exaltation in glory. Identified as the Lamb of God from the beginning of the
Gospel, Christ is crucified, naturally, at the time of the slaying of the lamb in
the temple, rather than on the following day as in the other Gospels. And his
crucifixion is now depicted differently: he is not abandoned, for his mother
and beloved disciple are there, and his words are not the cry of abandonment,
as in the other Gospels. Rather, after addressing his mother and beloved
disciple, Christ says with stately majesty,‘It isfinished’, and he‘hands over
the Spirit’(John 19:30).‘It isfinished’, meaning not, as we might too easily
think, that his work on earth has now come to an end, but rather that the
project initiated at the beginning of the Scriptures, God’s own project to make
a human being, is nowfinished. This is unwittingly confirmed in the words
uttered by Pilate a few verses earlier (and only in John):‘Behold the human
being [ἄνθρωπος]’(John 19:5). The work of God is to make a human being:
this is the project he announces in the opening verses of Scripture and
completes at its end. With the passion of Christ, the work of God is complete,
and the Lord of creation now rests from his work in the tomb on the blessed
Sabbath. A hymn that dates to the early centuries, and is sung on Holy
Saturday, that period of stillness between the crucifixion and the resurrection,
makes exactly this point:
Moses the great mystically prefigured this present day, saying:‘And God blessed
the seventh day.’For this is the blessed Sabbath, this is the day of rest, on which
the only-begotten Son of God rested from all his works, through the economy of
death he kept the Sabbath in theflesh, and returning again through the resurrec-
tion he has granted us eternal life, for he alone is good and loves humankind [lit.
lovesἄνθρωπος].^4The project, the work of God announced at the beginning, is completed at the
end by one who is God and man. For every other aspect of creation, all that
was needed was a simple divine‘fiat’—‘Let it be!’But for the human being to
come into existence required one amongst us able to give their own‘fiat’.
We can see this very aspect brought out very clearly with the next gener-
ation of writers from Syria and Asia Minor, the homeland of the evangelist
John.^5 On his way to martyrdom in Rome, Ignatius of Antioch made a very
arresting claim. While being led under guard to Rome to be martyred there for
his faith, he wrote to the Christians in that city, imploring them not to
interfere with his coming trials nor to try to keep him‘alive’, as they might
(^4) Doxastikon for Vespers, Holy Saturday. Greek and English text (modified) in N. M. Vaporis,
The Services for Holy Week and Easter(Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1993).
(^5) Although much disputed over the past century, the overwhelming weight of the early
tradition that John, the beloved disciple, wrote his Gospel in Ephesus has recently been strongly
argued anew. Cf. C. Hill,The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), and Richard Bauckham,Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness
Testimony(Grand Rapids, WI: Eerdmans, 2006), 412–62.
Patristic Humanism: The Beginning of ChristianPaideia 21