Meditations on "The Seven Last Words from Christ on the Cross" Final Word

  "Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, 'Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.'  Having said this, he breathed his last.

Luke 23:46

      Complete and resolute trust to the bitter end, that's what we are witnessing.   The One who had ultimate trust in the Father during his life and ministry, models complete and abiding trust even with his last breath.

      In The Sacrament of the Present Moment,  Jean-Pierre DeCaussade writes that "what grace accomplishes in us, requires nothing more than surrender and assent."    One of the most beloved prayers from my theological tradition (United Methodist) is "A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition".  Here's the way it begins:

     I am no longer my own, but thine.
     Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
     Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
     Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
     exalted for thee or brought low by thee.
     Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
     I freely and heartily yield all things
     to thy pleasure and disposal.

     If you've spent much time in church across the years, especially if you've attended an evangelistic revival service, you've probably sung a few verses of "I Surrender All".  The refrain goes like this:

     I surrender all, I surrender all
     all to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.

    In this last moment of life for Jesus, as recorded in Luke's Gospel and identified as the seventh and final word from the Cross, Jesus brings to completion what his life has continually accomplished, his unreserved and limitless surrender to God.
    
    Everything he has done before, through every moment that has been building up unto now, with every deed of power, every extension of hospitality offered to the ceremonially unclean, every act of love and forgiveness, every embodiment of God's kingdom, it is all now offered to God in this one final statement of absolute trust and unabashed surrender.

    Trusting God through calamity and hardship, trusting God even as his closest friends betrayed, denied and abandoned him, holding fast to his trust in God through unjust punishment, trusting the Father's will over his own, accepting the cup of suffering and death, he now trusted with his last breath and beyond.

    Surrender.  Trust.  Completion.  Fulfillment.

    These are some of the words that quickly come to mind for me when I reflect on this final word from the Cross.

     Oh that these might be appropriate words to describe the lives we are leading, and the deaths we will die.

    To God be the glory!