I’m going to take what may feel like a bit of an odd turn (particularly for we Protestants) in reflecting on this Sunday’s sermon text, which contains the last of the seven last words of Jesus from the Cross. In Luke 23:44-49, specifically in verse 46, we read, “Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.” Matthew and Mark tell us about the loud cry, but only Luke gives us those last words which He cried out.
As I’ve read about this seventh last word, I find Christian preachers and even serious scholars often saying that those words, which echo Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commend my spirit,” are a Jewish bedtime prayer for children. Thus we are asked to imagine that Jesus is repeating a child’s prayer He would have learned from His mother as He fell asleep each night. While I was able to find at least one version of a current Jewish bedtime Shema (the core of which from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and which Jews are in fact asked to say morning and night) that contains those words from Psalm 31, I was unable to verify that saying these words as one lay down to sleep was in fact the practice in Jesus’ time.
Nonetheless, there is something resonant about regarding this final word from the Cross as something like the bedtime prayer of a child. One thinks of, “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” All that the Gospels show us of Jesus’ intimate relationship with God the Father, including His use of the word Abba, which is a family familiar term perhaps something like “daddy,” shows us that it would be perfectly natural for God the Son to trustingly commit Himself to the Lord’s care at the moment of death.
However, as Richard John Neuhaus points out, Jesus does cry this prayer of committal in “a loud voice.” That makes it a bit more than a quiet, peaceful, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” In the face of His suffering and imminent death, it’s a kind of defiant announcement and witness of absolute trust in His Father.
Now for the possibly weird to some part. What came to mind as I contemplated all this was Michelangelo’s Pieta, the picture I put at the beginning of this above. There is lots to say about the imagery and beauty of that sculpture which now resides in St. Peter’s in Rome. But for this reflection on Jesus’ trusting commendation into the Father’s care, I find this image of His complete abandonment of Himself in death into His mother’s arms suggestive. With His Spirit/soul in the care of His Father between His death and resurrection, Christians imagined this tender reception by His mother of the body to which she years before gave birth. As the second Person of God began His human life trusting to the arms of a human mother, so He ends it, again in her arms.
So the One who taught us that to enter the kingdom we must become like little children, actually shows us how to do that when He dies. As another psalm, 131, suggests, the soul which hopes in the Lord is like a weaned, quieted child in the arms of its mother. So our Lord was and so we must be.
As I said, I can’t verify much about the Jewish use of “into your hands I commend my spirit” as a prayer, but it is abundantly clear that Christians have followed our Lord in making it part of our prayers. Catholic night time prayer includes this responsory for every day:
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.
You have redeemed us, Lord God of truth.
I commend my spirit.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.
In the Anglican church and in at least one of our own Covenant liturgies at the graveside of a departed Christian, we say something like, “Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant,” naming that person. As adopted children of the Father through our elder brother Jesus Christ, we are bold to claim His dying prayer as our own.
In these times of daily death counts, it seems good to me that we say that last prayer of Jesus somewhat often, reminding ourselves to relax into the loving hands of the Father. Maybe we might even need sometimes to cry it out in loud, defiant voices, affirming to ourselves and those around us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we are in the safekeeping of the ever-gracious hands of our God.