‘Christ’s Seven Last Words’ is a production of the University Church in Oxford, featuring Professor Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, which will be released each evening throughout Holy Week. In this seventh and final episode, Professor Graham Ward reflects on the words, ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit. Music sung by the University Church Choir. Sound design by Ana-Maria Niculcea As I said, there is one final step, one final last word. It is not in the Gospel of John, just as the cry of dereliction and abandonment – “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!” – is not in John, nor in Luke. Though it is Luke that records the final deliverance from suffering and the final word: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” This committal is a profoundly Trinitarian act: the Son returning His life to the Father through the Sprit. It shows that all the Godhead is involved in the crucifixion, as all the Godhead was involved in creation and its redemption, the incarnation and the resurrection. We overhear a voiced intra-Trinitarian prayer that reveals the operations of a love that is sacrificial surrender. It is a surrender into silence, for the Word now falls silent. But in that prayer, as in that silence and through that final deliverance, there is a reconciliation. If, citing the psalm, the earlier words of Christ’s forsakenness by God invokes the abyssal difference and distance between creation and its uncreated Creator, then with this prayer there is an incomprehensible crossing of that difference and distance. Something is deepened about God being with us, first announced in Emmanuel and the Bethlehem birth. This is not a departure from that presence: God is with us through the whole of Holy Saturday and the silence of the Word. The death of God, here, is not the abandonment of the world to its own wretchedness. It is rather the bringing of the world into the plenitude of that presence. This is the dilation of God for a new birthing. As the resurrected Christ in Matthew’s Gospel says, “I am with you always.” He is not with us materially, except in and through the work of the church as the body of Christ, the distributor of the sacraments, the proclaimer of the Word down through the tradition and its continual meditation upon the Scriptures, and its work among the sick, the poor, the imprisoned and the oppressed. Christ enters an eternal rest, which is also our eternal rest. But the labouring of His presence remains, and we are participants in that labouring: the body has to be taken down from the cross, the dead have to be buried, the bereaved have to be comforted, new creatures will be born, new joys registered and the rearing and formation of these children begins. What remains, what will always remain, even on the day of resurrection, is the drama and gravitas of the cross. It remains as a perpetual memory, returning almost like trauma, with every suffering, persecution, betrayal, hostility and domination. It is the meek, Jesus tells us, who will inherit the earth. And meekly He completes that salvation, known in God since the foundation of the world. He bows His head. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And, according to Matthew, at “that moment the curtain of the Temple was torn from top to bottom. There was an earthquake, the rocks split, and the graves were opened.” This upheaval is a beginning, not an end.
