Good Friday Meditation on The Seven Last Words

Below you will find the meditations I preached for the Travis Park United Methodist Church 2007 Good Friday Service.

Mediations on the Seven Last Words of Christ
Good Friday, 2007
Blues Service

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the cross are taken from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. They are the just as the name implies, the seven last words that Jesus spoke to us as he was dying. Musicians have set the Seven Last Words to music for centuries. Tonight, for the first time, we will experience Christ’s Last Words set anew, to the blues, by our own Ralph Cortez and Henry Pardilla.
Let us take a moment to open our hearts and our ears, to what the Spirit is going to say to us tonight…Let us pray…
Gracious God, as you hung on the cross, suffering, and dying, you gave us words to live by. Enliven those words for us again tonight, so we might here what you have to say to us today. Let all of God’s children say: Amen.

The First Word: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
(Luke 23:24)
Read word from Luke.
Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. Given the moment, what an amazing thing to say! In the midst of the greatest physical agony of his life, the first words that Jesus utter to his Father, to his Abba, to his Daddy, are about forgiveness. The nature of the time and place and content of this conversation amongst the Trinity is striking enough, but what really catches us off-guard is the order in which Jesus asks for forgiveness. As Will Willimon has said, “this is talk of preemptive forgiveness!” How offensive is that to us, today, as twenty-first century Americans? If you are at all like me, you’re generally willing to forgive someone once they realize that what they have done is wrong. But here, Jesus asks for and offers forgiveness in the midst of this terrible execution. Preemptive forgiveness.
What radical, incredible, and costly grace this is! What a radical, incredible, God we follow, who in the midst of terrible pain, unlike anything you and I will hopefully ever know, the God we choose to follow chooses to offer forgiveness, instead of curses, grace instead of violence.

The Second Word: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
(Luke 23:43)
Read word from Luke
The story of the two thieves is really a beautiful microcosm of our reactions to Jesus, isn’t it? When we listen to the words of Jesus, if we really listen to him, we realize just how divisive Jesus truly is. The one thief, like us at our worst, derides Jesus, always angry and suspicious of the Divine when God doesn’t meet the criteria that we have created for what we think the Divine ought to be and to do. We are fully capable of being defiant creatures until the very end, wrapped up in our own pride and anger.
The other thief, however, like us on our best days, recognizes God in Jesus and asks simply to be remembered when Jesus comes into his kingdom. And what does Jesus say, how does he respond? Jesus says, “truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Do you hear the words Jesus speaks to you, today? Once you recognize Jesus for who he is, Jesus says, TODAY YOU WILL BE WITH ME IN PARADISE. Not tomorrow, not after you death, but today, right now. Certainly, this must have been some relief to the mind and soul of the thief. No doubt the physical pain was still readily, extraordinarily, present, and the mental agony must have been unspeakable as well. Yet, the thief is given assurance that Jesus is with him. And this is the same promise that comes to us from Jesus: regardless of where you are, what you are doing, and what you are experiencing, Jesus is with you. When you suffer, Jesus suffers with you, just as he did with the thief on the cross.
Jesus has already journeyed to death and as he promises to be with us, so when our time comes to die, Jesus will make that journey with us as well. What a blessed assurance that Christ gives us from the cross.

