The Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ on the Cross

Good Friday

The first word: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

You know, we have heard these words so often that it is really to forget their real significance, what they cost Jesus.  It is helpful simply to remember the context of this gentle—perhaps too gentle—prayer.  They—the religious authorities, the temple guard, the Romans, have beaten and mocked him.  He has been publicly humiliated in a long winding walk through the center of the city to its gate, carrying a cross.  He has been stripped absolutely naked—the loincloth Jesus always wears in our artistic representations was not there—and he is nailed to a cross.  And he absolves them of it all.

But the problem is—I don’t know about you, but I know for myself—all too often I do know what I am doing, exactly what I am doing.  Oh, I will grant that many of my sins are spontaneous—spontaneous moments of anger or pride or whatever—but I know.  And I know that I don’t have to give into the temptations—the temptations of instant justification, or instant gratification, or instant results—I know.  And I suspect that I am not alone in this.  I’m actually pretty good at knowing right from wrong when I don’t hide from that knowledge.

And yet this is Jesus’ prayer for me, for all of us…Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.

In it, we are brought to the truth, humbled before it.  We cannot pretend anymore.  This humble man’s humble prayer shames us, and rightly, to bow before the very forgiveness we need, to bow before a compassion we could never dare ask for ourselves, before a love we do not—and cannot—deserve.

But Jesus knows this…he knows that one of the worst things about sin is that it entraps us in our shame, our guilt, our pride.  His prayer may seem foolish in the light of the creatures we are—creatures who deny and betray, creatures who mock and flog, who humiliate and strip the simple human dignity of others away, people who crucify others for crimes of which they may well be innocent, or at least often enough for crimes much less serious than our own.  People who are all too knowledgeable in the evils we commit, and who can even enjoy them.  But his foolishness is the foolishness of the Father, which is greater far than our cynical wisdom.

For the Father is not interested in the truth of the proposition, he is not interested in our cynical self-knowledge.  His interested is only that we should know his love.

It is a love we cannot repay, a forgiveness we have not—and can never—earn.  Real love.  And he humbles himself before us to beg us to accept it.

The second word: Amen, I say to you, today you shall be with me in Paradise.

How then can we accept this love?  A thief shows us the way. 

We know from the Gospels that Jesus was condemned to die as a criminal among criminals.  But the evangelist Luke tells us a marvelous tale.  For as the crowds heaped abuse on Jesus, calling out in mock that he should show himself to be the Messiah now, that he should come down from that cross and save himself, and even as one of the criminals joins in the jeering, the other comes to a realization.  “We are just getting what we deserve,” he says to the other, “But he, he has done nothing wrong.”  It must be that a realization is growing in his breast, a realization that his own life—whatever it was worth—is coming to an end, and in the worst way.  And yet that he was not alone there on that cross, that somehow the power of goodness and truth and love is there with him.  It was not in the crowd, not in the other thief.  And through his own suffering, which, by the way, would have differed little from Jesus’ suffering, he sees who Jesus is.  There is no explanation for it in the same way that there is no explanation for that moment when Peter finally caught the truth of Jesus—when Jesus asked: Who do you say that I am, and Peter, reflecting on all that he had seen and heard, says what is impossible to say—you, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.  It is, make no mistake about it, a moment of grace.  But it is also a moment of accepting that grace, and this is what the thief does.  There on the cross, naked, humiliated, and dying for his guilt, he makes a fool of himself before everyone save one: Jesus, he says to a condemned and dying man, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

And that one hears in the way that only God can hear and speaks these words that only God can speak; today you will be with me in paradise.

We are shown the way by a thief, no...two thieves in fact.   For the one, who was not a good man, shows us the way to repentance—the repentance that comes from accepting the grace.  And the other—the thief who has stolen our cross—a cross we have so deserved, who has robbed us of condemnation and death—he shows us the way to forgive.  He says to us all, if we are willing to hear: Amen I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise. 

The third word: Woman, behold your son.  Behold your mother.

Alone among the Gospels, John reports the presence of Mary, his mother, at his crucifixion, not far away like his other friends, but close enough to hear his voice, close enough to share his suffering.  Who is this woman?

She is remembered in the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke, as a woman of faith.  She says to the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation “Let it be done to me according to your word.”  When she put that faith to work and traveled the long way from Nazareth to the hill country of Judea, near Jerusalem, Elizabeth, seeing her from the distance and feeling her own child leap for joy in her womb cried out to her, “Blessed are you among woman, and blessed is the fruit of your womb…blessed is she who trusted that the Lord’s word would be fulfilled.  Her response is a humble one:

My soul—my very being—proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior;

he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed;

the Almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.

