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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
The First Word
And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 34 And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:33-34a ESV)
The Roman soldiers crucified Jesus, painfully nailing him to the cross where He would later die, but not before Jesus spoke, as the four Divinely-inspired evangelists tell us, a total of seven “words” or, in some cases, more like “statements” from the cross. Three “words” are primarily addressed to God the Father, two “words” are primarily addressed to three other people, and the other two “words” are not explicitly addressed to anyone. Yet, we can still say that all of “Jesus’s words from the cross speak to you”. Our seven-times repeated cycle of Reading, Meditation, Collect, and Hymn applies Jesus’s words to us and to our own lives.
As Jesus in His first “word” with great love and compassion asks the Heavenly Father to forgive those who were crucifying Him, because they did not know what they were doing, we might object! We might object both that ignorance is not really an excuse for sin and that in some sense they had to know what they were doing. Rather than objecting, we do better considering our own lives, how too often we know that what we are about to do is wrong and nevertheless do it anyway. And, still, Jesus our Great High Priest (Hebrews 4:14), out of that same great love and compassion, intercedes also for us, asking our Heavenly Father to forgive us. And, when we repent of our sin and trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, then God really does forgive us, and, as we are in Christ Jesus, there truly is no condemnation for us (Romans 8:1).
Collect for the First Word, and Hymn 447:1-3
The Second Word
And they cast lots to divide his garments. 35 And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!” 36 The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine 37 and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” 38 There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:34b-43 ESV)
The rulers scoffed; the soldiers mocked; one criminal railed, but the other rebuked. That other criminal (or “male-factor”, or “evil-doer”) confessed both his own sin and his own faith in Jesus’s innocence and Messiahship and so worshipped Jesus by seeking and receiving the forgiveness of sins. Jesus’s second “word”, a “word” of very public but individual absolution of that penitent criminal, also comforts us. Even the most intense pain and suffering will cease. The day may not be today, but, as we confess both our own sin and our own faith in God to forgive us for Jesus’s sake, and as we worship God by seeking and receiving the forgiveness of sins in the ways that He has given for us to receive that forgiveness, then the “word” that Jesus spoke to the penitent criminal is true also for us, that we will be with the Lord in paradise. For, long before we even existed, the Lord in His mercy remembered us in order to act for the purpose of saving us by dying on the cross. Immediately after our earthly deaths, the Lord will share with us the good things that He Himself enjoys “there”, whether we call it “paradise”, like the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2 and 3 LXX), “Abraham’s side” (or “bosom”) (Luke 16:22), or “heaven”. That happy existence eventually will be experienced most-fully after the resurrection of the dead. Holy Baptism is not strictly necessary, but under normal circumstances baptism is what makes us each, as the translated hymn-writer calls us, “a child of paradise” (Lutheran Service Book 594:5)
Collect for the Second Word, and Hymn 447:4-6
The Third Word
But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25-27 ESV)
The saying, attributed to To Kill A Mockingbird author Harper Lee, essentially goes that you can choose your friends but not your family. Maybe in Jesus’s case we would say that He could choose both friends and family, for Himself and for others. Jesus’s third “word” from the cross more-closely connects both His mother and the disciple whom He loved, usually understood to be the apostle and evangelist St. John, perhaps also a first-cousin of the Lord and so also a nephew to His Virgin Mother. This “word” spoken primarily to them seems very personal, but their privacy was hardly possible at the cross, some family arrangements are public matters, and the whole cross event is ultimately personal to each one of us. Certainly on the cross Jesus was thinking not of Himself but of others, including us! The Divinely-inspired Psalmist David says that God sets the solitary in families (Psalm 68:6), and, as that was true for Mary and John, in a less-obvious way that is true also for all of us. Through our parents God creates each of us individually as either male or female (Genesis 1:27), and either at that moment of our creation or, in some cases, at some point thereafter, God establishes our family relationships, and, as circumstances warrant, He also gives us people who serve as additional “children” or “parents”. And, as Jesus on the cross was concerned about the temporal well-being of His mother, we are concerned for the temporal and spiritual well-being of our
family-members, including being concerned about who will care for them as we do when we are delivered from this Vale of Tears, but more importantly being concerned whether they repent and believe, whether they receive forgiveness through the Church and Ministry that Mary and John at the foot of the cross can be taken to represent, and so whether our family-members ultimately will be taken with us to our Heavenly Father’s home.
Collect for the Third Word, and Hymn 447:7-9
The Fourth Word
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Ēli, Eli, léma sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 47 And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, “This man is calling Elijah.” (Matthew 27:45-47 ESV; confer Mark 15:34)
The only “word” recorded by the Gospel accounts of Saints Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s fourth “word” from the cross, like the first and seventh, was addressed to God the Father, but unlike those first and seventh “words”, which were intimately addressed to God as “Father”, the fourth was more-formally addressed to the Father as “God”. Quoting at least the second verse of Psalm 22, Jesus cries out with a loud voice expressing the pain of God’s abandonment, abandonment we deserve on account of our sins, but abandonment which we do not ourselves experience, because Jesus took our sins upon Himself and experienced that abandonment in our place. And, of course, God had not permanently abandoned Jesus but ultimately vindicated His Son. Some of the bystanders mis-heard Jesus as calling for Elijah and waited to see if Elijah would come to save Jesus (Matthew 27:49; Mark 15:36), but we know that Elijah had already borne testimony of Jesus (Matthew 17:3) and that, before that, John the Baptizer, in the role of Elijah (Matthew 17:10-13), had ministered to Jesus (Matthew 3:11-17) and confessed Jesus to be the Christ, even though Jesus did not necessarily meet all of John the Baptizer’s Messianic expectations (Matthew 11:1‑19). Especially at times of suffering, when God does not act as we might expect Him to act, we may think of ourselves as forsaken by our God, that He does not hear or answer our prayers, but at such times we do not see clearly how God is always present with us, even through suffering, and how He answers our prayers in the ways and at the times that He knows to be best for us. Jesus did not lose faith in His God, and we do not lose faith in Him, either. Psalm 22 ultimately moves from the complaint of abandonment to faith and praise, and God likewise moves us from the complaint of perceived abandonment to faith and praise.
