Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Palm/Passion Sunday
April 1, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
Tuning Our Ears at the Cross:
The Seven Last Words of Christ
COMPLETION
and
COMMENDATION
“It is finished” (John 19:30)
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46)
John 19:28-30; Luke 23:44-46
Pulitizer Prize winning humorist and columnist Art Buchwald recently published a final set of memoirs entitled Too Soon to Say Goodbye[1] in which he humorously documents for us the end of his life in a hospice. At eighty years of age, his kidneys began to fail him. After a few treatments of dialysis he decided to stop and checked himself into a hospice facility.
He said it was the best decision he ever made. He had a constant flow of visitors, many of them famous - Ben Bradlee, Tom Brokaw, Ethel Kennedy, Mike Wallace. And he received dozens of flower arrangements. Attention he suspected he would not have received had he been on dialysis.
He and the doctors figured he would only last for a few weeks. No one mentioned to him that his condition might actually improve. He ended up staying for months.
His hospice in Washington D.C. had a large sitting area for families. He called it his salon. There he said he held court, said goodbye to people, and held therapy sessions for his friends who after talking about his problems usually ended up talking about theirs, for which he charged only $75 an hour. After all, he didn’t feel right about making a profit in a hospice.
After four months in hospice his kidneys were still miraculously working. He decided the living room was a shrine. And he told people if they came to see him he would cure them of all their illnesses, the way they do at Lourdes.
The role of hospice, as you know, is to provide care and comfort at the end of life for the dying and their families. A volunteer at hospice told Art that dying people seem to fall into two categories. One group is at peace and say, “I want to go home,” which meant heaven. The other group are people who say, “I have to get up and do something,” or “I have to go somewhere.” They have unfinished business.
According to the last words from Jesus on the cross, he had no unfinished business. “It is finished.” he said. And then right before he died he prayed, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” He wanted to go home.
We hear these last two words together on this last Sunday in Lent. Our description of this day as Palm/Passion Sunday expresses the profound paradox and contradictions of this day: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem with palm branches waving in the crowd, which was at the same time the road to the cross, the way of the passion, the suffering of Jesus.
On that Sunday, the first day of the last week of his life, Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, palms were strewn on the road as people shouted in joy, “Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
But behind those lines of people crowded along the road, the political and religious authorities of the nation were behind locked doors plotting his death. And in just a few short days, there would be another crowd, not the Palm Sunday crowd, but another crowd shouting like a blood-thirsty mob, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Between these two contradictions - a parade and a crucifixion - lies a week heavy with momentous events.
Having entered Jerusalem, Jesus will soon go into the temple and drive out the money changers who were seeking to make a profit out of sacrifices. A woman will anoint Jesus with expensive perfume preparing his body for burial even before he dies. Judas will arrange his betrayal. There will be a Last Supper, a prayer of agony in the garden, an arrest, a trial, a scourging, a crown of thorns. Then he will be nailed to a cross, from which come his Seven Last Words.
Scripture says that before his last words there was darkness over the land for three hours, from noon to three, and the veil of the temple was torn. The veil of the temple that separated humanity from the holy of holies. The veil of the holy of holies was the place of God’s very presence where only the high priest could go on the Day of Atonement. The temple veil separated Gentile and Jew, male and female, lay person and priest, human and the divine. This veil was torn in two as Jesus died. This death was meant to bring reconciliation.
Peter Storey makes the striking connection of what he calls “a strange and bitter irony that the instruments used to [kill Jesus] should be those with which Jesus is most familiar. Woods and nails were the tools of his trade. The sound of hammer blows was part of his life. He was accustomed to the feel of nails in his hands. He was a shaper of wood - a carpenter . . . [But] this time, when Jesus heard the hammer blows, he received nails into his own flesh, and another wielded the hammer. But the Carpenter was still at work. He would turn even this wood and these nails into something good and beautiful.”[2]
“It is finished!”
“It is finished!” were his words. Not a cry of resignation and defeat, but a cry of completion and victory. His goal, his life’s mission fulfilled and accomplished.
In his death he bore all the sin of all the world so that we might know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. There are no lengths to which our God will not go to claim us as his own. Christ is our peace who has broken down the walls and made us one - one with God, one with one another. There is no way to explain it. We are not meant to figure it out. We are to sit here on this day and this week and behold it.
