“It is finished” here should be taken in the sense of consummatum est—it is consummated, fulfilled, brought to perfection. This is much more than “It is over.” Of a terrible ordeal that has been endured we may say, “That’s over with.” In that case we mean that it is consigned to the past; now we can get on with life. “It is finished” is quite the opposite. It is a life brought to completion. Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” From the cross he declares that he has done just that, borne witness to the truth, to the very end. Some, with Pilate, ask, “What is truth?” That question can be asked honestly, or, as with Pilate, it can be asked to preclude its answer. To those who sincerely ask the question, the answer proposed is this: The truth—the truth about everything—is Jesus Christ and him crucified. It is not the answer the world expected then or expects now.
For one thing, it appears that he is finished. By any ordinary measure this is not completion, but poignant failure. It is death. It is the demolition of all those grand hopes he had aroused. He started out announcing the coming of the kingdom of God, and he ends up here. Some kingdom. Some king. The jeering crowds around the cross are having the last laugh. He talked so splendidly: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” What kingdom? What comfort? What inheritance? The time has come to face the fact: It is finished, it is over.
This is the cross point in the Great Story, from the “In the beginning” of creation to the last words of the Bible, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” At the cross point, everything is retrieved from the past and everything is anticipated from the future, and the cross is the point of entry to the heart of God from whom and for whom, quite simply, everything is. Here the beginning and the end come together, along with everything along the way from the beginning to the end. What is the Word of God but the love of God? In the beginning, God intended love. Why did God create? For love. Not for necessity, for, being God, he needed nothing, but that love might be, and that it might be more and more. Love is necessary, for “God is love.”
He created out of nothing—ex nihilo—but his love. The Word is both his love and his beloved. “Without him was not anything made that was made.” Through him God loved us into being. When he formed Adam from the primordial muck, he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. He breathes love. Adam inhaled love. Here at the cross point, the new Adam exhales, “It is finished.” The first Adam breathes in and the second Adam breathes out, and both breathe love. What began in Genesis is now finished. What began there is that love should give birth to love. So it was that through the Word the first Adam came to be and, because he did not love, the Word became the second Adam, who bore the fault of all the Adams and all the Eves of aborted love. Here at the cross point, that great work is definitely finished. Here is the one person who did and who was what through the centuries and millennia the rest of us had failed to do and be. Quite simply and wondrously, he loved the Father as he was loved by the Father.
It is finished, yet time goes on. It is not over. Through all time, the cross point is the point of entry into his life of love, for that life and that love fill all time. “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” His eternity is not timelessness but the fullness of time, which means time fulfilled. The infinite is not formless but the form of Christ. It is from first to last, and at every point in between, cruciform, the form of the cross. Not any cross, but this cross; yet this cross is every cross. At a particular point in time, on a certain Friday afternoon on a dung heap outside the gates of Jerusalem, it is said of all time, “It is finished.” Yet it is not over. Now time, reformed because cross-formed, begins anew. The past and the future and this little in-between point we call the present are all in order. What happened at the cross point is what the first Adam was supposed to have done in the beginning. This is the Omega point, the end and the destiny of the love that was to give birth to love. It took the one who is both Alpha and Omega to restore life to love aborted.
Everything now and forever is to the glory of God. In his glory is our good. Humanity, said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, is the cantor and caretaker of the universe. In directing the universe to the praise of God, however, we do not simply put the cross behind us. Quite the opposite is the case. In a cruciform world, the cross is the epicenter of everything. “It is finished” does not mean that suffering and loss and the rivers of tears are things of the past. “It is finished” means that they do not have the last word. It means that love has the last word.
Excerpts from Death On A Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus.
