There is a very striking link between these two passages which is disguised, as far as I know, in all English versions at any rate. Not but what the Greek is forcibly and most correctly translated, whether by the word “accomplished” in Luke, or “finished” in John. But the fact is that the same word, though in different tenses, is used by both Evangelists. Hence it seems to me, that if we rendered the sublime word in John 19 (for it is only one in the original), “It is accomplished,” instead of “It is finished,” we should gain appreciably thereby. The Lord shrank from being “made sin” —that was, may we not reverently say, the bitterest ingredient in His cup of suffering, that and the consequent hiding of God's face? But there were other ingredients in that awful cup, and our Lord, in His perfect humanity, could not but be straitened to the utmost. “How am I straitened!” He says. At length, on Calvary, comes the triumphant cry, “It is accomplished.”
But indeed the link is but imperfectly established unless we note the force of the change of tense alluded to above. That in the verse in Luke is the aorist, and the emphasis is on the transaction, as taking place at, and in, a definite time. In the Johannine verse it is the perfect, and as all scholars know, the force is “the work abides accomplished,” its consequences are everlasting. Such is the indubitable force of these two passages. There is no precision like that of the Holy Scriptures.
R. B.