Jesus had come to break through the rock around our human hearts. Self-sacrificing love was the dynamite he chose.[3] “No one has greater love than this,” he said on the last night of his life, “than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
He had finished off the religious system that he opposed, stripping it of its power - the temple system with its careful division of clean and unclean, those who are accepted and those who are not. All are welcome at his table because all are embraced by his cross. And you don’t have to wash up first. You come to him and he makes you clean. He finished off the whole idea that the sacrifice of a lamb or a goat or a calf or any other scapegoat was an acceptable substitute for a surrendered human heart.
“It is finished!” he cried. Ended, completed, once and for all. The writer of Hebrews tells us that Christ appeared as a high priest and entered once and for all the Holy Place, putting an end to all sacrificial deaths for the sake of atonement or salvation. We cannot wash away our own sins or cleanse our own conscience or rid the world of its terrible parade of sins, but Jesus is the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. He is the mediator of a new covenant written in blood, sealed by the power of love, offered freely to all by the grace of God.
All this and more was meant when Jesus cried, It is finished.
It is what Jesus set out to accomplish. To break our hearts open with love. And he has. Billions of hearts have been broken open by the love of his cross. Some continue to shield their hearts. But one day, every heart will break open and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. It is finished!
And it was finished. Jesus had shown us what God had intended for every human person to be. He had gone to the very end of his life to show us there was no end to the love of God. He had shown us a dangerous new way to live - the way of undying love. He had accomplished what he set out to accomplish.
It took his death on a cross to reveal to us coercive power - political and religious - in all its ugly brutality. He had shown the world that that was not God’s kind of power.
Stanley Hauerwas says, “Crucifixion is the way [our God] rules. Crucifixion is kingdom come. . . . Here [on the cross] the powers of this world are forever subverted.”[4 ]As Willimon adds: “Jesus didn’t die as a frustrated revolutionary. His death was the revolution.”[5]
The cross shifted the balance from the love of power to the power of love. On Good Friday, love wrestles to the death with the evil of abusive power and still remains love. The world has done its sinning, and Christ has done his loving, each beyond limit. And in the end, limitless love prevails. Evil is defeated. Not vanquished but defeated.[6] It is finished! Love’s redeeming work is done.
Jesus said, “I must do the work of the One who sent me, while it is still day.” (John 9:4). Now the day is over. He has done the work he was made for and sent here to do. “It is finished.”
But what about us? What about when we die and we know we have left much unfinished? We look at the world around us and see so much that is to be done.
Richard Neuhaus put Jesus’ words in the context of the kingdom of God. He said, “‘It is finished.’ But it is not over.”7
Jesus completed what he was sent here to do. He has shown us the way. Now it is our calling to live in the power of his Spirit and embody the kingdom of God as he did.
And that can be frustrating, especially for those of us who are never satisfied with what we are able to do. So many of us reach the end of our days feeling there was more that could be done. And there’s always more to do.
I think there is profound wisdom in the words of John Ruskin who in talking about an artist finishing a painting said what could be said about each of our lives: That the artist never does finish, not perfectly. It is finished by God, in God. God alone can finish. We do our best, then let it go.
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”
And that’s what Jesus does with his last word. He let it go: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
This final word, says Lucy Winkett, is the word that makes sense of all the rest. It is the end of a long conversation between Jesus and his Father. Here Jesus commends his spirit to God not easily, but at the end of a terrifying struggle in physical pain and spiritual distress. This final word from the cross echoes the opening words of this last conversation with God, began in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he said in emotional and spiritual anguish, “Father, not my will but thine be done.” The conversation that started with resolve ends with surrender: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”[8]
Did you hear that first word? “Father, Abba.” Abba, the One he had known his whole life long. Now at the end he trusts that his Abba is waiting to receive him.
What a vast array of emotions in these hours on the cross! And fittingly so. There was no ordeal like crucifixion. On the cross Jesus had gone from the cry of abandonment by God to abandoning his life into God’s hands.
A father lost his only child, a son, who had been born when he and his wife were in their forties. The son died from a rare disease at the age of twenty-three. Out of his great grief, this bereaved father said, “The Christian life is lived in between - in between My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? and Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”[9]
Interestingly, both cries come directly from the psalms. On the cross Jesus is praying the psalms. Two words that sound like a contradiction actually give voice to the paradox of our conflicting human experiences. We often live in between feeling forsaken by God and the yearning to yield ourselves to God.
