It is finished

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 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 already felt ahead of you. He went into the God-forsaken dark first, and He came out the other side 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. 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 dark is not the end of the story. It is finished is.