John 19:30

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(30) It is finished.—That is (comp. John 19:28, and John 17:4), the work which God had given Him to do. (Comp. Notes on Matthew 27:50, and Luke 23:46.) This word is the expression by Jesus Himself of what St. John had expressed by saying, “Jesus knowing that all things were now finished, that the Scriptures should be fulfilled.”

The order of the seven words of the cross will be, (1) “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); (2) “Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43); (3) “Woman, behold thy son,” “Behold thy mother” (John 19:26-27); (4) “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34); (5) “I thirst” (John 19:28); (6) “It is finished” (John 19:29); (7) “Into Thy hands I commend My spirit” (Luke 23:46).

And he bowed his head.—This reminiscence of the very attitude of the last moments is peculiar to St. John.

And gave up the ghost.—Comp. John 10:18, and Notes on Matthew 27:50; Mark 15:37; and Luke 23:46. All the expressions used lay stress on the voluntary action of the death.

MacLaren's Expositions

John

AN EYE-WITNESS’S ACCOUNT OF THE CRUCIFIXION

CHRIST’S FINISHED AND UNFINISHED WORK

John 19:30. - Revelation 21:6.

One of these sayings was spoken from the Cross, the other from the Throne. The Speaker of both is the same. In the one, His voice ‘then shook the earth,’ as the rending rocks testified; in the other, His voice ‘will shake not the earth only but also heaven’; for ‘new heavens and a new earth’ accompanied the proclamation. In the one, like some traveller ready to depart, who casts a final glance over his preparations, and, satisfied that nothing is omitted, gives his charioteer the signal and rolls away, Jesus Christ looked back over His life’s work, and, knowing that it was accomplished, summoned His servant Death, and departed. In the other, He sets His seal to the closed book of the world’s history, and ushers in a renovated universe. The one masks the completion of the work on which the world’s redemption rests, the other marks the completion of the age-long process by which the world’s redemption is actually realised. The one proclaims that the foundation is laid, the other that the headstone is set on the finished building. The one bids us trust in a past perfected work; the other bids us hope in the perfect accomplishment of the results of that work. Taken singly, these sayings are grand; united, they suggest thoughts needed always, never more needful than to-day.

I. We see here the work which was finished on the Cross.

The Evangelist gives great significance to the words of my first text, as is shown by his statement in a previous verse: ‘Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, said, I thirst,’ and then-’It is finished.’ That is to say, there is something in that dying voice a great deal deeper and more wonderful than the ordinary human utterance with which a dying man might say, ‘It is all over now. I have done,’ for this utterance came from the consciousness that all things had been accomplished by Him, and that He had done His life’s work.

Now, there, taking the words even in their most superficial sense, we come upon the strange peculiarity which marks off the life of Jesus Christ from every other life that was ever lived. There are no loose ends left, no unfinished tasks drop from His nerveless hands, to be taken up and carried on by others. His life is a rounded whole, with everything accomplished that had been endeavoured, and everything done that had been commanded. ‘His hands have laid the foundation; His hands shall also finish.’ He alone of the sons of men, in the deepest sense, completed His task, and left nothing for successors. The rest of us are taken away when we have reared a course or two of the structure, the dream of building which brightened our youth. The pen drops from paralysed hands in the middle of a sentence, and a fragment of a book is left. The painter’s brush falls with his palette at the foot of his easel, and but the outline of what he conceived is on the canvas. All of us leave tasks half done, and have to go away before the work is completed. The half-polished columns that lie at Baalbec are but a symbol of the imperfection of every human life. But this Man said, ‘It is finished,’ and ‘gave up the ghost.’ Now, if we ponder on what lies in that consciousness of completion, I think we find, mainly, three things.

Christ rendered a complete obedience. All through His life we see Him, hearing with the inward ear the solemn voice of the Father, and responding to it with that ‘I must’ which runs through all His days, from the earliest dawning of consciousness, when He startled His mother with ‘I must be about My Father’s business,’ until the very last moments. In that obedience to the all-present necessity which He cheerfully embraced and perfectly discharged, there was no flaw. He alone of men looks back upon a life in which His clear consciousness detected neither transgression nor imperfection. In the midst of His career He could front His enemies with ‘Which of you convinceth Me of sin?’ and no man then, and no man in all the generations that have elapsed since-though some have been blind enough to try it, and malicious enough to utter their attempts,-has been able to answer the challenge. In the midst of His career He said, ‘I do always the things that please Him’; and nobody then or since has been able to lay his finger upon an act of His in which, either by excess or defect, or contrariety, the will of God has not been fully represented. At the beginning of His career He said, in answer to the Baptist’s remonstrance, ‘It becometh us to fulfil all righteousness,’ and at the end of His career He looked back, and knowing that He had thus done what became Him-namely, fulfilled it all-He said, ‘It is finished!’

