As he was about to die, Jesus exclaimed, “It is finished.”
Imagine, if you will, that Jesus had said, “I am finished.” That would make sense to us. After betrayal, arrest, rough interrogation and accusation, flogging, and crucifixion, it would have been the normal human thing to think or utter as death neared. It is likely that the other two crucified that day, as well as the many thousands and thousands crucified in the ancient world, despairingly thought much the same on their crosses.
“I am finished.” It is what I would have thought and said were I on that cross. It would have been the gasp of a person giving up in the face of suffering and death. It would have been a resigned or bitter admission of defeat before circumstances and forces – religious, political, social, and physical – which could no longer be resisted.
But Jesus did not say, “I am finished.” He cried out, “It is finished.” Jesus’ exclamation – “It is finished” – was a cry of victory, as one commentator has astutely observed.[1] Following long and excruciating humiliation and suffering, at the brink of death, where all the world would see only utter defeat in its most desperate and stark reality, Jesus declared victory. This is not victory as the world sees it. This is victory as God and Jesus see it.
That little word “it” showed all the difference. When Jesus declared “It is finished” he meant his whole mission on earth was fully accomplished. What God had sent Jesus to do, Jesus did. On the cross, Jesus finished what God intended him to do to overcome sin and death, to restore us to God and to true life.
The way Jesus fulfilled his mission – the “it” of his exclamation – was to take on himself all that separates us from God and destroys us. In obedience to God and love for us, Jesus refused to wield sin and death in the world. Rather, he suffered our sin and our death so that they would be destroyed by God’s life-giving love, first in him, and then in us. By suffering and dying on the cross, Jesus accomplished this mission. As the painfully dying Jesus cried out in victory, “It is finished.”
Now, what Jesus finished on the cross for us, he wants to acconplish in and through us – namely, to live God’s love in the world against the forces of sin and death that seek to destroy us and others. May we, with Jesus, walk in the way of the cross. It may seem like defeat to the world, and even to us at times, but in God’s good purposes it is the way of true life and love.
[1] Newbigin, Lesslie. The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel.
No comments:
Post a Comment