We love stories with a happy ending. After a spell of struggle, our heroine learns what really matters and walks into the sunset, preferably with orchestral accompaniment. When The End lingers on the screen, we feel satisfied if all the loose ends have been tied up. The kiss in the rain seals the deal. The music swells, the picture fades to black, and we have no interest in what follows: arguments about the toothpaste lid, resentment over unwashed dishes. The happy ending is enough.
So when Jesus says from the cross, “It is finished,” it’s tempting to imagine a cosmic job well done — the divine equivalent of downing tools and wiping the brow. But what if “finished” doesn’t mean stopped? What if it means fulfilled — that creation finally recognised itself for what it truly is?
I’m passionate, intense, and prone to saying too much when silence would serve me better. I know what it means to swallow pride, to seek forgiveness, to give it. I’ve learned that people act from forces beyond their comprehension, and that healing begins not by accusing them, but by tending to my own wound. Forgiveness isn’t an event—it’s a journey. Painful, yes, but once begun, something curious happens: the memory of the hurt—once implacable as stone—begins to soften. If you’ve ever known forgiveness, you’ll understand what I mean. It’s as though the past itself becomes porous, rewritten by the decision to love.
Maybe time itself might be more malleable than we think. Perhaps love is the one force that travels faster than light — it doesn’t just move forward; it reaches backward too and transforms how we experience the past.
Physicists tell us that light behaves differently when we attempt to measure it — as if reality waits to be seen before deciding what it will be. I’m no physicist, but the Gospel seems to say something similar: the world becomes real when it is loved. Until then, it’s potential; seen dimly, as through a glass darkly.
At the cross, Love finally looks straight at us — at the whole wild universe — and says, “It is finished.” If quantum theory suggests that the universe exists as infinite potential possibilities until observed, the cross declares that the act of perfect love is that observation—the collapsing of all probabilities into divine meaning. Not the kind of collapse that destroys, but the kind that brings coherence: wave becoming word, possibility becoming presence.
I doubt that “It is finished” was intended as a concluding statement; I see it as an author’s note, scribbled in the margins of the story itself: “This is what I meant all along.” And if the retrocausalists are right—that the future can ripple backward, that what is decided in the present can somehow re-weave what came before—then perhaps Easter was never a three-day delay between death and resurrection. Perhaps resurrection is the condition under which death itself was always redeemed.
Of course, we still keep trying to tidy things up — to separate holy from unholy, past from future, saved from unsaved — as if God were anxiously colour-coding eternity. But Jesus seems to have retired that filing system.
Creation isn’t over – everything is not yet “very good” – it’s ongoing. Every time we choose to love instead of harden, to forgive instead of preserve our pride, another small piece of the world becomes real. And if that sounds sentimental, so be it. The universe, it turns out, may be run on sentiment — on a love stubborn enough to reach both backward and forward in time.
The salvation offered at the cross is not God changing Hen’s mind about us, but us finally catching up with a love that was already finished before time began.
One day, perhaps we’ll see the whole thing clearly. I suspect we will laugh (with not inconsiderable embarrassment) at how certain we were that time was a straight line and that God was keeping score. Until then, we get on with life after the cosmic kiss in the rain—the daily art of living the “happily ever after”: putting the lid back on the toothpaste, sharing the chores, keeping house with grace.
Vapors In The Wind 
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