“Consummatum est” – “it is
finished”. It is
the penultimate word of Christ from the Cross and yet, it seems to signal a
note of finality, an ending note. “It is finished”, Christ says, as
John tells us. In his gospel, it is Christ’s last and final word from the
Cross. And yet, it is not the last word, but only the next-to-the-last
word in the tradition of the Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross.
But if that were not enough to
give us pause to think just what it means to say “it is finished”,
there is as well the additional perplexity and even paradox that this day
which we call Good Friday falls this year on March 25th,
the day which also denotes the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
a day which marks “the beginning of Christ’s story”, we might say,
the day which, until the mid-eighteenth century in England at any rate,
actually marked the beginning of the Christian year, Lady Day signaling the
Annunciation, the conception of Christ, the beginning of the story of Christ
with us. Wonderfully and providentially, we are reminded of how we
have our beginning and our ending in Christ on this day.
This conjunction of The
Solemnity of Good Friday and The Feast of the
Annunciation occurs every once and a while, of course. It did in
1608, for instance, and moved the poet/preacher John Donne to reflect on
that paradoxical conjunction of Christ’s coming to us and his going from us,
his coming to us in the Annunciation, his conception in the womb of Mary,
his going from us in his death on the Cross, his passion; “this doubtful
day / of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away”. As he
suggests “this day hath shown, / Th’abridgement of Christ’s story, which
makes one /… Of the angels’ Ave, ‘and Consummatum est.”
“Th’abridgement of Christ’s
story”. It is a nice image,
conveying the idea of the whole story of Christ captured in the conjunction
of the Annunciation and the Passion. In some sense, “it is
finished”, then, complete, as it were. The story has its ending
concurrent and congruent with its beginning. But to what end the
story? By which I mean, what is the purpose of the story? What
is the end in the sense of the telos?
Τετέλεσταί, in the Greek, Jesus
says, meaning, it is accomplished, fulfilled, or realized, even, perhaps,
with the sense of perfection. But is the end of the story Christ’s death on
the Cross? To what end, that is to say, to what purpose? The
redemption of our humanity is the answer, our atonement.
We contemplate the death of
Christ on the Cross on Good Friday. The world is full of the
spectacles of hideous and horrible deaths, never more so than in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in terms of the mind-numbing numbers
and gruesome nature of the atrocities and the carnage that is constantly
before us, a barbarity greater than any form of barbarity in human history.
Our modern history, in some sense, and without much exaggeration, is the
story of holocaust upon holocaust, the story of the barbarity of reason
against all reason and truth.
And yet, in a sense, it begins
and ends here with the Passion of Christ. Why? Because the death
of Christ means the death of God, make no mistake. Therein lies the
full horror and the utter folly of our humanity. It lies in the
dreadful perversity of our humanity to attempt to annihilate God. Why?
Because we would be gods. We want to be the centre of the universe and
we are not. We rage not just against the limits of the created order
but against the Creator himself. But we do more than raise our fists and
curse God. We crucify him.
The whole point of Holy Week and
especially its culmination in the events of Good Friday is to make us see
what our sins and betrayals really mean. God gives himself into our
hands so that we can do with him what we will. What we will is to
crucify him. That is the meaning of Christ’s story from the
perspective of our wills. We contemplate exactly what our willful
atheisms actually mean – the attempt to obliterate God from the horizons of
our minds and from reality itself. It is made visible to us in our
betrayals of Christ. He is at once true God and true Man. In him
we see the truth of our humanity, the humanity which we deny in killing him.
In him we see that true humanity lives and dies at one with the will of God.
In him we see that true humanity finds its fulfillment in relation with God
through whom we live in relation to one another. And not otherwise.
What, then, is finished?
Our humanity? God? No. What is finished is all that
belongs to the work of human redemption, all that belongs to the
divine will to restore our humanity to its end in God, to our atonement, to
our being at one with God. Our telos is with God. God is
with us. That is the great good news of the Annunciation – “the
Lord is with thee”. But what do we do with the God who is with us?
That is the end of our story, the story of human folly and wickedness.
We crucify God. We visit upon God nothing less than the whole pageant
of human sin and evil. He bears the sins of the world, past, present
and future; the whole meal-deal of human wickedness is portrayed in the
crucified Christ. The whole meaning of all sin, of all evil, is made
visible in the crucified Christ. “It is finished”, says Jesus,
meaning that he has borne it all. He has taken upon himself all that belongs
to humanity’s rejection of God, our rejection of truth and honour, our
rejection of goodness and honesty, our rejection of love and kindness.
Paradoxically, in denying God we deny ourselves.
The good news of Good Friday
somehow lies in the realization that in killing God, we kill ourselves.
In the death of Christ, we contemplate the death of ourselves. But
there is even greater good news to Good Friday. The death of God is
the death of death. Therein lies the full meaning of Christ’s
penultimate word, “it is finished”. In the death of Christ, God
has taken not just the idea but the reality of death and suffering into
himself, into the heart of God. Nothing is added to God but everything
is changed for our humanity. Death is changed. “Death be not
proud”, as Donne puts it in a famous sonnet, for “Death shall be no
more, Death thou shalt die”.
It was the existential prophet
Nietzsche who proclaimed that “God is dead”. He had in mind, I
think, the smug complacencies of the nineteenth century middle-class who, in
his view, had conflated God and religion with their own material comfort and
prosperity. If God is conflated with the social, economic and
political order, then, in effect, there is no God. God has simply
become a cipher for your own will to power. By the death of
God, Nietzsche also meant the complete rejection of the intellectual
traditions from Plato onwards, the complete rejection of metaphysics, of the
will to truth, we might say. There is only our willfulness.
But this, too, we are given to
see in the crucifixion of Christ. In the crucified Christ we see the
full spectacle of our willfulness. In him “it is finished”.
But if left simply at that, we would see only the negative side of our
“end”. The telos of our humanity is about an end with God
that shall not end and that is something positive. The will of Christ
to bear the full weight and meaning of our willfulness against God and the
reality of the created order signals the completion of our humanity, its
perfection as found in the will of God, a perfection or end that has
gathered death into itself. “It is finished”, even the
consummation of death.
Out of the suffering and death
of Christ, God perfects our humanity. He makes something out of our
will to nothingness. “It is finished” signals the ultimate
truth of our humanity over and against our lies, namely, “thy will be
done, on earth as it is in heaven”. Outside of that there is only
the same old, same old vanity of human wishes and fantasies. We
have no truth apart from the truth of God. “It is finished”
returns us to the truth of God. It signals the redemption of our
humanity, the fulfillment of the divine purpose for our humanity realized
through the forms of our rejection of God. “Then said I, Lo, I come
(In the volume of the book it is written of me) to do thy will, O God” (Heb.
10. 7). “I have come”, Jesus says, “to do the will of him who
sent me”, the will of the Father.
“It is finished”.
God has placed himself in our hands to do with him what we will. We
have had our way with him. “It is finished”. He has borne
it all. But this sense of ending only gives way to the last word in
the tradition of the Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross, “Father,
into thy hands I commend my spirit”. Having completed the work of
human redemption, he places himself in the hands of the Father. We are
returned to the will of God. We await what comes from the hands of the
Father through the sacrifice of the Son in the will of the Spirit. We
are returned to the hands of God, to our beginnings but only through this
ending, “it is finished”.
“It is finished”