Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025
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To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
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- Jesus’ sixth word on the Cross, “It is finished!” is a great expression of hope.
- To the eyes of the world, Jesus seemed like a failure. He was being executed in the most shameful way possible, treated as a criminal and mocked by most, stripped and exposed before the disdainful gaze of passersby, defeated by those who had made themselves his enemies and conspired in order to frame him for a capital crime. Beyond that, we know that Nazareth, where he had been brought up, was scandalized because of him (Mk 6:3) and twice cast him out. We know that most of those in Capernaum, which he then had made “his own city” (Mk 2:1) returned to their former way of life and “walked with Him no more” (Jn 6:66). The places where he had done his miracles, like Chorazin and Bethsaida, didn’t believe in him. Galilee in general was unsafe. Jerusalem really never received him. Members of his extended family thought he was out of his mind. By human metrics, Jesus seemed to be dying as a loser, as a failure.
- When he said upon the Cross, “it is finished,” some might interpret it as throwing in the towel, as giving up, as saying essentially “it’s over, turn off the lights, you win.” But it wasn’t. It was a triumphant statement in the midst of tremendous agony, “Mission accomplished!” He was actually achieving the purpose for which he had been sent. He was at that very moment saving the human race.
- At his Presentation, Simeon had prophesied that Jesus would be a sign of contradiction and we see that on full display on the Cross, which is architecturally and symbolically the greatest sign of contradiction of them all. Jesus’ apparent defeat was in fact his greatest triumph. I’ll never forget the words of Jesuit Father William O’Malley, who had played the role of Father Dyer in the 1973 film The Exorcist, and died last July. Many years ago, he came to the Diocese of Fall River to preach a day of recollection for the priests. He was blunt, earthy, eloquent and unforgettable. he stressed that we should never forget, in the midst of all that we might have to endure, that when we look at Jesus on the Cross, we have to see him and it as they are really are: the image of the happiest person who has ever lived at the moment of his greatest victory. The happiest person who ever lived at the moment of his greatest victory! For that reason, Jesus, he emphasized, did not whisper “It is finished!,” but shouted it! He did not say it as one battered to his knees and forced to wave a white flag. He shouted it like a conquering hero who has won his last and definitive engagement and brought everything to its triumphant conclusion. Jesus had prayed the previous night during the Last Supper, “Father, the hour is come. Glorify thy Son that thy Son may glorify thee. I have finished the work you have given me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with yourself, with the glory which I had before the foundation of the world.” That was what was now happening, in the supreme glorification of the love of God for us. Jesus had been born with this goal. This was what was to happen at the fullness of time. The most tremendous deed ever done upon this earth was being completed.
- Jesus at that moment was completing all of the Messianic prophecies. He had said to the apostles as they were about to head to the holy city, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem and everything written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled” (Lk 18:31). He was Abel betrayed by his brother, Isaac carrying the word for the Sacrifice, Jonah about to spend three days in the belly of the earth. Just as Zechariah had said, he was sold for 30 pieces of silver that would later be used to buy a field of blood. Just as Isaiah had declared, he would be sadistically treated, scourged, killed between criminals and pray for his torturers. Just as the Psalms had stated, he would be given vinegar to drink, his garments would be divided, his bones counted, his throat parched. With regard to all of these prophecies and more, Jesus was stating, we might even say with a sense of accomplishment, even joy, “They are all achieved!”
- He was also finishing of course the Passover meal. As Scott Hahn has made famous in his books and talks, Scripture scholars, in looking at the Gospel narratives from the point of view of the Jewish seder, have noted with curiosity and a certain astonishment that Jesus did not finish the rite. There are supposed to be four cups of wine, consumed at different times. Jesus and his disciples only drank three before they went out toward the Garden of Gethsemane. What happened to the fourth cup? Most believe the fourth cup was the “cup of suffering” (Is 51:22) foretold by Isaiah that Christ would drink on the Cross, the chalice Jesus in the Garden asked that the Father take away from him if it be his will (Mk 14:36). But Hahn argues that finishing the ancient Passover rite was also the reason why Jesus said on the Cross, “I thirst.” St. John tells us that Jesus said “It is finished!” immediately after the soldiers put a sponge full of wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to Jesus’ mouth (Jn 19:28-30). Jesus had said during the Last Supper, “Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mk 14:25). If Jesus had just drunk that wine, it must be that he was fully inaugurating that kingdom, which was the culmination of his work. He was finishing the Last Supper, the new and eternal Passover, on the Cross. He was putting into body language what he proclaimed in the Upper Room: “This is my body, given for you.” It was on the Cross that he himself became the fourth cup as he poured out “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, to be shed for you and for all, for the forgiveness of sins.”
