2 of 3

At the beginning of the Gospel of John we are told:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:15)

Creation has an end, creation is to be consummated, and the name of that end and consummation is Jesus.

Sin does not and cannot determine the character of Jesus' task. To be sure, he has come that we might be redeemed, but our redemption is but one movement in this drama of the beginning and end of time. In his book After the Spirit, Gene Rogers suggests that we let "redemption" name a plot defined by a starting point. We begin in slavery from which we are redeemed. The plot of consummation, however, is not determined by a starting point but by an endpoint: "it ends in joy, in that to whom one is united." Consummation is joy made possible by God's love, by God's friendship with us. In Jesus, redemption and consummation become movements in the one story of God's unrelenting love for his creation. That we—that is, we Gentiles—are included in the redemption of Israel is but a sign of the abundance of God's love and the completion of the new creation.

That is why "it is finished" is such good news. For Irenaeus, Jesus is the one who recapitulates all that God has done on our behalf until the final consummation. But this means that in Christ that recapitulation continues in the world. We, the body of Christ, through the Spirit, turn out to be "the finished." This, I believe, is what Athanasius meant by his dictum that God became human so that humans might become divine. Which means, as Richard Neuhaus puts it in his reflections on the seven words in his Death on a Friday Afternoon: "'It is finished.' But it is not over." God remains at work making us, his creatures, divine.

What is over is our vain attempts to be our own creators. What has happened is our overwhelming, says David Ford. We are overwhelmed by God's love through which we are able to see the beauty of God's care for all that is. Now it is possible for us to live at peace, to be God's agent of reconciliation, in a violent world. We are able so to live not because we have answers to all the world's troubles, but because God has given us a way to live without answers.

To so live does not mean we will be free of suffering, but it means that we can now live knowing it is through suffering that God's kingdom is manifest. Paul writes to the Colossians,

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of the body, that is, the church. I became its servant according to God's commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:24-27)

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49