It is finished. It is complete. It is whole. It is
accomplished. Its purpose is fulfilled. It is perfect.
Oh, how I yearn to say those words myself … but my
perfectionist soul is never fulfilled. It’s always on the lookout for
improvement. My work must always be better; my list is never complete; my
actions are always lacking in some way. It’s an exhausting way to live. On my
own deathbed, I’ll likely cry out in frustration, “Wait, I’m not finished yet!
Just one more time, God, and I’ll get it right.”
So I marvel at Jesus’ last cry in John’s Gospel, “It
is finished!” And I wonder, just what
“it” is? Jesus doesn’t say, “I am finished.” Or even “My suffering is over.” He
doesn’t say, “My earthly life has come to an end.” Or “My life goals have all
come to fruition.” Just before he takes his last breath, Jesus pronounces a
much broader and more mysterious completion.
If we look at the other places in John’s writings
where Jesus uses this verb or its related noun--accomplishment, wholeness,
perfect end--we can see clearly that the “it” that Jesus’ death brings to
fulfillment is the powerful, self-giving Love of God.
John writes, “Having loved his own who were in the
world, Jesus loved them to the end.”
John’s first letter says, “If
we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
It
is love. In his human dying, in his presence with us into the depths, Jesus
brings to fulfillment the life-giving, ever-generative Love of God.
This is the kind of finish that my breathless,
perfectionist soul needs. At its worst, religion can encourage my
perfectionism, my need to do more, to do better. But not here. Not here, face
to face with the vulnerability of Love poured out on the Cross. The fulfillment
of love isn’t a striving. It isn’t a duty to cross off of a universal to-do
list. It is an outpouring of love, from Jesus to us, then from me to you, from
you to me, from us back to Jesus.
In Genesis, when God created the world, God too pronounced
the work, “finished,” and “very good,” and God rested. But God wasn’t finished
with the world. God wasn’t finished with loving the world, with creating and
upholding it at every moment.[1]When
Jesus cries out that God’s love has been fulfilled, this end is also only the
beginning, only the beginning of God’s New Creation, a New Creation in which divine
Love is victorious even over death, where it lives in and around and between us,
Christ’s Body, making all things new, making all things—even the imperfect ones—whole.