The utterance further expresses Christ’s consciousness of having completed the revelation of God. Jesus Christ has made known the Father, and the generations since have added nothing to His revelation. The very people, to-day, that turn away from Christianity, in the name of higher conceptions of the divine nature, owe their conceptions of it to the Christ from whom they turn. Not in broken syllables; not ‘at sundry times and in divers manners,’ but with the one perfect, full-toned name of God on His lips, and vocal in His life, He has declared the Father unto us. In the course of His career He said, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’; and, looking back on His life of manifestation of God, He proclaimed, ‘It is finished!’ And the world has since, with all its thinking, added nothing to the name which Christ has declared.

The utterance farther expresses His consciousness of having made a completed, atoning Sacrifice. Remember that the words of my first text followed that awful cry that came from the darkness, and as by one lightning flash, show us the waves and billows rolling over His head. ‘My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ In that infinitely pathetic and profound utterance, to the interpretation of which our powers go but a little way, Jesus Christ blends together, in the most marvellous fashion, desolation and trust, the consciousness that God is His God, and the consciousness that He is bereft of the light of His presence. Brethren! I know of no explanation of these words which does justice to both the elements that are intertwined so intimately in them, except the old one, which listens to Him as they come from His quivering lip, and says, ‘The Lord hath made to meet on Him the iniquity of us all.’

Ah, brethren! unless there was something a great deal more than the physical shrinking from physical death in that piteous cry, Jesus Christ did not die nearly as bravely as many a poor, trembling woman who, at the stake or the block, has owed her fortitude to Him. Many a blood-stained criminal has gone out of life with less tremor than that which, unless you take the explanation that Scripture suggests of the cry, marred the last hours of Jesus Christ. Having drained the cup, He held it up inverted when He said ‘It is finished!’ and not a drop trickled down the edge. He drank it that we might never need to drink it; and so His dying voice proclaimed that ‘by one offering for sin for ever,’ He ‘obtained eternal redemption’ for us.

II. Now, secondly, note the work which began from the Cross.

Between my two texts lie untold centuries, and the whole development of the consequences of Christ’s death, like some great valley stretching between twin mountain-peaks on either side, which from some points of view will be foreshortened and invisible, but when gazed down upon, is seen to stretch widely leagues broad, from mountain ridge to mountain ridge. So my two texts, by the fact that millenniums have to interpose between the time when ‘It is finished!’ is spoken, and the time when ‘It is done!’ can be proclaimed from the Throne, imply that the interval is filled by a continuous work of our Lord’s, which began at the moment when the work on the Cross ended.

Now it has very often been the case, as I take leave to think, that the interpretation of the former of these two texts has been of such a kind as to distort the perspective of Christian truth, and to obscure the fact of that continuous work of our Lord’s. Therefore it may not be out of place if, in a sentence or two, I recall to you the plain teaching of the New Testament upon this matter. ‘It is finished!’ Yes; and as the lower course of some great building is but the foundation for the higher, when ‘finished’ it is but begun. The work which, in one aspect, is the close, in another aspect is the commencement of Christ’s further activity. What did He say Himself, when He was here with His disciples? ‘I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.’ What was the last word that came fluttering down, like an olive leaf, into the bosoms of the men as they stood with uplifted faces gazing upon Him as He disappeared? ‘Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages.’ What is the keynote of the book which carries on the story of the Gospels in the history of the militant Church? ‘The former treatise have I made. . . of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which He was taken up’-and, being taken up, continued, in a new form, both the doing and the teaching. Thus that book, misnamed the Acts of the Apostles, sets Him forth as the Worker of all the progress of the Church. Who is it that ‘adds to the Church daily such as were being saved?’ The Lord. Who is it that opened the hearts of the hearers to the message? The Lord. Who is it that flings wide the prison-gates when His persecuted servants are in chains? The Lord. Who is it that bids one man attach himself to the chariot of the eunuch of Ethiopia, and another man go and bear witness in Rome? The Lord. Through the whole of that book there runs the keynote, as its dominant thought, that men are but the instruments, and the hand that wields them is Christ’s, and that He who wrought the finished work that culminated on Calvary is operating a continuous work through the ages from His Throne.