The Third Word: “Woman, behold your son!” and “Behold your mother!”
(John 19:26-27)
Read the third word.
I once had a friend who sung in my previous church’s choir. He was in his late sixties and retired. He had several adult children, one of whom worked in a Methodist church in Austin. She served as the children’s minister there and was in her thirties. She had children of her own. One day, while working at the church, she was carrying vacation bible school curriculum, and honestly, she was carrying more than was safe for her, in effort to save yet another trip. On a concrete staircase she lost her footing on the stairs, and she fell, and she died, right there at the church.
I went to the funeral and talked with her father after the service for a while, and I will never forget what he said to me and the utter conviction with which he said it: he said, “Joe, it is unnatural for a parent to lose a child.” It is not reasonable, it is not orderly, it is not natural, it is not supposed to work that way, and yet, it so often does. The pain that my friend was experiencing was palpable. The pain immanted from him.
Here we experience Jesus’ hanging on the cross with his mother and best friend looking on. The woman who gave him birth, nursed him, raised him, tried to protect this incredible child. She was with him at the Wedding at Cana, not only did she birth him but she was there for the beginning and end of his ministry, and his life. The pain Mary must have felt, I cannot imagine. Can you fathom the desperation as she looked at him, hanging on a tree, and he, what must he have felt, looking at his mother, watching him die. This is a special kind of pain that I cannot understand, losing a child, but I know several of you know this pain. You’ve been there. You know what Mary was experiencing.
Also present at Jesus’ execution, amongst all of the women who stayed with Jesus, is the only male disciple that the gospels report staying with him: the beloved disciple. This disciple was the one whom Jesus loved above all others, the one whom most likely represented the future of Jesus ministry. Perhaps, the beloved disciple was alone in life, we do not know.
What we do know is this: Jesus connects the two of them. The mother who is losing her son, and the best friend who is losing his brother. Jesus finishes his lesson on the nature of family values, he radically redefines what family is: those who love and care for one another, who tend to each others needs and each others souls, they are family. This kind of family may include family related by blood but it is not limited by genetics alone but rather is much broader, much more open kind of family.
Jesus gives us one final lesson and it is a beautiful one: We are never truly alone!

The Fourth Word: “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Read the word
Surely, this must be the most despairing and heart breaking of moments for Jesus, for even in his special embodiment of the Divine, Jesus felt abandoned, forgotten, and forsaken. What incredible loneliness. I’ve got to be honest: these words scare the hell out of me. They are frightening and disturbing. The first word was a word of forgiveness, the second word one of assurance, the third word shows us a new way to be family with each other, but this word, this word is dark, despairing, dangerous, accusatory, and angry..
How can it be that the second member of the Trinity is suffering so greatly as to feel abandoned by the Divine community?
How terrible it is to feel abandoned by God, to feel that the best he could do was to quote David in Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”
I imagine we’ve all experienced this, to lesser degrees. In the midst of the deepest darkness in our lives, we feel abandoned by God. Even though nothing could be farther from the truth, all signs in our darkness seem to point to that. It seems that death, the forces of darkness, the powers and principalities of this world have finally won. This word points us to what Marcus Borg calls Mystery with a capital M. We are not, finally, capable of understanding God in all God’s mystery and complexities. We want God to fix this for Jesus, to ride in on a shiny horse, like John Wayne or Bruce Willis and make it all better, and yet, God doesn’t bend to our will but rather suffers with Jesus. This suffering God scares us.
But ultimately, our calling is not to understand, but to watch, and to experience, to be faithful, and to await the victory over the powers and principalities that is being won, even as Jesus hangs, seemingly alone, in despair.




The Fifth Word: “I thirst.”
(John 19:28)
To be hanging on a cross, the most painful method of state-sponsored execution ever devised, to be hanging nearly naked, exposed to the elements, to have the weight of your body pressing down on your organs, so that with every breath you wish for death to come sooner, suffocating and bleeding to death must make cause for a terrible thirst that I pray none of us will ever experience. The thirst to relieve the pain, to be finished, to die, must be overwhelming: truly, there are things in this life that are worse than death. And yet, we should be mindful of the thousands of people who are being tortured be devious and maniacal governments and people all over the world this very evening. We should be mindful that Jesus suffers with them as well. Jesus thirsts, not only for liquid, but for justice, for reconciliation. Jesus thirsts for truth to spoken to power, for good news to be brought to the poor. Jesus thirsts for the captives to be set free, for the blind to recover their sight and for the oppressed to be liberated. Jesus thirsts for the year of Jubilee to be declared!
For you see, Jesus drank the wine that was given to him. Jesus drank the cup that was dealt to him in life to its fullest, down to the very dregs. From the life-giving waters, to the wine of death, Jesus followed the road that he was set upon to the very end. And he asks us, are you able to drink of the cup of which I drink?
To be a follower of Christ is serious business, as this word makes clear. We cannot ignore this Jesus. The Jesus we encounter here is fully human, not some theologically abstract concept, not merely a teacher or a prophet but a fully formed human being who embodies the divine and who suffers as only a human can. Jesus knows our suffering!
For those of us who are comfortable in our lives, following Jesus means being prepared to suffer as Christ does. We need look no farther than the saints Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few from our previous century. It is not reasonable for us to believe that we are the exception to the rule, for Jesus has told us that the servant is not greater than the master and that the world will hate us, just as it hated him. We must be prepared to suffer as Jesus did, if we are to take up our cross and follow him. For just as we follow him here, we must follow him there.

