Luke alone gives us this Seventh Word from the cross. Mark says that “Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last.” Similarly, Matthew reports, “And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.” According to John’s Gospel, “When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, ‘It is finished’, and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” So Mark, Matthew and Luke say there was yet another word, indeed a loud cry, but only Luke tells us what it was. Note that in this last word God is once again “Father.”
The Aramaic Abba captures the intimacy of the relationship. Even in the anguish of the garden the night before he was to die, especially then, it was “Abba, Father.” “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what you will.” The early Christians understood that, in Christ and through Christ, they could approach God in the same way. St. Paul writes, “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’”
The Seventh Word is typically depicted as tranquil resignation at the end of the storm and the horror. We are told that it was uttered as a loud cry, which is not the mark of tranquility. This Seventh Word is a cry of trust, hurled almost defiantly, into the absence of the One of whom Jesus spoke when he said, “Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” Prayer can be an expression of childlike faith, and it can be trust defiantly hurled. Parents change their mind about a promise made, and the child, teetering on the edge between disillusionment and faith, exclaims, “But you said so! You promised!” There is something of that in this Seventh Word.
Between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the joyful consummation is forever. Their love, which was from before the foundation of the world, is now magnified by the homecoming of all the prodigal children adopted into their love. Stumbling our way toward home, we worry to ourselves about the unworthiness of our love, only to discover that it has already been attended to. It was taken care of in that representative moment, that vicarious moment, in which he cried out, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and so saying he handed over to the Father all that he had assumed in the womb of Mary. There on the cross the life of every mother’s child who ever lived or ever will live was handed over to the Father. Every hair has been numbered, every fallen sparrow taken into account. All has been offered up, all has been redeemed, nothing is lost.
On the cross the wounded Word is returning from his mission, bringing with him the totality of all that love assumed; in the lead a thief who believed and half believed, followed by a ragtag band of tax collectors and sinners and the victims of history beyond numbering, victims who only now know the sacrifice of which their sacrifice was part. Choirs of angels, cherubim and seraphim come out to meet him, to welcome home the Son of God. They stand aghast at the battered, tattered company he is bringing with him. “They are all mine,” he says. “They are my brothers and sisters; they are the ones whom I went to seek and to save. I am taking them to the Father. I am taking them home.”
The cross is not the dark side of which the resurrection is the bright side. In John’s Gospel, Jesus speaks repeatedly of being glorified in his death. The glory is in having kept faith, in having seen it through to the end, in having surrendered himself in unqualified love to the Father. This is now, because of him and through him, a human possibility. The only dark side, for him and for us, would be to turn against the light by setting our will against the will of God. At the cross point of history, at the moment of catastrophe beyond all catastrophes, the entirety of the human project was definitively turned toward the light. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” From now on, the eternally important decision in every human life is whether, with him and through him, we say the same.
To prodigal children lost in a distant land, to disciples who forsook him and fled, to a thief who believed or maybe took pity and pretended to believe, to those who believed or maybe took pity and pretended to believe, to those who did not know that what they did they did to God, to the whole bedraggled company of humankind he had abandoned heaven to join, he says: “Come. Everything is ready now. In your fears and your laughter, in your friendships and farewells, in your loves and losses, in what you have been able to do and in what you know you will never get done, come, follow me. We are going home to the waiting Father.”
Excerpts from Death On A Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus.
