It is finished
The cross
The cross is the ultimate disconnect, and it speaks two words that should not be able to live in the same hour. The first is desolation. Out of the darkness over the whole land comes the most forsaken cry ever uttered: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me. The communion at the very center of reality — the Son with the Father, before all worlds — seems, for one unbearable moment, to tear. There is no softening this. He is not performing abandonment; He is in it. And then, from the same cross, in the same dying, comes the other word, and it is not a word of defeat. It is finished. Not I am finished, not it is over and lost, but the work is done, accomplished, complete. The thing He came to do has been carried all the way through to the end. So the deepest rupture the universe has ever known is, at the very same instant, its deepest completion. The tearing and the finishing are one act. What looks from below like the end of everything is, from the cross itself, the accomplishing of everything.
“When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished. He bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.”
— John, at the cross — John 19:30 (WEB)
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This is Disconnect at its furthest reach — the Son forsaken, the rupture total. Yet the phase reveals its secret here: the very same break is the work completed. Disconnect asks you to trust that even the bottom, even the dark where God seems gone, can be the place where something is finished rather than the place where you are.
When your own forsakenness is at its worst — when God seems to have torn Himself away and left you alone in the dark, when the prayers go up and nothing comes back down — the cross does not hand you an explanation. It hands you a companion. Even that desolation has been entered, borne all the way to the bottom, and turned into finished work. There is no abandonment you can feel that He has not felt ahead of you; He went into the God-forsaken dark first and came out calling it accomplished. So when you cannot sense Him, the question is not whether He is real but whether your feeling is the final word. It is not. Your dark is not the end of your story; the word He finished over the worst hour, it is done, is. The cross says the worst hour you will ever live was walked through by the Son, and on its far side stands a word you cannot yet say but He has already spoken over it: finished.
The Church has known hours that felt like outright forsakenness, seasons when whole Christian civilizations collapsed and the Body was stripped of everything it leaned on while the heavens went silent. Yet the cross stands at the very center of the faith precisely as the disconnect that accomplished everything, the rupture that was also the completion. So the Church in its darkest passages has not fallen out of the story of its Lord; it is walking the shape He walked first. Forsakenness, public and total, is no more the end of the Body than it was the end of the Son. From the far side of the worst the Church will ever endure, the word already spoken over it is not defeat but the same finished work.
What cannot be shaken is the finished work itself. Feelings of abandonment come and go; the cry in the dark is real and then it passes. But what was accomplished on that cross is done, and nothing can undo it. When everything else is torn away, the completed work of Christ remains, finished and unshakable.
- Where do I feel most forsaken right now, and have I let that feeling become the final word?
- Can I believe that Christ has already walked through the exact dark I am in?
- What changes if the worst hour of my life is met not by an explanation but by a finished work?
Lord Jesus, in the dark I have wondered if You forsook me. You know that cry; You made it first. Thank You that even my forsakenness has been entered and borne by You. When I cannot feel You, hold me to the word You finished over it: it is done. Amen.