“They filled a sponge with sour wine and put it on a hyssop, and then put it to His mouth.
When Jesus therefore had received the sour wine, He said, ‘It is finished,’ and He gave up
the ghost” (John 19:29)
In all the obituaries in the newspapers one comes to the list of “survivors,” listing the members of the deceased’s immediate family. The term always fascinated me. My first thought is of an accident, where only one among them died, the others were spared; however, not often is that the situation. The deceased more commonly was the only person whose life was in jeopardy. Probably the term comes from the sense that all the family suffers when one is in critical condition. They all agonize with him or her; they all endure the length of illness until the end. In that sense they survive and regain ample strength to go on living bereft of their loved one.
But survival is a negative term when it comes to our Lord Jesus Christ’s traumatic cosmic event on the Cross. In saying, “It is finished,” and then expiring, we cannot understand just that He died, while His mother Mary, John and the extended family of disciples survived. The Greek term tetelesthai refers to a completion or a consummation. It describes the indescribable, explains the inexplicable and challenges us with the mystery that St. Paul called “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, but to them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (I Corinthians 1:23).
The Cross is the summation of Christ’s entire ministry, the fulfillment of the plan of the Holy Trinity, proof of the possibility to conquer the curse of Adam by total obedience to the will of the heavenly Father, and the portal to the Kingdom of heaven now opened to all humanity. Rather than being the end of a failed campaign, it is the start of a wholly new relationship between God and mankind.
The Cross far transcends the limitations of mere survival. We heard in the recent past the pop song “I Will Survive” that affirms a woman’s heroic and heartfelt shout to herself after being rejected and abandoned by her lover: “I have all my life to live, I have all my love to give, I will survive.” And we can only cheer her for her courage, applauding her strength of character. She will sweep up the broken pieces of her shattered plans and go on living, or as contemporary society prefers to state it: “Get on with her life,” putting the anguishing episode behind her.
Philosophers would identify that attitude as Stoicism—mustering the means to overcome the instinct to flee or to withdraw from life and to go inward where one feels she cannot be hurt anymore. The tendency comes to all of us at one time or another, especially when our plans are shattered, our goals crushed, and our self-image tattered. It’s understandable, but it’s not Christian.
When we look at the Cross and our Lord upon it, when we kiss His cross and thereby affirm our commitment to Him, we are making several significant points:
1. The worst has already happened; nothing more harmful to the world or to us is possible. What could be worse than to have the loving Lord enter time and history with a plan to save us, and to be treated in such a way by those He felt would be best capable of understanding what the Holy Trinity was about?
2. Again, St. Paul: “The Cross is to them that perish, foolishness; but to us who are saved, it is the power of God” (I Corinthians 1:18).
3. I am more than a spectator; I am a player on the field of life, and Christ’s victory through endurance gives me the courage and the means to share that triumph by taking up those crosses that come to me from time to time and bearing them bravely.