Biblion Bible Commentary
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It Is Finished
John 19:28-30
28 After this, Jesus, seeing that all things were now finished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, “I am thirsty!” · WEB
Three verses for the death, and the last word is a single Greek word that a merchant would write on a bill.
After this, Jesus, seeing that all things were now finished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, "I am thirsty!" John 19:28.
The sentence is carefully built. He is described as seeing that all things were now finished — a settled awareness — and then speaking, which means even the cry of thirst is deliberate.
And it is the one moment in the account where his physical suffering is named by him. This Gospel has spent nineteen chapters on a man who offered living water to a Samaritan woman John 4:10 and stood up at a feast to invite anyone thirsty to come and drink John 7:37. He dies saying I am thirsty.
The Scripture in view is most likely the psalm that has been supplying this chapter — in my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink Psalms 69:21 — the same psalm his disciples quoted at the temple clearing.
Now a vessel full of vinegar was set there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop, and held it at his mouth John 19:29.
The sour wine was the soldiers' ration, cheap and refreshing, and offering it is a small mercy from men who had gambled for his clothes an hour before.
Hyssop is the detail this account alone gives, and hyssop is not a practical thing to hold a sponge on. It is the plant used to daub the blood on the doorposts on the night of the Passover Exodus 12:22, and it is being used at the hour the lambs are dying.
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished!" John 19:30.
In the Greek it is one word. It was the word written across a bill of debt when the account was settled — paid in full — and the word used of a task brought to completion. It is the verb of chapter seventeen, where he told his Father he had accomplished the work John 17:4, now said from the cross.
It is not a groan and not a surrender. Nothing about it says I am finished. It is an announcement that something has been carried through to its end, and it is shouted Matthew 27:50 by a man for whom speaking at all had become the hardest thing there was.
What is finished is the work described in the previous three chapters, and everything the New Testament says afterward about there being nothing left to add rests on this word.
Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
The two verbs are the last statement of the book's whole account of him. Bowed his head is the ordinary phrase for a man settling down to sleep, and it is the wrong order physically — the head drops after death, not before.
And gave up is active. He hands it over, which is exactly what he had said he would do: no one takes it away from me, but I lay it down by myself John 10:18.
He is not overtaken. He finishes, and then he goes.
settled What this mark means