 It was she who said to her son, at the wedding feast at Cana, “They have no wine.”  It was she who said to the servants there, “Do what ever he tells you.”  How did this woman have such great faith, and what becomes of her faith now?

Mary is different from us in perhaps only one way: she knew the truth that we too often forget: she understood how much God loved her—as a friend of mine put it quite simply, that God loved her “to bits.”  And she trusted that love.  And whereas we often try to find love, or to make God or others love us, she simply lived out of that love.  We often think of Mary’s acceptance of the angel’s message as an act of faith, but after the angel left, she was left to give birth to that boy, to raise him as best she could, to lose a husband along the way, to watch her son go off on a mission which was the expression of everything she trusted, but far beyond her comprehension.

It is this faith that brings her to her son’s cross.

Where is the angel’s greeting now?  Where the blessing of Elizabeth?  And where now those fair words: My soul—my very being—proclaims the greatness of the Lord…

Mary could not have foreseen this, but she was a woman of faith—faith, which as St. Paul reminds us, is a trust in things unseen, not in the self-evident.  This is Mary’s faith.  Somehow she understood that this too was a sign of God’s love for her, for us all.  It did not make it a whit easier.  But she understood and she trusted.  It is why she alone could be at the side of her son.

It is for this reason that Jesus asks his mother to take in the beloved disciple as her own child—so that he might have her faith.  It is for this reason that he asks the beloved disciple to take in his mother, so that he might have the faith he lacks.  It is for this reason she is given to us.  For Jesus knew what she understood; she had taught her Son the very truth of the love of God for humanity—for you and me—from the moment of his conception, and she had lived out of that love, trusting it even in the face of every challenge that life offered, even the death of the Son she had accepted as God’s gift.  Her faith is the true faith of Abraham, the trust of the Lord who alone can create that which has never been, and who can raise even the dead to new life.  It is the faith that our first parents, Adam and Eve, who could not trust God, lacked.  And it is the faith we need.

And so Jesus gives her to us—to us men and women of little faith, sometimes even of bad faith.  That we might learn what God’s love truly is .  And so he entrusts us to her.  That we might have her faith as our own.

The fourth word: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

It is too easy for us to pietize Jesus’ death, to say, “Well, since he knew what was going to happen, at least he could count on that.”  After all, he was God’s son, wasn’t he?  Ironic, isn’t it, for we add our own mock to his crucifixion.

He means these words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The translations of Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus cried this out in a loud voice.  The actual word is screamed.  Jesus screamed this.

We cannot underestimate the truth of his suffering—the physical suffering, assuredly, but even more the mental, the psychological, the spiritual suffering.  Our faith tells us that Jesus suffered for our sins.  But even more than that, he precisely suffered our sins.

And what do those sins do but deny the love of God to one another and to ourselves.  To deny to one another the love that every human being needs, just to get through the day.

Jesus faced death as each of us will…alone.  But more than that, he had been assaulted in a way that few of us will ever know—and God save us if we ever have to.

Mocked and broken, every human dignity stripped away, even stripped of the simple modesty of clothing, he was left by the roadside to be jeered at, as a joke.  All the signs of his Father’s love—the support of friends and family, the affection of the people whose lives he touched, the joy in the simple beauties of this world—all had been taken away, and not merely stripped away but replaced with hatred, contempt, and humiliation.   Above his head they posted a notice--a gibe--Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

There is only faith now…faith in that which is truly unseen.  Faith in life when death triumphs, faith in love when there is none, faith in the goodness of God when all the evil that humanity can devise is operative.

Did Jesus know what would happen next?  Yes, he knew that he would die.

Yet, though this cry—this scream—sounds so much like the despair it approaches, it indicates the deep faith that Jesus still had…the great trust that he placed in his Father. 

Yes, his Father had led him here.  Yes, it was going to end here.  Yes, it was unspeakable.  But in Jesus own words, that Father—the Father whom he trusted, the Father he called Abba, the Father he thanked the night before, the Father he prayed to, the Father whose will he longed to accomplish—that Father is still his God.  Everything is gone—even the merest hint of his Father’s presence—but he is still Jesus’ God.  And Jesus would have no other.  So Jesus gives his life for the first of God’s commandments.  And in the face of all despair he prays 22nd Psalm, which begins:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

and which ends in the praise of his Father, his God and ours.    