Collect for the Fourth Word, and Hymn 447:10-12
The Fifth Word
After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” (John 19:28 ESV)
As we heard last night, our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, told His disciples that He would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until He drank it new in the Kingdom of God (Mark 14:25); in other words, Jesus said that He would not celebrate another Passover meal before His death and resurrection, not that He would not drink of any wine at all before His death and resurrection (compare Voelz, ad loc Mark 14:25, p.1032). And, that Passover wine may have been the last thing that Jesus had to drink, before traipsing back and forth from one official to another; before trials, mocking, scourging, and the trek out to Golgotha. Once there, the soldiers had offered Jesus laced-wine, apparently as some sort of numbing agent, before they nailed Jesus to the cross, but He did not take it (Matthew 27:34; Mark 15:23). Hanging on the cross for three hours can only have intensified His thirst. Some think a prophecy about thirst and receiving wine had yet to be fulfilled (for example, Psalm 22:15 or 69:21), but we better understand the Divinely-inspired St. John as telling us that Jesus, knowing that all was already finished in order to fulfill the Scripture, and apparently wanting better to express that completion, used His fifth “word” (and in this case exactly one Greek word) to express His thirst apparently to those nearby, in order for Him to get something to drink, something like the sour wine that they would give to Him. Jesus was true God in human flesh and could have quenched His own thirst, but He had humbled Himself to this death on the cross for us, and so then He did not always or fully use His Divine powers. Now, however, when we come to Jesus hungry and thirsty for righteousness (Matthew 5:6), He sates our hunger and slakes our thirst. With repentance and faith, we come to the Sacrament of the Altar, where bread is His Body given for us and wine is His Blood shed for us, and, thanks to Him, we hunger and thirst no more (John 6:35).
Collect for the Fifth Word, and Hymn 447:13-15
The Sixth Word
A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” … (John 19:29-30a ESV)
We may have labored hard and have been glad to complete a particularly wearisome workout or task. Maybe we have said, “I am glad that is done!” Or, maybe we have even said, “It is finished!”, echoing our Lord, who apparently received enough wine to speak His sixth “word” (and again in this case it is exactly one Greek word). The Divinely-inspired St. John does not say to whom Jesus spoke this “word”, nor does Jesus Himself say precisely what is finished. At least one commentator thinks both that Jesus spoke the “word” to His Father, as if reporting back to the one Who had sent Him, and that Jesus nevertheless intended for all people to hear the “word” (Lenski, ad loc John 20:30, p.1308), including us. As for what was finished, certainly Jesus’s Passion was done, for He was as good as dead, though certainly His burial, descent into hell, resurrection on the third day, ascending into heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and coming again to judge the living and the dead were still to be completed. The immediate context suggests Jesus’s work of fulfilling Holy Scripture was done, and that fulfillment corresponds to God’s will expressed in that Scripture that His Servant suffer for the sins of the world. And, that understanding of completing payment for sins is consistent with the Greek verb that is used to record Jesus’s statement, which verb can be used in connection with paying a debt. President Biden’s new so-called “infrastructure” plan will apparently cost $2-trillion but be paid for with higher taxes, and we can hope so, for the U-S budget deficit is already more than $3-trillion and the national debt is already more than $28-trillion (US Debt Clock). To an astronomically-high un-payable debt Jesus once likened our sins against God, ten-thousand times 20 years worth of wages for an average day-laborer (Matthew 18:23-25), only thanks to Jesus’s death on the cross, that astronomically-high un-payable debt of sin is, in fact, paid in full, by Him, for you.
Collect for the Sixth Word, and Hymn 447:16-18
The Seventh Word
Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46 ESV)
Jesus seventh and final “word” is again clearly directed to His Father, and, yet, this and all of “Jesus’s words from the cross speak to you” also. Quoting another Psalm (Psalm 31:5), Jesus commits His spirit into His Father’s hands and breathes His last. The loud voice, perhaps for the sixth and seventh “words”, and the content of those “words” themselves are vivid reminders that Jesus did not passively succumb to death but was actively in control until the very end. Even as we, taught by the Small Catechism, may piously commit into the Lord’s hands ourselves, that is, our bodies and souls (Small Catechism, VII:2, 5), too often we think that we also are in control, when we are not. We may wrongly think that self-isolating, social distancing, wearing facemasks, getting vaccinated, and doing countless other things enable us to die on our own terms, as Jesus died on His own terms, but any sense of real control is an illusion. To be sure, to some extent God permits us to influence how long we live, but we do not choose the very moment of our death as Jesus chose His, rather we trust God to bring our death about in a way and at the time that He already knows that it will occur, and by His grace we trust Him to preserve us in the faith through His Word and Sacraments, so that when our moment of death comes we trust only in Jesus’s merits. Because of Jesus’s death on the cross, we are delivered already now, and, as we commend ourselves into our Father’s hands, the Lord answers our prayer for us to be delivered in our hour of death and in the Day of Judgment. The Psalm from which Jesus quoted ends with these words of encouragement and warning suitable while we live in His forgiveness of sins and patiently wait for our final deliverance:
Love the Lord, all you His saints!
The Lord preserves the faithful / but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride.
Be strong, and let your heart take courage, / all you who wait for the Lord!
Collect for the Seventh Word, and Hymn 447:19-21
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +