayings of Jesus on the cross preserved by John, who was a special witness to the chief doings of his Lord on the earth.  So the declaration meant more to him than to any other who heard it.  Yet it had a fulness of meaning which even he could not fully know.  Jesus’ life on earth was finished.  He had perfectly obeyed the commandments of God.  The types and prophecies concerning Him had been fulfilled.  His revelation of truth was completed.  The work of man’s redemption was done.  On the cross He affirmed what John said He declared in the Upper Room to His Father:  “I have glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work Thou hast given Me to do.”

All four Evangelists tell of the moment when Jesus yielded up His life, but John alone of the act that accompanied it as the signal thereof, which his observant eye beheld.  “He bowed His head,”—­not as the helpless victim of the executioner’s knife upon the fatal block, but as the Lord of Life who had said, “No one taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.”

John makes mention of another incident without which the story of the crucifixion would be incomplete.  Mary Magdalene and other loving women had left the cross, but were gazing toward it as they “stood afar off.”  John remained with the soldiers who were watching the bodies of the crucified.  “The Jews, ... that the bodies should not remain upon the cross upon the Sabbath, asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken”—­to hasten death—­“and that they might be taken away.”  As John saw the soldiers “break the legs of the first and of the other which was crucified with” Jesus, with what a shudder did he see them approach His cross; but what a relief to him when they “saw that He was dead already, and brake not His legs.”

In a single clause John pictures a scene ever vivid in Christian thought.  He knew that Jesus “gave up His spirit” when “He bowed His head.”  The executioners pronounced Him dead.  “Howbeit one of the soldiers”—­to make this certain beyond dispute—­“with a spear pierced His side, and straightway there came out blood and water.”  There was now no pain to excite the Apostle’s sympathy, and yet he reports the incident as being of special importance.  He calls attention to the fact that he was an eye-witness, and that there was something in it that should affect others as well as himself.  He says, “He that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also may believe.”  He explains why these incidents so deeply impressed him.  They recalled two prophecies of the Old Testament.  One was this, “A bone of Him shall not be broken.”  This reminded John of the Paschal Lamb which should be perfect in body; and of Jesus as the Lamb of God, by which name He had been called when pointed out to him as the Messiah.  All through life Jesus had been preserved from accident that would have broken a bone, and in death even from the intended purpose that would have defeated the fulfilment of the prophecy.