Jesus’ Cry to His Father

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 

In Jesus’s final prayer from the cross we are again pointed to the words of the Psalmist. This time to the 31st Psalm where, in his sorrow, the Psalmist finds his only refuge in God: “Into your hand I commit my spirit” (Ps 31:5). Numerous aspects of the Psalmist in his distress illuminate our understanding of our savior in his passion. But what Jesus’s allusion to the Psalmist’s prayer signals most directly is that he entrusts his life to God without qualification. God alone is the Psalmist’s rock and fortress, and God alone is the one whom Jesus trusts for his own rescue.

Yet, Jesus’s cry does not take the precise form of the Psalmist’s. One of the differences in this particular prayer is that he addresses the Psalmist’s words to his Father. To be sure, Jesus often favors the more intimate paternal language when addressing God, so the fact that he follows his regular practice here is not particularly noteworthy. Moreover, this is not the only time that he calls upon his Father from the cross: his first “word,” recorded nine verses earlier, is likewise addressed to his Father. However, when we meditate on Jesus’s final word after doing so on the six words prior, this contrast with the Psalmist’s is especially striking inasmuch as, in this final word from the cross, Jesus expresses that it is in his communion with the Father that he will rise victorious.

Firstly, Jesus expresses that it is in his communion with his Father that he will be delivered from “the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). His earlier cry of dereliction speaks of forsakenness by God (even while—vitally—speaking in the same word of the reality that God has indeed “not hidden his face” (Ps 22:24)). The agony expressed there was real, and crucially so for our salvation. Still, paternal language was not deployed at that point, and the Son’s relationship to his Father was not foregrounded. Here at the very end of his passion, however, Jesus does use paternal language, announcing with utter confidence that, as the Father’s beloved Son, he awaits his deliverance by God at the hands of his Father.

Secondly, he expresses that it is in his communion with his Father that he lays down his life in obedience to the Father so that his death might be life for us. Jesus’s entrusting of his spirit to the Father is his fulfilment of the Father’s will for him to take death upon himself. When Jesus was “crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men,” it was not as a helpless victim, but as the one who actively laid down his life for our salvation “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). His entrusting of himself to his Father was his final demonstration of his own righteousness because, as the Father’s beloved Son, he obeyed his Father by giving up his life with the full expectation that his Father would restore his life in the end.

Of course, in all this, Jesus also expresses that it is in his communion with the Father that he thus restores us to life. This is true, generally speaking, because it is the victory of his resurrection that secures our new life. Yet, in his prayer, Jesus specifically demonstrates that this is true because his entrusting of his spirit to the Father involves his completion of the mission that he carried out in obedience to the Father by the Spirit. As Luke goes on to show us, it is from the completion of Jesus’s Spirit-animated mission that the Spirit is then poured out at Pentecost in order to animate our new lives as we carry out our mission of proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus Christ to the world (Acts 2). Of course, this is so such that we now live by the same Spirit in whose power he lived in obedience to the Father in order that we might live in obedience to the one whom we, too, know as our Father.[1] 

Nonetheless, even as we are driven by his own final words to ponder the good news of the new life that follows—for him, and for us!—let us not move too quickly past the horror of our Lord’s death. Today let us also recall the instruction he gives not long before his final prayer: “Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves” (Luke 23:28). The late Rev. Prof. John Webster reflects upon this astonishing command: “Why so? Why should we not weep for him? Ultimately, I think, because Jesus in his passion is not an object of pity.” Instead, we must weep for ourselves because, as the lawless hands who put Jesus on the cross, we must not “think of ourselves as compassionate bystanders, looking on with sorrow as this poor unfortunate is maltreated and finally put to death.” For “We must understand that by this event we are exposed and condemned.”[2] 

 

Luke records Jesus’s last word as an cry of confident hope for his new life as the inevitable fruit of his communion with the Father for our new life. Yet he does this against the sobering backdrop of the death that characterizes us apart from such salvation. At the cross, “We are forbidden any of those refuges to which we ordinarily turn” to hide from our sin.3 So let us not pity our Lord in his death; “it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). Rather let us mourn our sin, which would attempt to consign our God to death, in order that we might more fully behold the glory of the life that he secures. Let us say with the Psalmist, and so with Jesus Christ himself, “In you, O LORD, do I take refuge, let me never be put to shame” (Ps 31:1). 

 [1] – That Jesus’s last word also sets the paradigm of this new Spirit-animated life is especially clear in the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7:55–60).

[2] – John Webster, “Hearing the Passion,” in Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, eds. Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015), 53.