It Is Finished: Time, Love, and the Completion of God

I want to share a thought with you – a sort of hypothesis I am exploring. It is the kind of thought that in certain churches will guarantee excommunication  – or at the very least ensure that your name is only ever mentioned in hushed tones – but it is too important not to share. It originates in my attempt to explore how several disparate ideas might coherently intersect with my theology. So I need to start by briefly explaining the threads.

The first thread has to do with the interconnectedness of all things. Not simply the poetic or ecological sense that we are all connected, but a deeper metaphysical and ontological claim: that existence itself is structured as a nested series of relationships. This idea finds expression in what Arthur Koestler called holonic theory—the insight that every entity is simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of a larger whole. Cells form organs, organs form bodies, bodies form communities, and so on. Every layer is embedded, entangled, never isolated. In John 1, we are told that through the Logos all things were made. The Logos is not simply the Word in a linguistic sense but the structuring principle, the inner logic of all that is. The Logos is the rational, creative breath that holds this holonic web together. So here’s the key question: is God external to this system, the architect standing outside the scaffolding? Or is God the ultimate holon—the One in whom all the nested parts are held and find their meaning? If the latter, then the divine is not aloof, but intimately entangled in the becoming of creation. And if God is the ultimate holon, then to be coherent within such a system, God must be constituted by what constitutes God—and that includes vulnerability.

Which leads to the second thread: the nature of time. Or more precisely, spacetime. Most of us live as if time is a line: past, present, future, a sequence of causes and effects ticking forward. But physics paints a more complex picture. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is not a fixed river flowing in one direction. It is part of the fabric of spacetime—a dimension woven into space itself, bending and flexing depending on speed and gravity. From this perspective, all moments exist simultaneously, like frames on a film reel. Our consciousness moves through them, giving us the illusion of linearity. Time, then, is not just chronology. It is relationship, orientation, interconnection. What if the cross is not merely a moment within time but a moment that reframes time? A singularity through which the timeless Logos enters temporality, not to observe it, but to inhabit it. If Christ is the Logos enfleshed, then the cross is not just the middle of the story—it is its centre. And from that centre, the whole timeline ripples with new meaning.

The third thread concerns the nature of love. Like any virtue, love cannot be real so long as it exists only conceptually. One of the persistent problems I have with the way we conceptualise heaven is that we invariably remove pain and suffering from it. Don’t misunderstand me: I have no appetite for suffering. I do not wish that anybody should ever suffer, but the reality is, looking back on my life, that many of my finest character traits were refined in hardship. I could never have developed patience or peace or self-confidence without first encountering circumstances that compelled their flowering. We often treat love simply as a feeling, or an ethic, or a commitment. Yet in the theological sense, we insist that love is not just what God does—it is what God is. “God is love,” writes John. But any virtue is incomplete so long as it remains in the abstract. If love is truly love, it cannot remain abstract. It cannot float above the wounds of the world. Real love, to be itself, must enter in. It must be moved, touched, changed. Love that does not suffer is not love. And if God is the ultimate holon, woven into the very structure of the cosmos, then this love must be forged through actual contact with pain. Not because suffering is inherently redemptive, but because estrangement is real, and healing is costly. This, I believe, is what the cross enacts. Not a divine blood payment, but the becoming of love. Not a sacrifice demanded by God, but the risk taken by God to remain love within creation.

So when Jesus says, “It is finished,” he is not closing a ledger. He is opening a reality. He is naming the moment when divine love is no longer beyond pain, but transformed through it. When the Logos, the structuring logic of all things, is made complete in woundedness. And if this moment is indeed the centre of the story—if time is relational, if creation is holonic, if love is real—then that moment has always been present. It ripples both backwards and forwards. It is not simply the end. It is the beginning.

The resurrection does not erase the cross. It transfigures it. Love, having gone to the lowest point, is raised—still bearing scars, still breathing peace. And from that wound, the world begins again.

It is finished. It has only just begun.