Luke 23.44-49 Good Friday, 2008
“OUR LIVES ARE NOT OUR OWN”
Do you know how when you ride around with your children in the car it is possible to talk about things you could never broach across the dinner table? I don’t know what that is about. Maybe it is that you are both looking forward instead of face to face. Maybe it is the stuff coming across the radio, causing us to free associate.
I remember my youngest, Lise, turning up a favorite song by Jon Bon Jovi. “It’s my life…” chanted the refrain over and over. The message was that because our lives belong only to us, we’re free to do with them just as we please. Nobody else will tell us what to do. “It’s a nice song, Lise,” I said. “But you know, actually, your life doesn’t finally belong to you. Your life is a gift from God and belongs to God. It comes from God, returns to God, and is merely on loan to you.” Lise could only roll her eyes at having a dad who couldn’t stop preaching even outside the pulpit.
When Jesus says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” we know what is at stake here. For Jesus, just as life originated in God at birth, and life returns to God at death, so everything in between belongs to God. Maybe that is why we sing hymns like, “Take my life, and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee.” Maybe that is why in youth ministry we use phrases like, “commit your life to Christ.” The church does not subscribe to the notion that we can possess our souls like we own a car, a house, or a boat. The church is at pains to reveal this is as a lie. In the choice between life being our right or being God’s gift, we opt for the latter.
The book of Hebrews (10:31, KJV) says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Yes, it is indeed a fearful thing in the sense of being awesome. But it is a frightening thing to fall into the hands of a dead god, the idols we con-trive of comfort and security, status and success, money and accomplishment.
And, of course, this is where most lives fall, “it’s my life to serve my own needs.”
You know, the better part of the Christian walk is simply trying to get this right, trying to resist this constant pressure around us to become gods unto ourselves. We achieve, we work, we build, we accumulate, we hoard, we work out at the gym, and watch our cholesterol. We create an illusion as masters of our destiny. But, as Jesus reminds us on the cross, death takes a hand and reveals the truth.
And the whole truth is it’s not even so much about giving up our lives to God and relinquishing them as our self-possession. In truth, whether we could grasp it or not, our lives are God’s our whole life long no matter how oblivious we are to it. Of course, many of us will not perceive this truth, even upon our deathbeds.
For to perceive this truth requires of us a grace that is not universally present.
I understand the Methodist tradition used to speak of “happy deaths”. That is, deaths where the Christian, being so perfected in love, so close to God, slipped away into death with a joy deriving from the briefest distance from death unto life.
Why does it seem like “happy deaths” must be many fewer today? Is it because most of us make a long and arduous journey from total self-absorption in this life to a most anguished, wrenching, and reluctant self-loss in the world to come?
Jesus had three long hours to die, the basis of our three-hour worship. He used his last moments well. He spoke to God, to a thief, to his family, to his followers, and now, finally, again to his Father, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
And in his final words we can understand that we have a choice. We can vainly preserve ourselves and our efforts as our own little personal immortality projects. Or we can commend ourselves and all those whom we love in death to the Lord of Life, who also just so happens to be the Lord over Death. Imagine the many practical benefits. For example, we are freed from having to commend ourselves and those we love to the gods of technology, sucking vast sums of money for a little extra time in a sterile windowless room long after our real lives are over. Most people yearn for this freedom to feel like they need not prolong their deaths by ritual obeisance at the feet of the gods of technology. They’re relieved to hear it. As baptized Christians, Paul wants us to live such that, “united with him in a death like his, we will be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (
So the last words of Jesus are no meek surrender to prevailing gods and powers. Do not hear him relenting, giving in, or surrendering. No, Jesus’ last words are a take-charge, direct, strangely confident message. He is here commanding, commending, and committing, going head to head with powers and principalities. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” When it matters most, he ack-nowledges that true power who was his spiritual polar north star from day one.
For the past 12 hours or so, Jesus has been in the hands of sinful persons. Now when it matters most Jesus takes his life into his own hands. And in an act of su-preme countercultural defiance lays his whole being into the hands of his Father. He takes his life out of the hands of his tormentors and places it confidently into the hands of his Father. He doesn’t let his crucifiers define what his cross means. And just as Jesus taught us how to live so on the cross he teaches us how to die.
By giving his life to God rather than letting Caesar take it, he refuses victimhood. No one took my life, Jesus says. I gave my life by committing it to the Father. That’s truly great news in a land where most daytime shows scream victimhood. So there is a way to live. And there is a way to die. Jesus shows us the way.
We’re at the end now. The end of Jesus’ breathing and the end of our talking about it. He began with, “Father, forgive them.” Now he ends with, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” He does in his death what he did throughout his life.
Amen.