Jesus’ last word is a giving of himself back into the hands that made him. “Father, Abba, into your hands I commend my spirit.” At an ordinary funeral, this is called the commendation. We stand at the grave and commend the person who has died to God. There was no one to do that for Jesus, which may have been why he did it for himself. Barbara Brown Taylor says he was the rabbi at his own funeral. Listen to how she describes what happened with Jesus’s final words:
"With these words, he shifted the entire context of his death. Until he said these words, it looked to everyone as if his life was being taken away from him. He was on the receiving end of the worst punishment the empire knew how to inflict, which should have made him their victim. But by saying what he did, he took himself out of their hands. By commending himself to God, he redefined what was happening to him. He gave away what they thought they were taking away.
When each of us come to the point of our death we have a choice. You can still decide how you will let go. You can still open your hands at the last moment and give up what others thought they were taking from you, what cancer thought it was taking from you, what any other disease or tragedy thought it was taking from you. You can choose to take your life back and give it to God.
This miracle can happen anywhere, at any time. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl says he even saw it in the Nazi death camps, where people were made to stand in line for the ovens. Even there, he says, he watched them exercise choice - some of them turned into wild animals in their fear, while others ministered tenderly to those around them.
They had all suffered, and they were all about to suffer more, but some of them would not allow the punishment being inflicted upon them to become the meaning of their lives. Even there, with so few choices left, they reserved the right to make their own meaning."[10]
Jesus reserved such a right. Quoting Psalm 31 he says, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Some have said that this was the bedtime prayer of Jewish boys and girls.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep. . . .” “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
In the end, all the darkness and all the pain, all the betrayal and all the injustice and all the death in the world could not separate Jesus from his Abba, his dear God.
And nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not death, not suffering, not sin, not anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
“Abba, my dear Father,” Jesus said with his last breath, “into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He died as he lived, in the intimacy and trust of a child in the arms of a loving parent.
O love that wilt not let me go
I rest my weary soul in thee
I give thee back the life I owe
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
Conclusion
“It is finished,” Jesus said, a triumphant cry. And then the bedtime prayer, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
It strikes me that these are the most important last two things any of us can say.
To be able to say at the end of our lives, “It is finished.” To live with all that we are. To do what God has called us to do and to be who God has called us to be. To live our lives, every second given us, to the fullest and the best, with a passionate and fierce dedication of our lives to some great purpose beyond ourselves. To accomplish what we set out to accomplish. At the end of such a life, death can come as a friend.
Oh, there’s always more that could be done. There are those whose lives are cut short by tragedy and disease. But even some of them lead meaningful lives. There are others too frightened, too lazy, too self-centered to do with their life all that could be done. And they die with much left unfinished.
Dag Hammarskjold, the inspirational Secretary-General of the United Nations half a century ago, died prematurely in a tragic plane crash. He was dedicated to working for peace and building up the UN in its formative years. In his spiritual journal, Markings, he writes:
Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.[11]
It sounds as if Hammarskjold had pondered this word from the cross and tried to shape his life by it.
Thomas Merton said: “Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. No one can give up what they do not possess.”
The goal of our lives is this: to be who we were created to be. And out of that sense of being, do what we were put on this earth to do, to live purposefully. And then at death we can say with the apostle Paul:
The time of my departure is at hand.
I have fought the good fight.
I have finished the race.
I have kept the faith.
And then to say with Jesus, “It is finished!”
And then to let go, to yield our life and work into God’s hands, trusting God with our life and with our death, offering ourselves into God’s care, placing our lives into the Hands of the One who made us, and to die falling into God’s welcoming arms: “The Eternal God is our dwelling place and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
___________________
1. Random House, 2006.
2. Peter Storey, Listening at Golgatha, Upper Room Books, 2004, 74-76.
3. Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way, Cowley, 1999, 104.
4. Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ, Brazos, 2004, 85.
5. William Willimon, Thank God It’s Friday, Abingdon, 2006, 62.
6. Storey, 76-78, 81.
7. Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, Basic Books, 2000.
8. Seven Words For Three Hours, Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005, 70-72.
9. As cited in Fleming Rutledge, The Seven Last Words From the Cross, Eerdmans, 2005, 77.
10. Taylor, 94-96.
11. Ballantine Books, 1983, 138.
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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