Into Your Hands
Luke 23:46[1]
This is the week when we remind ourselves that the one whom we
follow as Savior and Lord was executed as a common criminal. He died surrounded
by those who heaped scorn and abuse on him for the way he lived his life.
Depending on which account you read, he died abandoned by everyone he knew,
everyone who claimed to follow him as disciples, everyone who supposedly put
their faith in him. The one who had been greeted just days earlier with cries
of “Hosanna,” which was a shout celebrating the arrival of God’s salvation, was
subject to cries of “crucify him.” And that’s how he died: on a cross.
I think many of us have become expert at distancing ourselves from
the fact that following Jesus makes no sense. We may think that his death was
his mission, and he had to go through it for us. But he also said that if we
were to follow him, it would require us to give up our lives as well. He called
those who would follow him to take up their own crosses. We’ve sanitized that
notion to the extent that it has become an idiom in our common language: it’s
just a “cross we have to bear.” That phrase betrays the fact that we don’t take
seriously the full weight of Jesus’ death on the cross, and his call to follow
him to a similar fate. But St. Paul took it seriously. And he knew that, to
anyone with sense enough to pay attention, following Jesus looks “foolish.”
For most of us, there’s an ulterior motive to following Jesus.
We’ve been taught that if we believe in Jesus, we’ll “go to heaven” when we
die. And so we go through the motions of living out our faith with one eye, or
perhaps both, set on that ultimate goal. But as anyone who studies human
behavior can tell you, when you use some kind of external reward or punishment
as the means of motivation, you may get right actions, but only as long as the
reward or punishment remains effective. In other words, you can’t mold
character, you can’t instill a way of living, unless you give someone a reason
to have a change of heart.
I would have to say that Jesus’ death on the cross was a result of
the way of living he chose to follow. And we see that way of living reflected
in his last words according to our Gospel lesson for today: “Father, into your
hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). I think that, here as well, we hear
the words, but they probably don’t sink in. We’re used to thinking of Jesus
dying with a cry of anguish, as Matthew and Mark report. We may be tempted to
think that Luke is just trying to soften the perception that somehow God might
have abandoned Jesus on the cross. We may think that this is a “kinder,
gentler” version of the story.
But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all. Jesus’ last
words according to Luke are quoted from Psalm 31. The full text of the verse reads,
“Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful
God” (Ps. 31:5). One of the details of this verse is that the Hebrew word
translated “spirit” can also be translated “life.” So in a very real sense,
with his last breath Jesus was entrusting his whole life to God. The words
Jesus uttered as he was dying were essentially “it is up to you, God, what
becomes of me, and I am willing to have it so.”[2] I would
say that Luke wanted us to see that Jesus died the same way that he lived his
whole life: seeking to follow God’s way and God’s purpose, and entrusting his
fate into God’s hands.
When we pay attention to Luke’s version of Jesus’
dying words, we see that his cry, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk.
23:46), is not a dying prayer, but a life motto. That’s precisely how it reads
in the context of Psalm 31. The Psalmist recounts all the hardships of life,
enemies who sought to undo him, the anxiety and sorrow he bore from opposition.
And yet, in spite of all the afflictions he endured, at the end of the day he
could pray, “my times are in your hand” (Ps. 31:15). The whole Psalm is a
prayer of trust, of confidence in the “faithful God” (Ps. 31:5), and the prayer
“into your hands I commend my spirit” is a life motto.
We have been schooled to think that if we live that
way, life will turn out basically good for us. After all, those who obey God
are rewarded, both in this life and in the next. Or so the presumption goes.
But this week especially we are reminded that when you take the prayer “into
your hands I commend my life” as seriously as Jesus did, it’s likely to lead to
a cross. Actually seeking to make God’s ways and God’s purpose our way of
living in our day-to-day reality usually goes against the grain of our culture.
We will very likely find ourselves swimming against the stream. And in some
cases, as Jesus said, we will have to give up what we cherish most in this
life.
I realize that not much of this may count as a very successful way
to persuade you to adopt the life motto, “into your hands I commend my life.”
As a long-time student of the Bible, I can’t say that if you adopt this motto,
you will find yourself rewarded for it. It may be more likely that you will
suffer for it. But then there are some things we do in life simply because
they’re the right thing to do. Living out of the commitment to entrust your
life into God’s hands may not lead us to any tangible rewards, but it is a path
where we find God’s grace sustaining us, and nothing can take that away.
[1]
©2019 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 4/14/2019 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2]
Cf. James L. Mays, Psalms, 144. Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann, “Good Friday: Birth
of Hope from the Cross of Christ,” in The
Power of the Powerless, 120, where he calls this “believing with one’s
whole life.”
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