“It ain’t over till it’s over,” said Yogi Berra famously during the 1973 National League baseball pennant contest. His New York Mets were far behind at that point, but managed to come back and clinch the division title that year.
Of course, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” is what logicians call a tautology, a statement which is true by the very meaning of its words, a statement which, logically, cannot help but be true. As such, it’s literal meaning does not really offer much in the way of encouragement for a losing team… or to a man dying on a cross. Nor, we might add, is the strict sense of Berra’s saying much hope in the middle of a pandemic for a world listening to reports of how many got sick and how many died each day.
As we come now to the fifth Sunday in Lent, the third Sunday on which we will not have gathered physically in one place worship, we turn to the word from the Cross in which Jesus declares, “It is finished.” This sixth last word of Jesus is found in John 19:30 and follows right upon last week’s fifth word, “I thirst.” From Luke 23:46 we may discern that in the same verse John also alludes to but does not quote the last last word, the seventh, about Jesus commending His Spirit to God the Father.
For the last two Sundays I have pointed forward to this week’s sixth saying from the Cross, noting that it is anything but despair. It’s meaning can be a little ambiguous in English, but not so in the Greek of the New Testament. To be “finished” in English can mean simply to have come to an end, to be over and done with in some final way. We say of a person with a terminal illness, “She’s finished,” or, as may also be on our minds right now, of a failed business, “It’s finished.”
But the word in Greek, tetelestai (again, like the fifth word from the Cross, literally a single word) does not mean at all the end of a thing or of a life. It means a completion, an accomplishment, even a perfection of something. It’s what an artist says after the last brush stroke on a painting or a carpenter exclaims after having driven the last nail in a new house. Jesus was not bemoaning the end of His life. He was declaring that the work He came to do was accomplished. He had triumphed.
It is paradoxical and important that Jesus uttered “It is finished” from the Cross. One would think He would have said it to Mary or Peter after the Resurrection, when He was once again standing there alive and whole. But, no, Jesus declared His work accomplished while He was still hanging there. That’s actually good news for us as we confront our present trials of all sorts. We need to remember that even in the midst of struggle and pain our Lord declares our salvation completed and sure.
Which all means I need to quote again Father Richard John Neuhaus, and his excellent book on the seven last words, Death on a Friday Afternoon. Jesus completed His work even before the whole story came to its glorious culmination on Easter morning. It was finished on the Cross, but it was not quite over, as Neuhaus says about us, “‘It is finished,’ but it’s not over.”
Thus we live in this strange in-between time enjoying an accomplished salvation that is often called, “now, but not yet.” Jesus has done everything necessary for us, but we still live and strive and sometimes suffer, waiting for what He has done in us to be completely done. As John would write later in I John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now [that’s what He accomplished on the Cross]; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
Our salvation is accomplished. We are waiting for Jesus now to make us like Himself. That part’s not over till it’s over.