The Seven Last Words of Christ: The First Word

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”  

Luke 23:34

Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Crucified between Two Thieves (The Three Crosses), 1653-1655

Sovereign Lord, when “the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus” (Acts 4:27–28) and “killed the Author of life” (Acts 3:15), truly, they did not know what they were doing.  They were raging against you when they scorned your servant, but they did not know he is your Messiah, your chosen one (Lk. 23:35).  They took their stand against you when they abused “the King of the Jews” (Lk. 25:38), but they did not know you had given him “the throne of his ancestor David” (1:32).  When they condemned the one you ordained “as judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42), they “acted in ignorance” (3:17). They were sitting in darkness and the shadow of death when, through your tender mercy, your Dayspring visited them, to give them light and to guide their feet into the way of peace (Lk. 1:78–79).  But, Lord God of Israel, they did not perceive the Light you sent for their enlightenment and glory (Lk. 2:32).  Weeping over Jerusalem, your Light pronounced their doom:  “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes….because you did not recognize the time of your visitation” (Lk. 19:42, 44).  In their blindness, they did not know what they were doing—and in this way you fulfilled what you had foretold through all the prophets, that your Messiah would suffer (Acts 3:18).

Most merciful God, through the prayer of your Christ, you showed forth your goodness and loving-kindness to us.  “For the Word of God, who said to us, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those that hate you,’ himself did this very thing upon the cross; loving the human race to such a degree, that he even prayed for those putting him to death” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.18).  In his prayer for his enemies, you reveal the riches of your “kindness and forbearance and patience,” showing us that your kindness is meant to lead us to repentance (Rom. 2:4).

Father of all mercies, deliver us from blindness and self-deception; help us to know what we are doing, willing, loving, that we might confess our sins to you.  Grant us true repentance through the gift of your Holy Spirit, that we might turn to you, who triumphed over the powers of darkness by the death of your servant Jesus, “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:14, 2:15).

The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross

"And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." 

John 12:32

Volto di Christo (Face of Christ), Bose

Today marks the beginning of Holy Week, which "leads us behind Jesus 'the Righteous' in his Passion, Death, and Resurrection" (Monastero di Bose).  Especially this week, Christians seek to lift up our hearts to the Lord.  Beginning today, I will be sharing a series of meditations on the "Seven Last Words" of Jesus from the cross.  I share them with you in hopes that through them, he who was lifted up might draw you to himself.

The First Word

The Second Word

The Third Word

The Fourth Word

The Fifth Word

The Sixth Word

The Seventh Word

"Remembering Jerusalem"

The New Jerusalem as bride of the lamb, Walters Manuscript W.917, fol. 206v

One thing I asked of the Lord,
   that will I seek after:
to live in the house of the Lord
   all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
   and to inquire in his temple. (Ps. 27:4)

I will 'enter my chamber' and will sing you songs of love, groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer's path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up toward it--Jerusalem, my home land, Jerusalem, my mother, and above it yourself, ruler, illuminator, father, tutor, husband, pure and strong delights and solid joy and all good things to an unexpressible degree, all being enjoyed in simultaneity because you are the one supreme and true Good.  I shall not turn away until in that peace of this dearest mother, where are the firstfruits of my spirit and the source of my certainties, you gather all that I am from my dispersed and distorted state to reshape me and strengthen me for ever, 'my God my mercy.' (Augustine, Conf. 12.26.23, trans. H. Chadwick)

In the midst of defending his understanding of Genesis 1:1 as one of many true interpretations, Augustine is drawn into this rhapsodic confession.  He was considering whether it is true to interpret the "heavens" God created in the beginning as "the heaven of heavens," that is, Heaven, the spiritual House of God, wherein the beauty of the triune Lord is perpetually beheld.  And now, in the midst of defending his view against potential critics, he breaks off, suddenly, into a love song to his Lord.

Like the psalmist, the "one thing" Augustine asks is "to behold the beauty of the Lord" in his House (Ps. 27:4).  Wandering as he is in the world devastated by sin, he groans like one homesick to enter that state of rest and peace.  Now he is dispersed in the flux of time, finding himself tending toward nothingness.  Now he fleetingly knows the stability of that House, when he lifts up his heart contemplation or in the sursum corda of the liturgy.  But he longs for the Lord to gather his dispersed self together in the heavenly City, that he might "behold the beauty of the Lord" forever.

Augustine's desire is to find his rest, his fulfillment, his life, in the triune Lord.  His desire, to be sure, is to gaze upon the Creator, the Beauty of all things beautiful.  But it is also a desire to be gazed on as the Lord's beloved, and so to find himself gathered together, enfolded in the eternal embrace of Love.  Until that Day--when he will know, even as he has been known (1 Cor. 13:12)--, he will not be fully himself.

A Meditation for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son (Detail)

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. (Luke 15:14)

As usual, the Pharisees and the scribes are grumbling that Jesus is welcoming and eating with tax-collectors and sinners (Lk. 15:1–2).  So Jesus tells three stories about people rejoicing over finding something that was lost: a sheep, a silver coin, a son.  The three stories share a common, explicitly-stated theme: God delights in the repentance of those who wander from him (cf. vv. 7, 10).  Each story is also implicitly directed against the grumbling Pharisees and scribes, who like the elder son in the last story, are indignant (v. 28) at the welcome Jesus gives to the prodigals who come near to listen to him (v. 1).  Our Lord welcomes the tax-collectors and sinners because they come near to him, because they have felt their deathly hunger and come seeking nourishment from him, who is the bread of life.  Perhaps they are still a long way off, but he is running towards them.

Perhaps the story of the prodigal son is the paradigmatic story of conversion, metanoia.  At least it was for St. Augustine when, in his middle age, he reflected back on his life.*  He had been the prodigal son, turning away from God, becoming to himself “a region of destitution” (regio egestatis), of need, lack, poverty (Conf. 2.10.18).  As he confesses to God:

My hunger was internal, deprived of inward food, that is of you yourself, my God.  But that was not the kind of hunger I felt.  I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment, not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became.  So my soul was in rotten health.  In an ulcerous condition it thrust itself to outward things, miserably avid to be scratched by contact with the world of senses. (Conf. 3.1.1)

Apart from the Creator, he could find no life in the created order, which had become to him “the region of death” (ibid., 4.12.18).

In that region of death, Augustine, as it were, heard the voice of the Lord Jesus, the Mediator, “he who for us is life itself [and who] descended here and endured our death and slew it by his abundance of life” (Conf. 4. 12.19).  In his hunger, he hears the voice of the Lord calling to him, “‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me.  And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me’” (ibid., 7.10.16).  

But Augustine does not find the growth that is required, until he begins to grow in humility by embracing “the humble Jesus” (ibid., 7.23.24).  As he despairs of his own strength and falls prostrate before “the divine weakness” of the Word become flesh, he finds true nourishment and rest.  Like the tax-collectors and sinners, Augustine finds himself welcomed by the humble Jesus when he humbly comes near to feed on him.  

With them, let us become weak, prostrating ourselves before the humble Lord that we might share in his life.

* Only retrospectively, in the light of grace, could Augustine see himself in the prodigal.  Barth: “Known sin is always forgiven sin, known in the light of forgiveness and the triumph of grace...Unforgiven sin, or sin not yet known to be forgiven, is always unrecognised sin. We repent only as we have already found the God of grace and realised that we are His creatures. Any other penitence moves hopelessly in a circle. For the knowledge of sin is itself an element in the knowledge of grace.” (CD 3.2, 36)

Moscow Map

Map tiles by Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. Data by OpenStreetMap, under CC BY SA.