      
The fifth word: I thirst.

One of the cruelest and most calculated effects of crucifixion, the medical experts of the ancient world and even of our own day tell us is simple dehydration.  The body, lacking water, begins to cannibalize itself in search of it.  The pain is excruciating, far beyond anything that we can imagine, far beyond what I can describe. 

Jesus had been beaten and flogged.  He has received not so much as a drop of water since his arrest.  He has quite nearly bled out.  He is gasping for air, and the air that he can gasp parches his already parched body.  Each exhalation depletes him further; each drop of blood drains him.

It is an ironic end for this preacher who promised a woman at a well a spring of living water, who said that anyone who offered so much as a cup of cold water to one in need would have eternal life, who had cried out to the crowd gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles:

Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, as scripture says:

‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’

An ironic end for the one who supplied the best wine in abundance at the wedding feast at Cana.

When they give him to drink, Mark mentions a drugged wine…a cruel joke that will make the crucified one’s death slower and more excruciating.  John mentions just wine…maybe a small gesture of kindness at the end.  But John says that it is not about thirst, anymore…it is now about the fulfillment of scripture.  Indeed, the psalms are full of references to the thirst of God’s servant, most notably Psalm 22:

Parched as burnt clay is my throat,

my tongue cleaves to my jaws.

Many dogs have surrounded me,

a band of the wicked beset me.

They tear holes in my hands and my feet

and lay me in the dust of death.

I can count every one of my bones.

These people stare at me and gloat;

they divide my clothing among them.

They cast lots for my robe.

But it is also the fulfillment of the Beatitude:  Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be satisfied.

Jesus thirsts, but not for anything that water can provide now.  He thirsts for the Father’s will.  He thirsts for the fulfillment of that will.  He thirsts for our righteousness—the righteousness we cannot attain on our own.  He thirsts on our behalf.  He thirsts for us.

The sixth word: It is finished.

Jesus knows that death is near.  He has given his all.  And he can see the end.  It is finished, done with over. 

But the words he speaks are not the words of a slave who is done for the day.  They are the words of the man who has done what had to be done, who has accomplished everything that needed to be done, who has perfected that which was incomplete. 

Jesus has done the Father’s will.  He has drunken cup to its dregs.  He has made himself one with us, even to death.  Even to the grave.

These are not the words of a slave, but of a champion.  Jesus has triumphed over the temptations—the worst ones—the temptation to run away from the lives God has asked us to live, the temptation to do his own will, the temptation to forget that his life is God’s gift, the temptation to despair—all the temptations to which we are prey to. 

These are not the words of a slave, but of the Master.  The Greek—tetelestai—was inscribed at the bottom of a bill that had been paid.  Only the Master, only the Lord of the house can cancel the debt.  And now he has.

The Latin is consummatum est—it is consummated.  Perhaps like a marriage.  God has joined himself completely—perfectly—to our humanity.  These are the words of Love itself.

It is the voice of a King, a King who has declared that the war is ended, that now there shall be peace between us and Him.

It is the voice of our God, the God who judged creation very good, the God who has disfigured himself that we might look like him again, for ever.  It was indeed good, but now it is complete.

It is finished.

The seventh word: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

And so Jesus entrusts his life, his death, his all, to the Father.  He was condemned as a criminal, as an evil doer, and a blasphemer.  But he entrusts himself to God, his sole judge.  With these last words.

But it is funny, isn’t it, that these were not just the last words that Jesus spoke, but the words of his whole life.  We see these words in action at his baptism, when he who was sinless put his life at the mercy of his Father to join himself completely to humanity.  We see it in the temptation when he resolutely refused to trust his own powers and status as the Son of God, but insisted in on the humble and obedient status of a son of humanity…

We see it in the humble trusting prayer he taught his disciples…the prayer he prayed for himself, for them, for us...

Father, hallowed be thy name…

thy kingdom come…

thy will be done…

on earth—in me—as it is in heaven.

No, these are not Jesus’ last words…

They are his first words

They are his always words

And he invites us to take them as our own now.

For he knows that the Father is trustworthy…he knows know in a way that we must still believe.

And if we will believe with him his promise is that we shall enjoy that which he so longed for:

the vindication that only the Father can bestow.

Amen.

AMDG