Take that last book of Scripture, which opens with a view of the ascended Christ ‘walking in the midst of the seven candlesticks, and holding the stars in His right hand;’ which further draws aside the curtains of the heavenly sanctuary, and lets us see ‘the Lamb in the midst of the Throne,’ opening the seven seals-that is to say, setting loose for their progress through the world the forces that make the history of humanity, and which culminates in the vision of the final battle in which the Incarnate Word of God goes forth to victory, with all the armies of heaven following Him. Are not its whole spirit and message that Jesus Christ, the Lamb who is the Antagonist of the Beast, is working through all the history of the world, and will work till its kingdoms are ‘become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ?’

Now, that continuous operation of Jesus Christ in the midst of men is not to be weakened down to the mere continued influence of the truths which He proclaimed, or the Gospel which He brought. There is something a great deal more than the diminishing vibrations of a force long since set in operation, and slowly ceasing to act. Dead teachers do still ‘rule our spirits from their urns’; but it is no dead Christ who, by the influence of what He did when He was living, sways the world and comforts His Church; it is a living Christ who to-day is working in His people, by His Spirit. Further, He works on the world through His people by the Word; they plant and water, He ‘gives the increase.’ And He is working in the world, for His Church and for the world, by His wielding of all power that is given to Him, in heaven and on earth. So that the work that is done upon earth He doeth it all Himself; and Christian people unduly limit the sphere of Christ’s operations when they look back only to the Cross, and talk about a ‘finished work’ there, and forget that that finished work there is but the vestibule of the continuous work that is being done to-day.

Christian people! The present work of Christ needs working servants. We are here in order to carry on His work. The Apostle ventured to say that he was appointed ‘to fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ’; we may well venture to say that we are here mainly to apply to the world the benefits resulting from the finished work upon the Cross. The accomplishment of redemption, and the realisation of the accomplished redemption, are two wholly different things. Christ has done the one. He says to us, ‘You are honoured to help Me to do the other.’ According to the accurate rendering of a great saying of the Old Testament, ‘Take no rest, and give Him no rest, till He establish and make Jerusalem a praise in the earth, Christ’s work is finished; there is nothing for us to do with it but trust it. Christ’s work is going on; come to His help. Ye are fellow-labourers with and to the Incarnate Truth.

III. I need not say more than a word about the third thought, suggested by these texts-viz., the completion of the work which began on the Cross.

‘It is done!’ That lies, no man knows how far, ahead of us. As surely as astronomers tell us that all this universe is hastening towards a central point, so surely ‘that far-off divine event’ is that ‘to which the whole creation moves.’ It is the blaze of light which fills the distant end of the dim vista of human history. Its elements are in part summed up in the context-the tabernacle of God with men, the perfected fellowship of the human with the divine, the housing of men in the very home and heart of God; ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ a renovated universe; the removal of all evil, suffering, sorrow, sin, and tears. These things are to be, and shall be, when He says ‘It is done!’

Brethren! nothing else than such an issue can be the end of Creation, for nothing else than such is the purpose of God for man, and God is not going to be beaten by the world and the devil. Nothing else than such can be the issue of the Cross; for ‘He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied,’ and Christ is not going to labour in vain, and spend His life, and give His breath and His blood for nought.

Nothing but the work finished on the Cross guarantees the coming of that perfected issue. I know not where else there is hope for mankind, looking on the history of humanity, except in that great message, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has come, has died, lives for ever, and is the world’s King and Lord.

So for ourselves, in regard to the one part of the work, let us listen to Him saying ‘It is finished!’ abandon all attempts to eke it out by additions of our own, and cast ourselves on the finished Revelation, the finished Obedience, the finished Atonement, made once for all on the Cross. But as for the continuous work going on through the ages, let us cast ourselves into it with earnestness, self-sacrifice, consecration, and continuity, for we are fellow-workers with Christ, and Christ will work in, with, and for us if we will work for Him.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

19:19-30 Here are some remarkable circumstances of Jesus' death, more fully related than before. Pilate would not gratify the chief priests by allowing the writing to be altered; which was doubtless owing to a secret power of God upon his heart, that this statement of our Lord's character and authority might continue. Many things done by the Roman soldiers were fulfilments of the prophecies of the Old Testament. All things therein written shall be fulfilled. Christ tenderly provided for his mother at his death. Sometimes, when God removes one comfort from us, he raises up another for us, where we looked not for it. Christ's example teaches all men to honour their parents in life and death; to provide for their wants, and to promote their comfort by every means in their power. Especially observe the dying word wherewith Jesus breathed out his soul. It is finished; that is, the counsels of the Father concerning his sufferings were now fulfilled. It is finished; all the types and prophecies of the Old Testament, which pointed at the sufferings of the Messiah, were accomplished. It is finished; the ceremonial law is abolished; the substance is now come, and all the shadows are done away. It is finished; an end is made of transgression by bringing in an everlasting righteousness. His sufferings were now finished, both those of his soul, and those of his body. It is finished; the work of man's redemption and salvation is now completed. His life was not taken from him by force, but freely given up.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