- The expression translated into English, “It is finished,” is actually only one word in St. John’s original Greek: tetélestai. In ancient Greek that word was regularly used on invoices to signify “paid in full.” Jesus on Calvary was paying in full the total debt of what in justice we owe for our sins. Jesus was exclaiming that people don’t owe anything anymore. He was paying off all our bills. We were indeed bought, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “at a great price,” but Jesus was paying it all (1 Cor 6:20).
- That reality fills us with hope. Jesus’ example also helps us to hope that, despite various obstacles we may endure, with his grace, we can indeed persevere. We see this hope enfleshed in some great saints of perseverance. We can think of St. Paul who through labors, imprisonments, numerous brushes with death, five scourgings, three beatings with rods, a stoning, three shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, cold and exposure, in dangers from rivers and robbers, from Jews, Gentiles and “false brothers,” dangers in the city or in the wilderness, in toil and hardship, and the anxiety for all the Churches (2 Cor 11:23-33), was nevertheless able to exclaim to his spiritual son St. Timothy, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith!” (2 Tim 4:7).
- We see this perseverance in Saint Monica who prayed for 17 years for the conversion of her husband and mother-in-law and then another 15 years for the conversion of her son Augustine, but after 32 years not only saw them brought to faith but through that persevering prayer, through finishing those duties of spousal and maternal love, became a saint herself.
- We see it in Saint Polycarp, the mid-second century Bishop of Smyrna (Turkey) and martyr, to whom I’ve always had a devotion because his feast day is my birthday. As he was being brought to the place where he would be tried and killed, some of his captors tried to persuade him to save his life by saying Caesar was Lord or by offering incense to the statues of the pagan gods, but he replied, “I am resolved not to do what you counsel me.” Later, in the stadium, he was given a chance to save his life simply by cursing Jesus Christ. He replied, “For 86 years I have served him and he has done me no wrong, why would I betray him now?” He had chosen Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life and he was going to persevere in that choice until the end. They sentenced him to be burned at the stake and as they were tying his feet to the stake and were about to nail his feet, he said, “Leave me as I am. The one who gives me strength to endure the fire will also give me strength to stay quite still on the pyre, even without the precaution of your nails.” They lit the fire, and the Christian eyewitnesses noted in their account of his martyrdom that there was a Eucharistic culmination. “When a great flame burst out,” they recalled, “those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. … Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum.” He persevered unto the end and his martyrdom because a Eucharistic sacrifice.
- We see it in the American saint Rose Philippine Duschesne, who was a contemplative Visitation Nun in France whose monastery was closed by the French revolutionaries. She trusted in God and kept her eyes on him. She joined the Missionary Society of the Sacred Heart. Eventually she was sent to the United States, where she founded schools. Not only was the journey hard, but the word was really hard, as people didn’t appreciate French educational methods and accused them, she quipped, of doing everything except poisoning the children. But with hope in the Lord she soldiered on. Eventually she became too infirm the tough work of a teacher in the frontier, so they sent her to help Fr. Pierre de Smet in Kansas who was a missionary among the Potawatomi Indians, where she struggled to learn their language and eventually became blind. But she took on a mission of prayer. The community ended up dubbing her Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “The woman who always prays.” She persevered in prayer until the end, often in all night vigils, which communicated to everyone the real presence of God with them.
- All of them in life manifest the hope they received from Jesus’ perseverance to the end and their desire to share with others the fruits of Jesus’ victory. It’s important for us, too, to derive hope from what Jesus has won to give us confidence before the struggles and challenges we and the Church face now and will in the future. Jesus never promised that the Christian life would be easy. In fact he promised us the opposite, that it would involve a daily Cross, forgiving others without limit, turning the other cheek, going the second mile, giving our inner clothes along with our outer, being hated, calumniated, betrayed sometimes even by family members, and some of us martyred. What they did to him, he said, they would do to us. But each of us has signed up to follow that Crucified Savior. And he by this sixth word communicates to us that none of the obstacles or even all of the obstacles combined can defeat his purpose in us provided with hope in him, trust in him and persevere. He will bring good out of the evil we endure. He will turn even crosses and stakes into pulpits by which we can show preach in body language that Christ is worth living for and dying for and in him hope never disappoints. This is what has inspired the martyrs and the saints to persevere unto the end. And this is the gift Christ wants to give us and help us share with the world.
- And so we finish by praying: “Hail O Cross, the culmination of divine love to the extreme, our only hope. Help us to bring that hope without end to the world!”
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