Seventh Word from the Cross: 'Into Your Hands I Commend My Spirit'

A Sermon originally preached on Good Friday 2013

After the Sixth Word’s rousing climax to John’s Passion, it can be difficult for the Seventh Word to seem anything but flat and somewhat lifeless. The Word ‘It is finished’ is a crowning note of glory, marking the completion of a new creation. It can be difficult to remember that for Luke, this final Word is just as much a shout of triumph. Jesus does not meekly utter a whispered prayer to his Father, he cries with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’

Oddly enough, this has echoes of what Jesus says in John’s Gospel. There, he says ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’ A bit further on, he says, ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.’

So now on the Cross, Jesus says that he is the one handing over his spirit (that is, his life) to the Father. In all the drama of the Good Friday Passion, Jesus is not a passive object, simply suffering all these indignities. Ultimately, he is the one in control of events. This is how he can stay so serenely calm in the midst of all his sufferings, and in Luke, especially so. Matthew and Mark have Jesus cry with a loud voice, but that’s just a tidying up of the Greek. I’ve seen translations that say he screamed, but the word is literally far more like ‘bellowed.’ He bellowed like a bull, and his cry in Matthew and Mark is one of abandonment: why have you forsaken me. Luke uses a different word: here Jesus simply raises his voice, as it were, and his final words are ones of trust and confidence.

Earlier in the Gospel, we saw how the scribes and chief priests tried to lay hands on Jesus, but couldn’t. Even now, in his Passion, when Jesus has already noted that this is [their] hour, and the power of darkness, they are not the ones in charge. Now the sun’s light has failed, and there is darkness over all the land, but darkness does not have the final word. Jesus suffers, true, but he suffers because he so chooses. He suffers in obedience to the Father’s will. There is no bitterness or compulsion here: the way Luke tells the story, Jesus is on that cross precisely because he chooses to be, and he will die on his own terms.

Although Luke has not been building up John’s theme of creation, he takes care to point out that this is Friday, the Day of Preparation for the Sabbath. As he dies, Jesus does not just give up the ghost, trusting himself to his Father’s care. He is also entering into the Father’s Sabbath rest. Now, he will rest in the tomb, but not in the sense that he needs to regain his strength after the exertions of the Passion. He rests in the sense that with his death, the new creation has been brought to completion.

Deep darkness falls. Everything has ended. The church has long speculated about what happened to the Spirit of Jesus during those hours of death. The Second Epistle of St. Peter tells us that "the gospel was proclaimed to the dead." Centuries later the church compiled the Nicene Creed and proclaimed that "he descended into hell." But whatever he was doing, we know for sure that the dark hours for his human friends passed in grief and in waiting.

It’s funny that in the gospel stories, none of his followers remembered that Jesus had said, "After three days I will rise again." But his enemies and accusers remember. Love forgets and hate remembers. How true that is. In grief we forget so much. We focus on our sorrow and forget all that was good and sweet and life-giving. In the face of death, it is very difficult to remember life. Grief engulfs us and hides all hope. Even for Christians who have been assured again and again that Christ conquered death, the grief of those who have lost a loved one is intense, and the sense of hopelessness defeats even the strongest among us. God understands this. In a sense, all the universe wept when Jesus died.

It is a part of life to mourn and to wait. The difference between for us as Christians is that we have been assured of the coming light and the coming resurrection. "Oh, death, where is your sting?" St. Paul asks. Today this is what we ask and tomorrow, we wait knowing that Easter will come.

On this day, we come face to face with the reality of Christ’s love.

Gazing into the depths of the well that is the Passion, perhaps our first impression has been the great injustice of that day in Jerusalem. Perhaps, on further reflection, we have seen our own sins contributing to that great burden that Jesus took upon himself, in dying for the sins of the world. We have seen a great merciful forgiveness, far surpassing anything that we could ever expect or hope for.

Perhaps in that forgiveness, but certainly in his suffering, we see that he is not just the Man of Sorrows, but also the Man of Glory: the world’s King and true Messiah, enthroned upon the very cross on which his enemies tried to put him to shame. But here the water begins to get deeper, and ripples distract us. Sometimes we need to work hard at remembering that this is what we see.

Still we look deeper, and see that all this glory and forgiveness is not for us alone, but that as we gather with Christ’s mother and his beloved Disciple at the foot of the Cross, we are being bound together into a community of faith. And even this community is not just for its own sake. It is in community that we are made part of Christ’s Body. In what might be the darkest depths of this pool, we find that Christ has become so closely identified with us in our death that we are bound, not just to one another, but to him as well. As we come to deeper appreciation of our new life in his Body, we are called to service, to mission, to be the messengers of his love and grace to a thirsty world that yearns for the living water he comes to bring.

And this deep pool of water we peer into is as old as Creation. Without expecting it, we have seen the echoes of the Genesis creation account, reminding us that we are a new creation, brought to fulfilment with its final climax in Jesus’s death on the Cross. What’s more, we are brought with him into God’s own sabbath rest, ready to awaken on the first day of a new week and walk out into the bright sunshine of a glorious new and redeemed world. But now I’m starting to get ahead of myself, and ought to settle down before I wind up preaching the Easter sermon before its time.