“It is finished”
Reflecting on Good Friday
On Good Friday, as we think about the last words of Christ, we come to this terrible declaration: “It Is finished.” Facing this is very truly “Not a time for words ….” (Eliot)
On Maundy Thursday – during the time of the vigil, contemplating the altar of repose – there was a deep sense of paradox. On the one hand, there was the beauty of the flowers and greenery along with the powerful sense of presence attested by the blessed sacrament on the altar, while on the other, there was the stark sense of the darkness all around – at the High altar and in the events of the Passion and Crucifixion.
All of this lay before us for contemplation in the deep silence of the night and brought to mind the words of T.S. Eliot:
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls…..
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed….
And that is just it, the entire drama of the Crucifixion is ultimately one of cosmically significant change – accomplished through a sequence of acts of horror culminating in death…
But this is not a death as the world knows it – this is a death to transcend death. To the secular world around us, death is indeed to enter the darkness in which all is finished.
To quote T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets again:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
But let us return to those stark and dark words of Christ on the Cross, that came at the end of the sustained torture to the point of death that was the whole point of Crucifixion; “It is finished.”
As we begin to think of this in terms of theology, more words of Eliot come to mind:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
And indeed, we do find that with seeming banality that the linguists and grammarians among us tell us something very dry about these last words from the cross, namely that word used here (τετέλεσται) is a verb and more exactly – as they stress – one in the perfect-tense form.
Why does such a dry datum of grammar – of all things – matter? Well, a perfect verb stands naturally in contrast to an imperfect verb, which is one that relates to an action that was habitual, incomplete or that still continues. And that indeed was the point: what is finished here is not simply ended, yet it is finished. It is in the truest ever sense perfect because, in this moment, the work of Christ becomes complete.
At this moment, therefore, in his cry of utter seeming bleakness, Christ did not utter a word of despair and “giving up,” rather this word declared an action and a moment brought to completion; it was a declaration that all had now been accomplished.
Thus grammatical nuance does, in the end, matter theologically because, through it, we are helped to understand that the cross stands before us, not as a tragic interruption of Jesus’ vocation, but as the moment in which his obedience, revelation of the Father, and saving purpose arrive at their enduring completion.
At Calvary, our Lord does not utter here a cry of desolation, or despairing resignation – rather this was a declaration of a saving work now done. 1
Hence Christian interpretation over the millennia hears in the words “It is finished,” the completion of the Servant’s work; the obedient one bearing sin; the pouring out of his life, all accomplishing what no merely human sufferer could accomplish, for the whole world.
The cry from the cross therefore gathers up, not just one prophecy, but the whole scriptural presentation of redemptive suffering.
This moment on the cross was, therefore, precisely not what the unbelieving world saw – for it is the moment in which his obedience, revelation of the Father, and saving purpose – all converge at their nexus of fulfillment.
Thus on the Cross we come to understand that the ancient words and prophecies of sacrifice, messianic hope, and promise come to fulfilment in the body of Christ.
As Augustine saw very clearly, Good Friday is not the collapse of God’s plan but its moment of ultimate revelation.
“It is finished” are not words meaning “My pain is over.” They mean rather: the obedience is complete, the Scriptures are fulfilled, the sacrifice is offered, the Passover is accomplished, and the work entrusted by the Father to his Son Jesus has been brought to its end.
And here we learn too something vital for ourselves – namely that salvation rests not on what remains for us to do, but on what Christ has done. This word “It is finished” also judges our pride. If Christ has finished the work, then we do not complete it by our merits, improve it by our moral efforts, or supplement it by our religious anxieties and scruples; rather, we are called to receive it by faith, and with the assurance appropriate to knowing that we are called to live from this point forward in a life of gratitude working towards the holiness we shall fully attain in the life to come.
The authentic Christian life begins not with feverish attempts by us to make redemption possible, but as something we begin to attain with astonished recognition as we come in contemplation of the cross and realize the great paradox of this ending – namely, that through it, redemption has already been accomplished once for all in the crucified Son; in the very moment when the world saw weakness, God revealed victory; at the very place where human eyes saw defeat, the Son announced completion.2
All this is why this last word is so powerful.
“It is finished” means that the Scriptures have reached their goal, the sacrifice has been offered, the enemy has been overthrown, the debt has been met, and the love of God has gone all the way to the end.
On the cross, then, Christ does not merely endure the last hour; he gives that hour its meaning. He does not merely die; he completes. He does not merely suffer; he saves. And because he has finished the work entrusted to him by the Father, the faithful may stand before the cross not in terror, but in adoration, gratitude, repentance, assurance, and in hope.
As we wait in contemplation, amidst the sure and certain hope that is the Easter joy we are coming to, I can but quote Eliot again:
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought,
for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing
From the second of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (East Coker)
1. St. John’s Gospel, has in fact been building up to this climacteric from the very beginning. Jesus had long spoken of doing the Father’s will and finishing the work given him to do. And St. John is very careful here.
Let us recall the progression and sequence here as the last movements in a scripturally ordered drama. St. John tells us that Jesus, “knowing that all was now finished,” had said, “I thirst,” specifically “to fulfil the Scripture,” where the immediate scriptural background was Psalm 69:21: “for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” There is also here in the background Psalm 22, where the righteous sufferer is mocked, his garments are divided, and his anguish is laid bare before God, John also tells us that Jesus’ bones were not broken, which places this death in the light of Exodus 12:46 and Psalm 34:20.
Thus do we understand that the crucified Lord is not only the suffering righteous man (dikaiosune); he is also the true Passover Lamb, the one in whom the deliverance of each and every one of us here today was and is accomplished through HIS sacrificial death.
And when John speaks of the pierced side, he explicitly invokes Zechariah 12:10: “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” so that even the wound itself becomes a sign that Scripture has reached its appointed hour. And behind all this stands the horizon of Isaiah 52–53.
2. And the Fathers are helpful here Where Augustine hears the voice of fulfilled prophecy: Athanasius sharpens the same truth with a note of triumph: death, that ancient tyrant, imagined it was seizing a victim, but in seizing Christ it met its conqueror; the cross becomes not the scaffold of defeat but the instrument by which death itself is undone.
Chrysostom, with his characteristic sense of the dramatic, sees that Christ bore the cross as a trophy over the tyranny of death, so that what the world mistook for humiliation was in fact a victory.