I have a
full article refuting the popular Protestant understanding of τετελεσται (“it is finished”) in John 19:30:
I have added
the two following quotes from N.T. Wright and Raymond E. Brown that touch upon
the topic, but am reproducing them here, too, so they can get wider readership
on this blog:
So Jesus is executed as the ‘king of the Jews’. All four gospels report that this phrase was written out and nailed above his head on the cross. Just as condemned criminals in early modern Britain used to carry a placard telling the onlookers of their crime, so the Romans would put such a notice on the cross, as a warning to others. The gospel writers, of course, see the sign over Jesus’ head as heavily ironic, charged with meaning of which the Roman governor and his soldiers were ignorant—just as John sees Caiaphas’s statement about Jesus dying for the people (11.50). Pilate’s words point, despite his cynical intention, to the reality: the ‘king of the Jews’ must complete his scripturally rooted vocation by giving his life for his people, for the world, expressing and embodying the saving, healing, sovereign love of Israel’s God, the world’s creator. He should die, say the Jewish leaders, because ‘he made himself the son of God’ (19.7), just ass in Mark and elsewhere the bystanders at the cross mock Jesus and challenge him to come down from the cross if he is the son of God. But John’s readers and Mark’s readers know by now that it is because he is son of God that Jesus must go to the cross, that he must stay there, that he must drink the cup to the dregs. And he must do so not in order to rescue people from this world for a faraway heaven, but in order that God’s kingdom may be established on earth as in heaven.
That is why, in John’s account, the last words of Jesus are reported as being, ‘It’s all done’ (19.30), in other words, ‘It’s accomplished’, or ‘It’s completed.’ The echo is of Genesis: at the end of the sixth day, God completed all the work that he had done. The point was not to rescue people from creation, but to rescue creation itself. With the death of Jesus, that work is complete. Now, and only now, and only in this way can new creation come about. (Tom Wright, Simply Jesus: Who he was, what he did, why it matters [London: SPCK, 2011] 179-180, italics in original, bold added for emphasis)
The cry “It is finished” (vs. 30), which constitutes Jesus’ last words in John, has often been contrasted with the agonized “My God, my word, why have you forsaken me?” which constitutes Jesus’ last words in Mark/Matthew. (John is closer in tone, at least, to the last words reported by Luke: “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.”) . . . If “It is finished” is a victory cry, the victory it heralds is that of obediently fulfilling the Father’s will. It is similar to the “It is done” of Rev xvi 17, uttered from the throne of God and of the Lamb when the seventh angel pours out the final bowl of God’s wrath. What God has decreed has been accomplished.
The very last words of vs. 30 are so phrased as to suggest another theme in Johannine theology. Although Matthew and Luke also describe Jesus’ death in terms of his yielding up his life spirit. John seems to play upon the idea that Jesus handed over the (Holy) Spirit to those at the foot of the cross, in particular, to hiss smother who symbolizes the Church or new people of God and to the Beloved Disciple who symbolizes the Christian. In vii 39 John affirmed that those who believed in Jesus were to receive the Spirit once Jesus had been glorified, and so it would not be inappropriate that at this climactic moment in the hour of glorification there would be a symbolic reference to the giving of the Spirit. I such an interpretation of “he handed over the spirit” has any plausibility, we would stress that this symbolic reference is evocative and proleptic, reminding the reader of the ultimate purpose for which Jesus has been lifted up on the cross. In Johannine thought the actual giving of the Spirit does not come now but in xx 22 after the resurrection. (Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (xiii-xxi) [AB 29A; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970], 930, 931, italics in original)
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