The Sixth Word: “It is finished!”
(John 19:30)
Read Word
I remember watching The Passion of the Christ in a theater with a large group of believers. I felt that, as a pastor, it would be irresponsible for me not to see it because I needed to know what my congregation would be talking about. I will never forget seeing Jim Caviezel’s Jesus saying “It is finished” and all I could think of was, thank God. Thank God. The visual depiction of the violence perpetrated upon Jesus by the Empire, on my Lord and Savior, the one whom I love, was too much to watch, too much to take in, too much to process. It is clear at this point that death is about to overtake even Jesus.
The irony of my reaction to this moment in the film is that the relief from suffering was not the main thrust of what Jesus was saying from the cross in this word.
This word is actually a word of completion, of success, a word characterizing a race that was well run. Jesus has fought the good fight, has done all that was asked of him by God, has given everything that was freely his to give, and his work is now done. It is accomplished. In suffering as he did, in taking the crown of thorns, the whipping, the spitting, the mocking and ultimately, the nails, Jesus gave himself up voluntarily. He suffered non-violently, showing us that non-violence is not only possible, but it is the only way out of the mess that we have created for ourselves, if true wholeness and reconciliation are to be our goals. And in the midst of the process, Jesus redeems us, all of us, even me and even you!
Sin, death, the demonic nature of the powers, these were all finished! Jesus saw it, in the same way that Martin King saw the promised land from the mountaintop. Rome was not the final word, it was not the final power in this world. It is God’s love that is!
Indeed, “It is finished” is the victory cry of the one who has defeated the powers and principalities of the world, the sin of the world, though the world knows it not yet.

The Seventh Word: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
(Luke 23:46)
Read Luke
Finally, the victory declared, Jesus gives up his life finally, fully, and voluntarily. Because Jesus’ whole life had been that of commending his Spirit to God’s, he is able to truly say these words with his last breath. The experience of God’s grace, the trust in God, the knowledge that God was with him sustained him to the very end, so much so that he could release himself, surrender into the arms of God, and rest. May we all make that transition to our final rest with God as Jesus did, secure in the knowledge that Jesus goes with us.
Perhaps the best benediction I can give here, before Ralph and Henry lead us in the singing of the last word, is to offer up the words of Martin Luther King, extracted by Richard Young from a sermon of King’s entitled Garden of Gethsemane. May these words be our benediction and our prayer.
“I can hear Jesus himself, standing amid the agony and darkness of Good Friday, standing amid the darkness of the cross. And out of the pain and the agony and the darkness of that cross, we hear a voice saying, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And then we can hear him saying, “Not my will, but thy will be done.” Now you got to learn that, my friends, and when you learn that, you can stand up amid any condition, because you know that God is with you, no matter what happens. You can stand up amidst despair. You can stand up amid persecution. You can stand up amid disappointment. You can stand up even amid death. But you don’t worry because you know God is with you.
And so, I’m going away this evening—I don’t know about you—but I’m going away determined that wherever he leads me, I will follow. I will follow him to the Garden. I will follow him to the Cross if he wants me to go there. I will follow him to the dark valley of death if wants me to go there. Not my will, but thy will be done! And when you can cry that, you stand up amid life with an exuberant joy, You know that God walks with you. Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you know that God is there. Even though you stand amid the giant shadow of disappointment, you don’t despair, because you know God is with you.”
Friends, take this truth from the Bible, from the cross, as written by King, with you. Take it out as an Easter people in a Good Friday world. Know that God is with you, God has always, is now, and will forever be with you. Take this truth out into the world, commend your spirits into God’s hands and seek to partner with God and Christ in bringing about the Kingdom of God here on earth. Amen.