It is finished - The sufferings and agonies in redeeming man are over. The work long contemplated, long promised, long expected by prophets and saints, is done. The toils in the ministry, the persecutions and mockeries, and the pangs of the garden and the cross, are ended, and man is redeemed. What a wonderful declaration was this! How full of consolation to man! And how should this dying declaration of the Saviour reach every heart and affect every soul!

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

30. It is finished! and he bowed his head and gave up the ghost—What is finished? The Law is fulfilled as never before, nor since, in His "obedience unto death, even the death of the cross"; Messianic prophecy is accomplished; Redemption is completed; "He hath finished the transgression, and made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in everlasting righteousness, and sealed up the vision and prophecy, and anointed a holy of holies"; He has inaugurated the kingdom of God and given birth to a new world.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

When Christ had tasted the vinegar, he said, It is finished; that is, I have now done and suffered all things which lay upon me in this life to do and suffer. Having said this,

he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. They are terms expressive of death, and our Saviour’s free surrender of his soul unto his Father.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar,.... Of the Roman soldiers, who offered it to him, either by way of reproach, or to quench his thirst; and he drank of it, as is very likely:

he said, it is finished; that is, the whole will of God; as that he should be incarnate, be exposed to shame and reproach, and suffer much, and die; the whole work his Father gave him to do, which was to preach the Gospel, work miracles, and obtain eternal salvation for his people, all which were now done, or as good as done; the whole righteousness of the law was fulfilled, an holy nature assumed, perfect obedience yielded to it, and the penalty of death endured; hence a perfect righteousness was finished agreeably to the law, which was magnified and made honourable by it, and redemption from its curse and condemnation secured; sin was made an end of, full atonement and satisfaction for it were given; complete pardon procured, peace made, and redemption from all iniquity obtained; all enemies were conquered; all types, promises, and prophecies were fulfilled, and his own course of life ended: the reason of his saying so was, because all this was near being done, just upon finishing, and was as good as done; and was sure and certain, and so complete, that nothing need, or could be added to it; and it was done entirely without the help of man, and cannot be undone; all which since has more clearly appeared by Christ's resurrection from the dead, his entrance into heaven, his session at God's right hand, the declaration of the Gospel, and the application of salvation to particular persons:

and he bowed his head; as one dying, and freely submitting to his Father's will, and the stroke of death:

and gave up the ghost; his spirit or soul into the hands of his Father; freely laying down that precious life of his which no man could take away from him.

Geneva Study Bible

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Expositor's Greek Testament

John 19:30. ὅτε οὖν … πνεῦμα. The cry, τετέλεσται, “it is finished,” was not the gasp of a worn-out life, but the deliberate utterance of a clear consciousness that His work was finished, and all God’s purpose accomplished (John 17:4), that all had now been done that could be done to make God known to men, and to identify Him with men. παρέδωκε τὸ πνεῦμα, “gave up His spirit,” according to Luke 23:46, with an audible commendation of His spirit to the Father. ἀφῆκε πνεῦμα in Eurip., Hecuba, 569; ἀφῆκε τὴν ψυχήν Plut., Dem., xxix. 5.

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

30. received] He had refused the stupefying draught (Matthew 27:34; Mark 15:23), which would have clouded his faculties: He accepts what will revive them for the effort of a willing surrender of His life.

It is finished] Just as the thirst was there before he expressed it, so the consciousness that His work was finished was there (John 19:28) before He declared it. The Messiah’s work of redemption was accomplished; His Father’s commandment had been obeyed; types and prophecies had been fulfilled; His life had been lived, and His teaching completed; His last earthly tie had been severed (John 19:26-27); and the end had come. The final ‘wages of sin’ alone remained to be paid.

he bowed his head] Another detail peculiar to the Evangelist who witnessed it.

gave up the ghost] The two apostles mark with special clearness that the Messiah’s death was entirely voluntary. S. Matthew says, ‘He let go His spirit’ (Matthew 27:50); S. John, ‘He gave up His spirit.’ None of the four says ‘He died.’ The other two have ‘He breathed out;’ and S. Luke shews clearly that the surrender of life was a willing one by giving the words of surrender ‘Father into Thy hands I commend my spirit.’—‘No one taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself’ It was the one thing which Christ claimed to do ‘of Himself’ (John 10:18). Contrast John 5:30, John 7:28, John 8:28; John 8:42.

