Seven Last Words of Christ #6

Lenten Meditation
April 1, 2009

Sixth Word
John 19.30, “It is finished.”

The artist makes the final stroke on the canvas, and the painting is finished. The surgeon ties off the final stitch. The operation is finished. You push back from the table, satisfied, full, the last drops of coffee cooling in the cup and the crumbs of cake clinging to the napkin. The meal is finished.

So many things come to an end. We live in time, you and I, so beginnings and endings make sense of our experience. Projects at work begin and end. Appointments begin and end. Relationships are more murky, but they, too, have their beginnings—just listen to a couple tell their story—and their ends, sometimes painful. Our main experience of the world is temporal, in time—chronos, in Greek. T.S. Eliot wrote, “For I … have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

What is so ordinary about Jesus’ death is that it takes place in real time. Each breath, each heartbeat, is measurable on a chart. In the horizontal plane of chronological time, he is nailed to the cross, lifted up, mocked. He dies in time. What is so extraordinary about Jesus’ death is that it also takes place outside of time and connects us to eternity. He dies before he should—the soldiers come to break his legs as an act of mercy, allowing his death to come more quickly, but he has already breathed his last. God’s mercy trumps that of soldiers … or disciples. The horizontal coffee-spoon reality is transformed by the verticality, the transcendence, of Jesus’ final moment.

The word tetelesthai (it is finished) conveys not only the end of something in time but the completion of something that stands outside of time—there is a fullness made complete in Jesus’ death, an action transforming the present. It is like a cup of water with a thin film of oil on the surface touched by a single drop of dish soap. The entire surface is transformed in every direction at once. When Jesus says tetelesthai, “it is finished,” everything, everywhere and every when, becomes different in the eternity of now. Past, present and future are transformed.

With Jesus’ death, what is finished isn’t like the final stroke on the canvas, the painting sold and hung. It isn’t like the surgeon’s work, now healed and never, we hope, to be needed again. It isn’t like finishing dinner, which we then begin to crave again in a few hours. What is finished in Jesus’ death is completed not just in time but outside of it, bringing time and space themselves into a sort of fullness that overflows in everlasting abundance, that burns with an eternal flame casting light through all of history.

We ourselves who have been baptized into his death are thus finished, complete, made whole. We who are in Christ receive newness of life, the paradox of salvation. Evil, sin, and death have no ultimate power. They come to an end. What endures brings wholeness, healing, love and light. What is finished, made complete on the cross, is our salvation.