The Grammar of Easter

At first glance, the Easter narrative seems to get its grammar “wrong.” Two of its most powerful phrases—“It is finished” and “He is risen”—don’t quite follow the patterns we might expect in modern, everyday English. We might instinctively rewrite them as “It has finished” or “He has risen.” Cleaner. More correct. More… ordinary.

But Easter was never meant to sound ordinary.

These phrases come from ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament was originally written. When Jesus says, “It is finished,” the word used is Tetelestai—a verb form that doesn’t just describe something completed in the past, but something completed with ongoing, lasting effect. In modern grammar, we might try to force it into a neat tense, but it resists that. “It is finished” holds both past and present in tension: the work is done, and it remains done. Forever.

Similarly, “He is risen” carries a sense that goes beyond a simple past action. It doesn’t just mean Jesus rose once, long ago. It means He is in a state of being risen—alive now, present now, active now. The phrasing stretches beyond grammar into something living and continuous.

So why would God allow—or even inspire—phrasing that feels grammatically “off”? Perhaps because truth this profound cannot be confined to tidy linguistic boxes.

Easter is not just an event to be recorded or remembered; it is a reality that spills across time. “It is finished” declares that nothing more needs to be added to the work of redemption—no striving, no earning, no rewriting. And “He is risen” reminds us that this is not history gathering dust, but life that still breathes.

In a way, the “incorrectness” is the point. It disrupts us. It makes us pause. It refuses to let us skim past sacred meaning with casual familiarity. The grammar bends so that the message can stand firm.

Because sometimes, when something is eternal, language has to stretch to hold it.