On ‘the seven words from the cross’ see on Luke 23:34; Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46. Between the two words recorded in these verses (28–30) there is again a contrast. ‘I thirst’ is an expression of suffering; the only one during the Passion. ‘It is finished’ is a cry of triumph; and the ‘therefore’ in John 19:30 shews how the expression of suffering led on to the cry of triumph. S. John omits the ‘loud voice’ which all the Synoptists give as immediately preceding Christ’s death. It proved that His end was voluntary and not the necessary result of exhaustion.

Bengel's Gnomen

John 19:30. Τετέλεσται, it is consummated [finished]) This word was in the heart of Jesus in John 19:28 : it is now put forth by word of mouth; [—and it is put forth too before His death, which, however, itself was truly the principal head of those things which were to be consummated. What is meant is, His toil was accomplished; the prophecies were completed, not even excluding that as to the drink; and so now all things were tending to the one point, that He should deliver up His spirit by death into the hands of the Father. Most truly, therefore, He comprised in one joyous word the things past with those most surely and immediately about to be.—Harm., p. 574.]—κλίνας, having bowed) with His mind still present.[392]—παρέδωκε, He gave or delivered up) That which is delivered up, is permanent [still continues].

[392] Retaining His senses to the last, so that His bowing the head was not involuntary, but His deliberate act.—E. and T.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 30. - (d) "It is finished!" - the great victory of completed sacrifice. When he had received the vinegar, he said (τετέλεσται), It is finished! and he bowed his head and delivered up his spirit. The other evangelists record yet another word of Divine and sublime submission, "Father, into thy hands," etc. John simply adds the climax, and leaves the Divine, inscrutable, mysterious fact in its awful grandeur. The world's debt was paid. The types and symbolism of the old covenant had been adequately fulfilled. The mighty work, undertaken by him who would realize the expectations of the oldest prophets and the unconscious prophecies of heathendom, was done. Every iota and tittle of the Law had been magnified. The reality of which the temple and the sabbath were shadows, the priesthood and the offerings innumerable were figures, had all been realized. Τετέλεσται! Consummatum est! From the ground of human nature, from the heart of the Man in whom all the wants, perils, sins, mysteries of the human race were gathered up, has gone the adequate admission of the righteous judgment of God against that nature in its present condition. Death itself becomes, not his shame, but his veritable glory. The sin of humanity is branded with an eternal curse, more deep than any previous manifestation of the Divine justice could have produced; and yet it loses its sting. God reconciles the world to himself by the death of his Son, by this curse thus falling upon his Only Begotten. The earthly judges are condemned by their Victim. The great and last enemy is itself wounded unto death. The Seed of the woman bruises the serpent's head when that Seed receives the bruise in its own heel. The Paschal Lamb is slain. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. The prince of this world is east out. The reader must turn to the synoptic narrative for the other portents of the Crucifixion - the earthquake, the supernatural darkness, the rending of the temple veil, and the testimony of the Roman centurion. The silence of the Fourth Gospel concerning these events, on the supposition of its late orion, or on the hypothesis of the glorifying myth, or upon the suggestion that this evangelist was a theologizing mystic of the second century, who was merely fashioning the narrative to establish the doctrinal thesis of the Divine incarnation of the Logos, becomes entirely unintelligible. But the hypothesis that this eye-witness was supplementing other well-known narratives with particulars which came forcibly under his own observation, and made a deep impression upon his own mind, is suggested by every line. Dr. Westcott places "the seven words from the cross" in the following order: -

(a) Before the darkness -

(1) "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).


(2) "Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43).


(3) "Woman, behold thy son:... behold thy mother!" (John 19:26).

(b) During the darkness -

(4) "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34).

(c) After the darkness -

(5) "I thirst" (John 19:28).


(6) "It is finished!" (John 19:30).


(7) "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). It is a question whether the sixth or seventh word is the more triumphant. John 19:30

Vincent's Word Studies

Gave up the ghost (παρέδωκε τὸ πνεῦμα)

Rev., his spirit. Matthew, ἀφῆκεν dismissed. Mark, ἐξέπνευσεν, breathed forth (his life). So Luke, who adds, "Father, into thy hands I commend (παρατίθεμαι, see on Luke 9:16) my spirit."