“It is finished.”
The sixth word of the Crucified in Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya’s ordering of the last words of Christ on the Cross is from St. John’s account of the Passion. John’s last word of Christ is the penultimate word in the sequence of the seven last words. “It is finished,” Jesus says, “and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” It is a profound and moving moment.
“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us in the Epistle for today while the Gospel speaks about the Comforter, “the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father,” who “shall testify of me,” Jesus says, even as we also are to bear witness in the face of hostility and persecution. What kind of ending is this?
“It is finished” signals the completion and ending of all that belongs to human redemption in terms of the overcoming of sin and evil through the perfect sacrifice of the Son to the Father. It expresses the meaning of the coming of Christ to “do the will of him who sent him.” What is that will? To redeem the whole of creation. All that goes forth from God returns to God. Such is the radical truth of creation even in the face of negation of God’s will by sin and death. There is no truth apart from the will of God.
Ascension Day marks the ending of the mission of the Incarnate Son in his going forth and his return. It is his homecoming but one which establishes our homeland. Here we have, as Hebrews famously puts it, “no continuing city” (Heb. 13.14). We have our true abiding in God. Christ’s return to the Father is the completion of the work of redemption accomplished in his body. His return is the exaltation of our humanity, as the Fathers’ note, as well as the restoration of the whole of creation to its truth in God. Christ’s Ascension then leads to his Session, to his being seated at the right hand of the Father. This is a powerful image, a way of representing God’s providential rule made manifest in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. They end or culminate, we might say, with the Ascension and the Session.
But the radical meaning of these Scriptural and Credal doctrines so easily escapes us. We forget that it happens in the body of our humanity which Christ assumes from Mary. It means that we in our humanity are given a vision of our place with God in Christ; in short, that as he is so shall we be also. What that means exactly is beyond our conceiving and imagination. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him.” Yet it is enough to say that as he is so shall we be also for it is about our being gathered to God, not God being collapsed into the confused agendas of our day. The Ascension testifies to the truth of creation and its redemption in Christ. As the great Ascension hymns emphasize, the risen and ascended Christ shows the marks of the Cross. They are the marks of divine love, the testimony of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.
Thus the Ascension is not and cannot be a flight from the reality of the body and the material world as if such things were evil. Rather the Ascension is the culmination of the lessons of the Resurrection, the teaching that the things of the body and the world are made adequate to the life of the Spirit which is the true and only source of life and light. The Session reminds us that God is King.
“Will ye now hear the end of all?” Lancelot Andrewes asks in a Pentecost sermon and answers:
By this means God shall “dwell with us” – the perfection of this life; and He dwelling with us, we shall dwell with Him – the last and highest perfection of life to come … So the text comes about round. It began with an ascension, and it ends with one, began with Christ’s, ends with ours. He ascended, that God might dwell with us; that God dwelling with us, we might in the end ascend and dwell with God. (Sermon # 7 on Pentecost).
All these matters complement the sixth word of the Crucified. As Jesus says to Pilate “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn. 19.11). God is the ultimate authority, the beginning and end of all things living. God, Aquinas states, is the beginning and the end of all rational creatures, especially human beings. Ascensiontide shows that teaching. It brings to light the radical meaning of Christ’s word, “It is finished.”
The radical meaning is that all that opposes God, all sin and evil, past, present and to come, has been overcome in the love of the Son for the Father who bears all sin and evil in his body on the Cross. His word articulates and proclaims the meaning of salvation. It is about the return of all things to God through the loving sacrifice of the Son for the Father. This is itself the making known in terms of the body and the world of what belongs to the life of the Trinity. Something happens, to be sure, for that is the nature of the created world but what happens has its true ground in God himself, the source and end of all things.
Thus, “it is finished” brings to our remembrance the purpose of God for our humanity. We have an end and a home with God. He is our true end. “The end of all things” for us is always “at hand” in Christ, and, therefore, as Peter puts it, “be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.” Ascensiontide is really all about prayer; the lifting up of all things to God to whom all things have been raised up in Christ’s homecoming to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is really the moving image of the Ascension. “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.” Nothing captures so succinctly and completely the mission and witness of the Church. It is about gathering all of the confusions and uncertainties of our disordered world to God in prayer. In him we have our end. It is accomplished and perfected in Christ’s sacrifice and in prayer we continue to participate in that saving work, desiring that the good work of God in us may be perfected unto the day of Jesus Christ. In him, all is finished and all is perfect. That is the ground of our prayer, our seeking the will of him in whom we have our perfect end. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,” as Augustine puts it.
The sixth word of the Crucified illuminates the purpose and end of God’s will for us most profoundly and most simply in his doing the will of the one who sent him. By prayer and witness we participate in that self-same endeavour. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God is the king of all creation whose will is our good.
“It is finished”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday After Ascension Day, May 2023