“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (NRSV, Luke 23:46)

Jesus dies upon the Cross.  The fury of the world has spent itself in vain and Jesus passes out of its power to hurt him more.

In his first recorded word when he was yet a boy, it was the Father’s name which was upon his lips, “Did you not know”, he said to his Mother and St Joseph, “that I must be in my Father’s house?” (NRSV, Luke 2:49).  Now with his dying breath he commits himself into his Father’s hands.

How very revealing are the last words of dying people!  We have already thought of the robbers crucified with him.  One died as he had lived, his faculty of speech employed even to the end in cursing and swearing.  Very different was his companion with his plea, “Jesus, remember me”.  He brought nothing but a broken and penitent heart and cast himself and his life upon the compassion of Christ.

But how different again were Our Blessed Lord’s last words, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (NRSV, Luke 23:46) – words which show us not only how to die but how to live.  There is no backward glance now, since his triumphant declaration, “It is accomplished”.  So he leaves this world with no regrets, no hesitation, no uncertainty.

Early in his ministry, Jesus had told his disciples, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, …but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (NRSV, Matthew 6:19 - 21).  So all the innocent enjoyments which this life affords he had taken up into his enjoyment of his Father’s Presence.  Every object of affection he put second to his love for his Father which was so complete as to leave no room for any rival love.

This detachment from worldly things while still living in the world, can be seen most clearly on the Cross and what a lesson it provides for us!  How many are the things we covet or which we should be loath to part with when the time comes!  Good clothes – Jesus was stripped; a pleasant house – Jesus had only the Cross; money – Jesus was very poor; praise of human beings – Jesus was reviled; relations and friends – Jesus gave up his Mother and St John; life – Jesus gave up his for us.

If we possess some or all of these things, let us accept them gratefully but see ourselves as what we truly are – very temporary stewards of this world’s goods, not permanent owners.  We must leave all our so-called possessions when we die; let us therefore learn to be detached from them now, remembering that, “…one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (NRSV, Luke 12:15).

The night before his Crucifixion Jesus had told his disciples, “I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father” (NRSV, John 16:28).  And now that time had come.  The appalling sense of desolation which had wrung from him the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (NRSV, Mark 15:34), had now passed and he was again completely conscious of the bond between his Father and himself.

So Jesus comes now to the Father in his own right and in the unspotted purity of a holy life.  Never had he thought or said or done anything to disturb or ruffle his life with God; and so, though still in agony, there is tranquillity over his soul and he dies like a child settling down to sleep.

That untroubled calm of his last moments was the result and the continuation of a whole life spent in unbroken union with God.  He ended Good Friday as he had always ended every day from his earliest childhood – by committing himself into the Father’s care in the words of Psalm 31, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (NRSV, Luke 23:46).

Our own union with God can be weakened or destroyed, not only by an undue love of worldly things, which itself is really sinful, but also by those things which we more readily and easily recognise as actual sins.  Let us make up our minds now that whenever the call of death may come, it may not find us in the truly calamitous state of unrepented sin.

It is the danger and the fear of such a plight that lies behind the petition in the Litany, “…from sudden death, good Lord, deliver us”.  A lingering death, that provides the opportunity to make one’s peace with God, can be more merciful in the end than to pass away quietly but unexpectedly in one’s sleep.

Nevertheless in the midst of life we are in death, and if we should by any chance find ourselves in grievous sin, let us see to it that we lose no time in confessing it and gaining God’s forgiveness by which alone our disrupted relationship with him can be restored.

We have been thinking of Our Lord dying on the Cross for us, and he still pleads today as he pleaded then, “Father forgive them”.  If therefore Good Friday means anything it means that we must go to Our Lord in penitence and lay our sins at the foot of his Cross.  He knows.  He knows all our sins and everything about us.  And having done that, let us resolve that henceforth ourselves and our lives shall be his for all eternity.