Just before he dies on the cross, Jesus utters these words: “It is finished!” What’s “finished”? When he speaks these words, he’s like the winner in the Olympic marathon throwing up his arms in triumph at the finish line. And his triumph here left him precisely in blood, tears, and helplessness. He’s won, but it’s cost him his life, tested his faith to the limit, lost him his popularity, scattered his friends, shrouded his life in misunderstanding, left him looking compromised, and isolated him in an unspeakable loneliness. So, what’s “finished”? At one level, what’s finished is Jesus’ own struggle with doubt, fear, and loneliness. What was that struggle? The painful, lonely, crushing discrepancy he habitually felt between the warmth and ideals inside his heart and the coldness and despair he met in the world. Everything inside of him believed that, in the end, always, it is better to give yourself over to love than to hatred, to affirmation than to jealousy, to the gentleness of the heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge. Everything about him pointed uncompromisingly towards the “road-less-taken” and revealed that real love means carrying your solitude and chastity at a high level. For him, as for us, it wasn’t easy to live that out. As scripture says, sometimes it gets dark in the middle of the day, we find ourselves very much alone in what we believe in, and God seems far away and dead. When Jesus utters those famous words: “It is finished!” it’s a statement of triumph, not just of his own faith, but of love, truth, and God. He’s taken God as his word, risked everything on faith, and, despite the pain it’s brought, is dying with no regrets. The struggle for faith, for him, is finished. He’s crossed the finish line successfully. “It is finished” also means that the reign of sin and death is finished. The forces of sin and death are finished because we can, in full maturity and utter realism, believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, in love even when we don’t feel it, and in God, even when God is silent. Faith and God deliver on their promise when we run the race to its very end.[1]
[1] Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s reflection: “Jesus’ Last Words”, April 2006.