In Our Father's Hands

Since the early Church, the words of Jesus – his various teachings and sayings – have always been remembered and cherished by Christians. This is perhaps especially true about the words he spoke from the Cross. In the four Gospels, there is a total of seven things the Lord said after being crucified; they are sometimes called the Seven Last Words from the Cross. Five of these sayings are Jesus’s own words; for example, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” or “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” However, in two of the seven, Jesus quotes the psalms. We heard the first of these in our Responsorial Psalm on Palm Sunday, psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?” And in today’s liturgy, we hear the other one, the very last of the Seven Words of Jesus, quoting Psalm 31: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Christ on the Cross (1881) by Jules-Élie Delaunay

We should take a moment to briefly consider why Jesus quoted these psalms, and how they help us to better understand his Passion and Death. The first one – “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” – is the opening line of Psalm 22, and it is clearly a cry of anguish. The whole psalm is the plaint of someone in very dire straits, someone who has fallen into the hands of persecutors and evildoers, and who begs God for help. It’s not hard to understand why Jesus would be quoting from psalm, as he’s being put to death. However, traditionally the Church has understood this cry not as a sign that the Father truly abandoned the Son; we believe that the Father always loves the Son and that Jesus, even crucified on the Cross, never lost the blessed vision of the Father and his love. Rather, the cry is a sign of that the Son has voluntarily united himself to sinful humanity. His cry of abandonment is made on our behalf, we who have been estranged by God because of our sinfulness. That Jesus suffered terribly for our sake is undeniable, but he did not do so in despair. Jesus probably would have recited the entirety of psalm 22, and in the last nine verses, the psalmist expresses trust that God will be faithful, and will make known to future generations his salvation: “My posterity shall serve the Lord, and tell of him to future generations” (Ps 22:31).

This hope for and anticipation of God’s saving power is echoed in Jesus’s second quotation from Scripture, psalm 31. Once again, the speaker of this psalm is beset by evils; he looks to God as a refuge and asks for his justice to redeem him. At this point, Jesus is on the verge of death; he has been completely faithful to his mission from the Father, and now will await the vindication of the Resurrection. And so, addressing his Father directly, he quotes with his very last words the first part of verse 6 of the psalm, “Into your hands I commend my spirit;” the second part of the verse, which goes unsaid, is this: “It is you who will redeem me, Lord.” It is clear that Jesus, even as the very life breath is going out of him, has full confidence in God, the Father who has sent him, the Father to whom he now entrusts himself in the moment of death. In his final suffering, he does not despair but reaffirms his complete trust in his Father’s love.

Friends, what a powerful yet humble lesson our Lord teaches us with these, his final words. As we meditate today upon his suffering and death for our sake, we could hardly blame him if his reliance upon God had wavered in his final moments; but it did not. Even in the throes of death, Jesus is teaching us by example. In him, we see that the fire of God’s love cannot be quenched by any suffering, not even that of death. If we remain steadfast in prayerful trust in our Father’s love, then we remain in his very grasp; even if our bodies cry out in agony, we are in his loving embrace, safely in the care of his hands. The Son proves this for us, by his example, and by the Resurrection which followed. May we follow after.