Day: April 18, 2014

“All the people hung upon his words”

Nowhere does this text have greater application than on this day we call Good Friday. It is all the business of this day for us to hang not just upon the words of the Passion of Christ but, more specifically, upon the very words of Christ on the Cross. We hang upon the words of the one who hangs there for us and for our salvation. What we see and hear from Christ crucified is altogether for our good, our joy and our salvation.

There can be no Easter joy without the Passion. Christ’s words on the Cross reveal the ultimate triumph of love over sin and death. The seven last words of Christ on the Cross are taken from the four evangelists in their accounts of the Passion. Traditionally the last words of Christ begin and end with an address to the Father: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Everything, we might say, is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Spirit. Christ is the Word and Son of the Father; the uttered being of the Father who has come to do the will of him who sent him, to redeem our wayward humanity by calling us home to God. There is the forgiveness of sins; there is the final movement of the Son’s love towards the Father. We are embraced in this divine love.

The old spiritual has it exactly right: he’s got the whole world in his hands. Such is the nature of redemption. God seeks our good. “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Love trumps all and triumphs over all our sins and follies. This is what makes this day Good Friday.

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“All the people hung upon his words”

This is Luke’s word to us, too. And on this day especially, it is our challenge to hang upon the words of him who hangs upon the Cross for us and for our salvation. Only so can this day be in any sense Good Friday.

“He borrowed a body so that he might borrow a death,” Athanasius famously observes. He borrowed, too, a tomb, it seems, which becomes the womb of new life, the radical new life of the Resurrection.

Luke gives us three of the seven words of Christ from the Cross. In the traditional understanding, the words of the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father from St. Luke: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” and, as we just heard, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, as Luke tells us, “having said this, he breathed his last.” Christ dies. Then, and only then, are we left with the intriguing picture of “all the multitudes” having “assembled to see the sight” and “return[ing] home beating their breasts.” The sight of Christ crucified and the words of the Crucified are meant to affect us, indeed, to convict us and move us to acts of contrition and confession, even “beating our breasts.”

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