The Seventh Word

“Father, Into Thy Hands I Commit My Spirit”

 

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.”  And having said this he breathed his last.

 

Luke continues this account of Jesus’ death with an immediate confession from the centurion standing there, who praised God and declared Jesus innocent.  For Luke, the centurion is a representative figure.  He is the point and goal of Jesus’ death; he is the one like us Jesus seeks to lay claim to, and does, immediately, here in this scene.  There is an unbroken movement from Jesus’ death to its claim to be a death for us, and it belongs to the mystery of Good Friday that its most essential truth is ratified by Easter and not disclosed over against it.

 

Indeed, John suggests that had the disciples understood the scriptures, they would have seen that every clock that was ever set at any place in the universe was here at the moment of death being reset to the time of God’s eternity.

 

This is why it is completely right to call Good Friday “Good” and not intend by that some lurking irony.

 

The most important thing about the crucifixion is that it destroys whatever gap we might have suspected existed between God and his complete disclosure of himself to us.  It destroys the idea that God would be truly God if we could just get at him more fully---get behind his words, behind the scriptures, behind the testimony to him, behind whatever it is that we believe is both disclosing and hiding him at the same time.

 

The sin of Adam was the belief, rising up as an overpowering suggestion from the created realm itself, that there was a God behind the God who had spoken to him.  It was the belief that there was a God about whom it could be said, “That is the real God and that is what he really said and what he is really like.”

 

In a moment of inspiration, Bonhoeffer characterized the question, “Did God say?” and had the serpent pose it in the garden this way:

 

                              The misleading thing about this question is that it obviously wants to be thought to come from God.  For the sake of the true God it seems to want to sweep aside the given Word of God. Beyond this given Word of God the serpent pretends somehow to know something about the profundity of the true God who is so badly misrepresented in this human word.  The serpent claims to know more about God than man, who depends on God’s word alone.  The serpent knows of a greater, nobler God who does not need such a prohibition.  In some way (the serpent )wants to be itself the dark root from which the visible          tree of God then springs up.

 

Hanging on the tree of Calvary is God as he really is, and there is defeated forever the claim that he can be known behind something that reveals and obscures him at the same time. Defeated is the devil’s claim to know how the real God is, behind his word to us.  Calvary allows the devil and human sin to play its most potent card, and in so doing to show that God has put forth himself, in his son, as the means by which he can be fully known, loved, trusted, and obeyed---obeyed with an obedience granted East of Eden, by the Spirit released in Jesus’ last breath.

 

There is no gap.  And because there is no gap the devil can no longer suggest there is some other way to find the true God who gives life by dispensing fruit from some tree we have yet to see.  This is the tree of life, this cross of Jesus.  This is the place where knowledge of good and evil and eternal life is no longer opposed. They have been taken up and reconciled by the new Adam. For the final answer to Pilate’s question, and the question posed in every disguise the devil has ever adopted---What is truth?---we must now look no further nor be beguiled into searching anywhere else than right here.

 

Isak Dinesen writes imaginatively of the return of Christ for his eternal reign:

 

                                  At the time when the near return of Christ to earth had become a certainty, a Committee was formed to decide upon the arrangements for His reception.  After some discussion, it sent out a circular which prohibited all waving and throwing about of palm branches as well as all cries of “Hosanna.”

 

                                 When the Millennium had been going on for some time, and joy was universal, Christ one evening said to Peter that He wanted, when everything was quiet, to go out for a short walk with him alone.

 

                                   “Where do you want to go, my Lord?” Peter asked.

 

                                “I should like,” answered the Lord, “just to take a walk from the Praetorium, along that long road, up to the Hill of Calvary.”

 

We can assume that, even for Jesus, this was his finest hour---the moment of which he was most proud.  And now, with the generosity it is his to display, he who has defeated all pretense and sham on that holy tree shares the moment with the one who was frightened and denied him.

 

That is also a sharing with you and me, and that is the tree of life on the hill of our peace and reconciliation.

 

The temple curtain is torn down the middle, and there can be no doubt anymore about where God is to be seen and worshiped and loved.  It is here; it is for us.  And it is for him his finest hour, our eternal joy and peace.

 

“I should like just to take a walk from the Praetorium, along that long road, up to the Hill of Calvary.”

 

And as he goes, he takes our hand.  And we feel there the wounds, and we sense they are somehow familiar.  But there has been a balm in Gilead, and the healing that pours from those wounds is so great we catch our breath and stumble for a wee moment.  But he lifts us up and we go on and when we arrive and look back down we see before us the Garden of Eden, and God’s voice is sure and we are sure it is his, as the Holy Spirit tends to some flowers, with wolf and lamb lying down beside him.

 

Behold, the wood of the cross, how it has made all things bright and clean.  “It turneth all to gold, for that which God doth touch and own cannot for less be sold.”

 

AMEN.